The issue is that your levies spawn most in places where you have the tightest control and the most population, so it is very easy to predict where they will come from and how long they will take to arrive.
For instance, let’s take Armenia.
My capital spawns 27 divisions, in the north of the country in the high mountains.
2 spawn in the far west, 4 in the northwest and 0 from the newly conquered Medea.
The Seleucids attack my Medean provinces - by the time my army arrives, the war is over. The soldiers from the capital take over a year to arrive, which seems agonisingly slow...it’s less than 400 miles so they’re not doing 1mile a day, leaving the enemy troops over a year to go about capturing everything by which time I’m forced to surrender as their troops were already raised and ready just two tiles from my border where I could not see them.
CK2 had the system where you couldn’t declare war if you had levies raised - this seems to make more sense, as I’m pretty sure levies weren’t raised before a general decided ‘oh ok, erm...let’s go this way’...except for Varus...or maybe Crassus... and it went famously well for them.
It feels very ‘gamey’ - you can predict where the enemy troops will come from. They will always come from that place - Carthage’s stack will come from Carthage, Seleucid from Babylonia, Macedon from Thessaloniki...
For me it doesn’t seem to work...I think if you had more control over where the stacks spawned - so if you could choose the tile in the region of Armenia to spawn, rather than it always being on some windswept mountain (legendary, but impractical) without having to move your capital...
Is it an improvement on the old system? Sure, it’s more realistic than having EUIV style standing armies in this time period, but you have little to no control over the composition of said armies, no way of spawning them outside of predesignated cities, the enemy can launch an attack fully prepared and you take over a year to assemble your forces...
Maybe that’s just my experiences I’ve had today (I tired my old Favs - Armenia, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Aeolia and Epirus) and had the same issue with all of them...it just seems to be ‘well I’ll raise my levies and throw them at the enemy and pray’ rather than specialising troop types to counter enemy armies...
Just my thoughts - would be nice to be told there is a way to control spawning though!
For instance, let’s take Armenia.
My capital spawns 27 divisions, in the north of the country in the high mountains.
2 spawn in the far west, 4 in the northwest and 0 from the newly conquered Medea.
The Seleucids attack my Medean provinces - by the time my army arrives, the war is over. The soldiers from the capital take over a year to arrive, which seems agonisingly slow...it’s less than 400 miles so they’re not doing 1mile a day, leaving the enemy troops over a year to go about capturing everything by which time I’m forced to surrender as their troops were already raised and ready just two tiles from my border where I could not see them.
CK2 had the system where you couldn’t declare war if you had levies raised - this seems to make more sense, as I’m pretty sure levies weren’t raised before a general decided ‘oh ok, erm...let’s go this way’...except for Varus...or maybe Crassus... and it went famously well for them.
It feels very ‘gamey’ - you can predict where the enemy troops will come from. They will always come from that place - Carthage’s stack will come from Carthage, Seleucid from Babylonia, Macedon from Thessaloniki...
For me it doesn’t seem to work...I think if you had more control over where the stacks spawned - so if you could choose the tile in the region of Armenia to spawn, rather than it always being on some windswept mountain (legendary, but impractical) without having to move your capital...
Is it an improvement on the old system? Sure, it’s more realistic than having EUIV style standing armies in this time period, but you have little to no control over the composition of said armies, no way of spawning them outside of predesignated cities, the enemy can launch an attack fully prepared and you take over a year to assemble your forces...
Maybe that’s just my experiences I’ve had today (I tired my old Favs - Armenia, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Aeolia and Epirus) and had the same issue with all of them...it just seems to be ‘well I’ll raise my levies and throw them at the enemy and pray’ rather than specialising troop types to counter enemy armies...
Just my thoughts - would be nice to be told there is a way to control spawning though!
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