Manpower

[MinhowMinhow]

Should manpower be like Vic2, where a pop is elegible to become a brigade, or more like Hoi4, where a fraction of pop is elegible to become manpower (for Vic3, it would be soldiers or mobilized pops)?

Vic2 system is micromanagement heavy to recruit, while Hoi4 and EU4 are much better, because having manpower as a number is easier to recuit.

 

[dunka2]

Based on what they've released so far, it seems that barracks and ports will employ workers, likely also soldiers and sailors who have to outfitted and paid a wage year-round. Whether this means the old system of recruiting individual brigades remains is unclear. I'd hope that they move towards a system more similar to HoI4 where you order a specific composition and the game handles outfitting it with men and arms.

 

[Reman]

Vic 2's system has an insane degree of micromanagement with regiments needing to be recruited from individual provinces, then gradually being worn down in combat until they disappear and replacements need to be recruited from somewhere else. It doesn't help that Vic 2 has no macrobuilder AND has a heavy emphasis on correct composition, e.g. you need a specific setup to get max siege and recon, you need to make sure artillery stays in the back or their damage is vastly reduced, etc. There's the potential for interesting things to happen, with brigades recruited from high-militancy areas revolting along with the populace, but the gameplay impact of such things isn't nearly sufficient to justify how much micro there is. Replacing lost brigades as a contiguous country with this system is annoying, while doing it as a massive overseas empire is downright awful.

I hope Vic 3 does something to reduce the micromanagement significantly, as it makes wars very tedious.

 

[Revshawn]

The thing that interested me about Victoria 3 this time around is that, and Wiz didn't go into detail about this all that much, but he made it seem as if waging war can actually knock down your nation pretty hard if you take too many casualties. Your industries will take a huge hit if there is no one to man the machinery because they all die on the front lines.

Honestly, I much preferred Victoria 2's system to games even like HOI4. The problem with HOI4 is that the AI fronts just don't work in the way you want them to. I've found that I actually win wars I usually should lose the moment I turn off the simulated fronts and just start controlling my troops manually. Once I do that, I start having breakthroughs and all sorts of fun stuff. The way that HOI front line forces your troops to move in a certain way constantly is just too burdensome when you're trying to encircle and destroy pockets of troops and collapse a front line.

 

[Amallric]

EU like Manpower is a terrible mechanic and should even be removed from EU itself, but at the same time Victoria 2's system is indeed not very user-friendly and moreover, does not reflect the way armies worked historically. It is important to have soldiers tied to POPs in some way, but the system where people are supposed to join the army willingly based on the level of salaries and then form "Soldier POPs", does not have any basis in reality.

Most governments had a fairly good level of control on the size of their armed forces during the period, which was determined based on the state finances and willingness to spend money on the army, this was definitely not something left to market forces to decide. And soldiers from all parts of the country could be easily shifted around and grouped together to form regiments, at no point the fact that a "Soldier POP" in a specific area is depleted should be any issue to raise the remaining soldiers as a unit. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the soldiers were actually drafted from the general population for a relatively short time, and did NOT constitute permanent "Soldier POPs" with distinct ideologies and preferencies, something Victoria 2 completely fails to represent.

 

[Hertzila]

We'll see what the devs have been cooking up in the relevant dev diary, eventually. But right now, I'm for a primarily pooled manpower system, but where the system tracks internally who's fighting where. Basically, allow the system to internally split the pops into some reasonable partial units (eg. 100 soldiers) that are then glued together from applicable pops to form an actual military unit. Partial pools could be used as a last resort, but would then result in underpowered unit. Alternatively, allow arbitrarily-sized partial units, but I fear that might get too complicated too fast. Imagine trying to keep track of the soldier origins in a unit where literally everybody is from a different pop.

Either partial system would allow professional soldiers to be pooled from all over and allow conscription units to pool close pops into one unit, rather than requiring full divisible-by-3000 person pops in either case.