Large scale wars : I'm blocked here

[BaronNoir]

I'm playing Russian, DW, and it's 1650.

Russia dominate virtually all Asia, have a huge income, and is starting to outech her foes

But a super Austria have formed, and the super Austria is backed by Emperor-super Bavaria, and guaranteed by UK.

I have heavily fortified my borders (who are reaching Hungary and Bohemia) and I have 16 divisions of 20 regiments earmarked exclusively for dealing with a European war (12 on the border, 4 for landing operations). The divisions composition is rather dour by efficient 12 INF, 4 CAV, 4 ART.

Issue is : I'm not making any progress whatsoever with those huge forces. The Austro-Bavarians attack with stacks of 60 and up regiments, and one suitably epic battle of Krakow (L3 fortress, a Russian province) involved 180 Russian regiments and 160 Austro-Britanno-Bavarians regiments. I win all battles, but I take massive WE. (To knock down those stacks, I need to use at least 60 regiments armies: even with L3 fortresses, they take massive attrition.

So anyone have a trick for minizing WE ? (I can beat this unholy Alliance-I can't beat it without getting to like 12 WE within a year)

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

60k plus is huge. Russia is a pretty big country. Try to dance around those stacks of dooms and take their cities with 10-20k stacks in the back. Unless it is your capital, just let them take the cities. Sooner or later, these big stacks will suffer from attrition and become manageable to deal with. Scorch earth can be quite helpful in these situations. If you have the resources, you can also level up the forts at provinces where they are likely to capture. This will increase the time where they'd suffer from attrition.

Sooner or later, your enemy will suffer from massive WE and revolts will start popping up and that's when you can demand a few provinces to end the war (if you inflicted enough damage).

 

[unmerged(204522)]

race to land 34 for the better infantry-use your naval superiority to blockade and outmanoeuvre their doomstacks-force one of them out of the war and occupy the other one, force releasing as many small countries as possible, which you then vassalise-attack the other one when that truce expires, since the first one will still have WE and may refuse the call to arms, breaking the uber alliance-again force release and vassalise-showing us the map would be useful for dealing with brittany.

 

[Caban]

Yeah... 60k stacks is actually quite dumb. Don't even fight them until they weaken on their own considerably. Their war exhaustion will skyrocket if you don't do anything at all. Although you could put 1k troop armies in low support limit provinces to sucker them in and scorch just before they arrive. That would seriously increase attrition. Next time you may want to build level 2/3 forts in the low support limit provinces to double the siege time.

 

[unmerged(70580)]

I've no idea how you'd fight such huge stacks, unless the answer is, the same way as smaller ones, as I clobber anyone capable fo fielding such stacks later in the game really early.

However, unless you consider it against your personal rules, I'd suggest finding some way of not fighting all of Austria/Bavaria/England at once - there are a number of mechanics with war decs/truces/alliances you can ... well, exploit basically ... to stop you getting hit by all 3 at once. Too late for your current war of course.

 

[Lord Curlyton]

Eh, and if you have the right sliders and advisors, 12-14 WE is nothing. I take it as an accepted fact that any war against a real opponent later in the game will shoot my WE into the double digits if there is any real land engagements. Of course, by that point the vast majority of my land is usually cored, same religion, and either accepted/primary culture, with at least a L2 Gov building (Yummy RR reducer). a couple 15-20k auto-rebel hunting stacks generally allows me to cover all of my land (even Russian lands) and I rarely see RR >3-4% even with maxed WE. So depending on how big and how long I want the war to be, I'll either focus on crushing the field armies, attrition be damned, and then moving my mega-doomstack around assaulting everything and blitzing, or I'll play tag with their doomstack(s) and drag them further into General Winter's clutches while sending 5-10k stacks around to siege and retake provinces.

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

Yeah... 60k stacks is actually quite dumb. Don't even fight them until they weaken on their own considerably. Their war exhaustion will skyrocket if you don't do anything at all. Although you could put 1k troop armies in low support limit provinces to sucker them in and scorch just before they arrive. That would seriously increase attrition. Next time you may want to build level 2/3 forts in the low support limit provinces to double the siege time.

Like plain old Russian strategy against France and Germany.

 

[TAMBOURINESNAKE]

You can move multiple stacks into battle and move weakened stacks out. Continual rotation of medium stacks in and out of a large battle will guarantee victory if you really want to deal with the AI that way. Attrition isn't very noble.

 

[Caban]

Politeness never won a fight.

 

[Frozensky]

Attrition isn't very noble.

While I do agree, attrition is kinda how Russia rolls.

 

[Amur_Tiger]

You can move multiple stacks into battle and move weakened stacks out. Continual rotation of medium stacks in and out of a large battle will guarantee victory if you really want to deal with the AI that way. Attrition isn't very noble.

Russia fighting without General Winter on their side is decidedly un-Russian, using some attrition to wear down attacking forces is key, particularly since a far flung empire will often have forces most of the way accross Asia that must be drawn towards the European theater before going on the attack.

 

[Simberto]

In this kind of discussions, difficulty level is very important. Basically, on VH, you should not even care about enemy war exhaustion. It is at zero until you have control of half of their land, at which point it does not really matter anymore. So anything that drives up war exhaustion is completely irrelevant. And once you start fighting larger battles, your WE will be high, too. Usually, the enemy manpower is also pretty much infinite, as is yours in a lategame situation.

This means that your usual goals of WE and depleting enemy manpower become useless. What you need to do, instead, is slowly progress onto their lands, and capture them. This can be done in two ways, either by killing enemy stacks, or by keeping them busy. Killing has been sufficiently explained in rotating smaller stacks in and out, and combining your troops only for battles to avoid WE.

Keeping them occupied is a similar thing, just let them march onto one of your provinces, and sit some army next to them. They will besiege your stuff for a long time, and once they are finished doing that, you can retake it easily by a charge. Generally speaking, you want to never siege anything, it takes far too long. Always charge provinces, and push slowly onto their land until you occupy most of it, while killing/annoying their troops.