Manpower Calculations Revealed

[unmerged(1207)]

Like many of you, I come to this forum looking for answers on how Victoria works. One area that I haven’t found many answers is the area of manpower, leadership, defense spending, soldiers POPs and Officer POPs. To rectify this, I experimented with the game and figured out the answers myself. Here are my results. I’ll comment on them in a later posting. As I teaser I’ll say up front that it appears that the patches have broken the calculations for manpower.


Defense Spending cost is calculated by the formula:

DS = PCT * (.5*Officers + .25*Soldiers)

Where: PCT = Defense Spending Slider percentage setting (0-100%).
Officers = Total officer population in 1000s.
Soldiers = Total soldiers population in 1000s.
Note: For uncivilized nation the cost is one-third (DS/3).


The “maximum manpower” is calculated by the formula:

MPMAX = Soldiers * (.25 + .75*PCT) – Troops

Where: Troops = Amount of troops deployed. Each division counts as 10.
Note: Troops also includes ships. Each ship appears to counts as 2.


Similarly, the “maximum leadership is:

LMAX = Officers * (.25 + .75*PCT) [or 20 whichever is greater]

Note: This value is never less than 20.


The “monthly increase in manpower” is calculated by:

MPINC = .5 * PCT * MPMAX / 12 [or 0 whichever is greater]

Note: This value is never negative.


I am not sure now the “monthly increase in leadership” is calculated. I think it is something like this:

LINC = Factor * PCT * Officers / 12

Where: “Factor” varies by nation. I observed values of .38 to .48.


Manpower and Leadership grow continuously based upon the “monthly increase” values until they reach the “maximum amount”. Changing the “Defense Spending” slider changes both the “monthly increase” and the “maximum amount”. If you lower the “Defense Spending” slider and “maximum amount” drops below the total manpower (or leadership) you accumulated, you’ll lose any amounts in excess of the maximum.

Changing the number of soldiers and officers affect the above calculations. There is another and more immediate effect; adding soldiers gives an immediate increase in manpower. This increase depends on the position of the “Defense Spending” slider setting and is calculated as follows:

MP Added = Soldiers Added * (.25 + .75*PCT)

I haven’t experimented with officers and leadership but I guess it would work the same.

I have one final observation. According to the manual (page 13) “Investing in Defense Spending” will gain you Prestige. I did a quick experiment using Hawaii and this appears to be the case. Prestige increased after 3-1/2 years and again 5 years later. I wouldn’t hazard to guess what the formula for this is.

I’m sure you hardcore “Victoria” fans found this very informative. As I hinted above, I have more to say on this subject. Keep a watch for my next posting in which I critique all this.

George

 

[Johnny Canuck]

Interesting post, aglozier. I look forward to your next one.


EDIT: Nevermind, just saw your next one (should read the whole board before posting!).

 

[OriginalRafiki]

EDIT: Nevermind, just saw your next one (should read the whole board before posting!).

Nah, where would the fun be in that?

Great post, aglozier, this is the stuff that FAQs are made of!

Rafiki

 

[Darkrenown]

I posted this in another thread but it might be usefull to repost it here:

And anyone playing Austria please report back here your findings on how pop conversion to soldiers is affecting both Manpower, and the amount of divisions you can make of each national culture, thank you.

I started a game to test this and it seems that 1 soldier pop does not equal 1 division. In fact it adds one div to the total for every 10k in the converted pop. So if you convert a pop which is under 10k your div total might not go up, but if you convert a 100k pop you can build 10 divisions. So the good news is that pop merging won't affect your div totals and growth in your soldier pops can increase them. I tested this with south german, hungarian and romanian pops.

Converting non-national pops gives you less manpower, but you can still build 1 div for every 10k converted. Of course, you have to convert around 30k to get enough manpower.

 

[unmerged(1207)]

Nah, where would the fun be in that?

Great post, aglozier, this is the stuff that FAQs are made of!

Rafiki

Thank you Rafiki. Coming from the "King" of FAQs, your coment means a lot. I found FAQs such as yours to be very helpful. Writting this was my way of paying back for that help.

George

 

[OriginalRafiki]

Hehe, thanks

And BTW, having gotten help myself in various Paradox games from FAQS is what motivated me to try to make something for Vicky

Rafiki

 

[unmerged(1207)]

I just ran a quick test on converting POPs into officiers. It looks like it works exactly the same soldiers and manpower. This means that you get an immediate boost in leadership when you do a conversion.

George

 

[OriginalRafiki]

aglozier, have you seen my PM?

Rafiki

 

[unmerged(17126)]

Like many of you, I come to this forum looking for answers on how Victoria works. One area that I haven’t found many answers is the area of manpower, leadership, defense spending, soldiers POPs and Officer POPs. To rectify this, I experimented with the game and figured out the answers myself. Here are my results. I’ll comment on them in a later posting. As I teaser I’ll say up front that it appears that the patches have broken the calculations for manpower.
...

Excellent work ! Besides, sorry, but I'll never ever be able to understand why it's up to the player to find this out. To reveal all these formulas, which are a prerequiste for undestanding, should be a simple task for Paradox as it must be somewhere hidden in the code, also taking into consideration that these formulas may be subject to change from patch
to patch. Never seen a valid answer from the top explaining this politics. thus simply ignoring the more casual gamer ...
There should be a meta-FAQ, asking why so many FAQ are necessary ;-).
Seriously, a constructive proposal for the next patch : skip fixing some minor issues
and put a plain text file with similar figures on game mechanics in the package !
Pleeaze !!

 

[SwordOfJustice]

You know this whole soldier pop thing is a really weird model of raising and maintaining an army, with the two types of defense budget "military spending" and then "maintenance".

What is a soldier pop anyway? In real life there's no such thing. You send out your recruiters who get people from all walks of life. They are either in the reserves and train less frequently and hold down jobs or they are full time soldiers who are actually in the divisions and who get their pay for it. The government pays their costs including maintenance, food, equipment, etc.

These soldier pops are some kind of phantom, I think. What are they supposed to be?

And what is the government money you allocate to miltary spending supposed to be for? Segments of the population that make babies to recruit into your army?? :rofl:


It's a weird model for the military IMHO. Seems to be either some kind of pseudo feudal system or a clumsy way of removing population from the game's economic system.

Just an observation. It's only a game of course.


Cheers,
Sword

 

[SwordOfJustice]

P.S. Thanks for the info Aglozier. Great stuff!


Cheers,
Sword

 

[OriginalRafiki]

(...) or they are full time soldiers who are actually in the divisions and who get their pay for it.

There's your soldier POPs, right there, along with their families. Even if they were in the military, they would still be part of society and need cartain stuff to be satisfied and so forth.

Perhaps it isn't an 100% accurate protrayal of "how things are", but you need to abstract things in games.

Rafiki

 

[unmerged(1207)]

Here's the links to my other posts on manpower:

Manpower Exploit

How Should Manpower Work?

Manpower Calculations in Error

Manpower Calculation Enhancements

 

[unmerged(23954)]

Wow, gr8 work Aglozier, thx! I've been wondering how this worked, but never really had time to study it.
This has to be put in an FAQ, at least sticky it for now

 

[OriginalRafiki]

Does anyone (aglozier, perhaps) know if these numbers apply to 1.03 too, or if the calculations have been changed/tweaked?

Rafiki

 

[unmerged(3921)]

Aglozier, there is one missing, and imo critical, element in the manpower calculations. And that is how quickly manpower available and MPMAX decline when you are taking casualties in the field. When you are fighting a big war (say against Russia), I've found that your manpower available and MPMAX can be declining by as much as 3-5 per day, far overwhelming the monthly increase effect. Good work though.

 

[unmerged(24449)]

Chris 1959

I hope you don'tmind me pasting in a thread I started but it had a lousy title and what you say reflects the thoughts I have about raising forces, I just wish I had the programming skill to tinker around
I must admit I like the idea of mobilization, and the delay it involves, as it reflects nicely the wat late C19th armies developed.
I must admit it took me a while to find it as the manual is very poor regarding this important fact, and it was only reading the forum that I found out how it works.
The problems seem to be the vast armies that certain nations seem to field all the time UK, Russia and Holland spring to mind. In UK and Holland's case it seems to be large colonial populations that do this and Russia seems to be able to optimise her pop in a way that would have had the Red Army green with envy.
The question is I assume a nations mobilisation level is a reflection of it's population size ?
Manpower is a reflection of the pops you have as soldiers and military spending ?
If this is so then manpower can be determined by the player and AI as they see fit. Though with probably more men in uniform than could really be maintained without gross economic consiquences.
If mobilisation level is a reflection of population is there some way to tweak it?
To put it crudely it is believed that a nation can not really sustain more than 10% of its pop under arms for long without grave economic consequences. Great Britain in WWI recruited 5.5m men over the four years from a pop of appprox 36m, the remainder coming from the Empire. In 1918 about 3m men from Great Britain excluding Ireland were under arms about 8.5% of her pop.
The Indian Army was fielding 1m men overseas and 1m in India, I think the pop of British India then was about 230m so less than 1%. Other nations would roughly fall into the same levels, i.e. France has about 9% of her domestic pop under arms and about 1% of her African colonies providing troops. An exception is to put it bluntly Britains "white" dominions who sent troops at levels of the mother country, and in the case of Australia at a higher level.
Is ther some way we can reflect this in the game ? Setting limits on Home civilised countries for divisions in the region of 1 to 4% of the pop, and for colonies at 0.012 to 0.25% of their pops, higher for dominions. We could also take into account that 50% of an army are support troops.
It could also be a sliding scale starting at 2% and rising to 5% by the games end, reflecting a nations increasing ability to utalise it's potential manpower for military service.
It would mean that if a the games start India's pop is 100m then Britain could at most mobilise 12 divisions from India and if domestic pop was 20m then a max in UK of 20 divs.Russia with 60m could mobilise say in 1840 60 divs. These appear to be much more realistic levels than is currently so. A 1914 Germany with 80m pop could put 240 divisions in the field not far of what was the case.
It would be nice in a future release if the numbers to be mobilised were linked to regular divisions at a scale of 1 to 8. To mobilise 240 divs Germany would need a standing army of 60 divs.
It means that nations with large colonial pops can not unrealistically raise large armies.
Ideally rather than converting pops to soldiers a sliding scale could be used to get manpower, this could vary if one wanted a conscription or enlistment military, the pay be more men or higher quality with less strain on the economy.
Partial mobilisation would be nice, USA would not want to go into military overdrive to fight Columbia but would want all the men it could get to fight Germany.
One question though, why the hell is the Ottoman Empire awash with officers, I've got bad generals coming out of my ears from the very start ?
Does rairoad technology/capacity speed up mobilisation and if not coan it be changed ?