Muscovy/Russia need a nerf

[LAF1994]

The Muscovites/Russians are horribly overpowered at the moment. They almost always are the pre-eminent military power on the map (other than the Ottomans), and can easily have a larger development and forcelimit than the Chinese Emperor, which is extremely ahistorical. The biggest issue is that the 'Life-Long Conscription' idea is incredibly overpowered, being a +50% to forcelimit. It should be dropped to +25%.

 

[Sfan]

This is impossible, Russia is underpowered.

This being said, Russia clearly benefitted from the current patch. I would still like some screenshots and stats from numerous games to back your claim, because in my experience, they have a high FL but they rarely are able to fill it.

 

[Bki]

In my current game, Muscovy got partly eaten by the Great Horde, though it is an unusual occurence and more often Russia at least form.

But yes, in the hands of the human they are really strong. Objectively there are nations that start stronger than them, but Muscovy start is very easy.

 

[moscal]

In my current game MOS cannot win with NOV. Leg.war in HRE and MOS and NOV still live. Ergo - rng still work

 

[Ostovar Hossein]

Wasn't just 2 weeks ago someone asking for moscovy/Russia be buffed saying it was underpowered... Lol

 

[Question]

If we are talking about the AI, the reason is simple :

Muscovy -> Russia is the biggest power in the region. So they just keep blobbing. PLC will never attack Russia, they dont even get claims there IIRC.

Siberian frontier lets them go all the way to Asia for free, then they spend the rest of the game invading the asian states who cant put up a fight. Ive seen AI Russia conquer Korea before.

Unfortunately, this also means they pretty much ignore PLC/Lithuania entirely. Even if they have 2-3 times the dev of Lithuania, they wont attack them because they look at Asia, sees that all the states there are way weaker than Lithuania, and obsesses over them instead.

 

[Zak Preston]

This is impossible, Russia is underpowered.

This being said, Russia clearly benefitted from the current patch. I would still like some screenshots and stats from numerous games to back your claim, because in my experience, they have a high FL but they rarely are able to fill it.

Russia is quite fine in SP, I'd say it's on the stronger side rather than weaker. However in MP Muscovy => Russia is blatantly and ridiculously OP.

1. Army Quality is way too good: +10% Art CA, -10% Fire Damage Received, +5% Morale, then +10% Fire Damage from Streltsy and +5% Discipline actually make Russian army quality comparable to French one.
2. Wild quantity modifiers actually make Russian military the most powerful in game, beating any other nation without any possible competition. If you take 100k Prussian troops and face them with 150k Russians, the Greencoats will wipe the floor with Gray spacemarines.

So basically Russia has a quality compared to French coupled with undisputed and unparalleled top-1 quantity modifiers.

 

[Less2]

I was checking around at what the AI was doing and for some reason in both of my games that went to about 1600 the Russian AI had 100% of its inland provinces running a (goods production) manufactory while none of the other AIs was doing this. I'm not sure what caused this, but Russia ended up way ahead in cashflow.

 

[Bki]

Army Quality is way too good: +10% Art CA, -10% Fire Damage Received, +5% Morale, then +10% Fire Damage from Streltsy and +5% Discipline actually make Russian army quality comparable to French one.

This is probably nitpicking, but Russia doesn't get discipline from their NI.

(Art CA is probably the best of all the CA to get though, and Fire damage received is great late game, so yes their ideas are strong militarily especially when considering Streltsy).

 

[Jarvin]

Art CA is probably the best of all the CA to get though

Disputable

 

[EarlKonrad]

This is probably nitpicking, but Russia doesn't get discipline from their NI.

(Art CA is probably the best of all the CA to get though, and Fire damage received is great late game, so yes their ideas are strong militarily especially when considering Streltsy).

Streltsy aren't a part of their ideas and should be judged accordingly. Cannon CA is good, but you should always take into account that it's value is halved because cannons only do half damage from the back. Additionally, cannons aren't really a consideration until tech 16 and so there's a big window of time where the Russians can't really take advantage of that idea.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Russia is quite fine in SP, I'd say it's on the stronger side rather than weaker. However in MP Muscovy => Russia is blatantly and ridiculously OP.

1. Army Quality is way too good: +10% Art CA, -10% Fire Damage Received, +5% Morale, then +10% Fire Damage from Streltsy and +5% Discipline actually make Russian army quality comparable to French one.
2. Wild quantity modifiers actually make Russian military the most powerful in game, beating any other nation without any possible competition. If you take 100k Prussian troops and face them with 150k Russians, the Greencoats will wipe the floor with Gray spacemarines.

So basically Russia has a quality compared to French coupled with undisputed and unparalleled top-1 quantity modifiers.

Simply put, you are wrong.

France gets +20% morale and +5% discipline.
Russians get +5% morale, -10% fire damage taken, 10% cannon CA and 0.25 AT.

France has a clear and distinct edge. 5% discipline is 5% more damage taken and 5% less damage taken across the board. 10% cannon CA is, at best, 5% more damage dealt. -10% fire damage is also very small as it only affects one of the three phases (if you take into account morale phase). All in all, France has a clear quality edge. Russia wins out in terms of number.

If you want to bring Streltsy into the table than you also need to talk about events for both countries as those are also important and one of the reasons why Sweden's military is more powerful than one would imagine just by looking at their ideas.

 

[Bki]

Disputable

Streltsy aren't a part of their ideas and should be judged accordingly. Cannon CA is good, but you should always take into account that it's value is halved because cannons only do half damage from the back. Additionally, cannons aren't really a consideration until tech 16 and so there's a big window of time where the Russians can't really take advantage of that idea.

Streltsy just get +10% fire damage, no discipline.

As for cannon, the value of +10% CA is not halved because cannon are always in the back. So it's still an increase of 10% to the damages they would deal anyways.

And at tech 16, the tech modifier on fire damage (which is a purely multiplicative bonus) for artillery is more than twice that of infantry, so even taking into account the halved damages, artillery do more damage in fire phase than infantry when at full strength. And artillery stay at full strength during the entire battle until you start really losing, while infantry get killed immediately.

There's a window between tech 18 and 20 where you could argue that infantry is superior, but after that the damage from artillery is just better, with at least more than 3x more fire multiplier (so 1.5x the damage from the backrow compared to infantry) for close to a century.

Sure it's only fire phase, but fire phase come first, and will probably decide thing all other factors being otherwise equals.

 

[Lightwell]

The Muscovites/Russians are horribly overpowered at the moment. They almost always are the pre-eminent military power on the map (other than the Ottomans), and can easily have a larger development and forcelimit than the Chinese Emperor, which is extremely ahistorical. The biggest issue is that the 'Life-Long Conscription' idea is incredibly overpowered, being a +50% to forcelimit. It should be dropped to +25%.

Saying it again. All of Europe is OP in this game. There's no point in complaining about just a single nation.

 

[Sfan]

People here are saying the Russian AI is incompetent, that's slightly different. The key word here probably being AI.

 

[zorkman]

Muscovy is always overpowered & has been since EU1 came on the scene. The game is set up so it can hardly fail, & all the Russian minors +Novgorod, & hordes are just canon fodder for it to feast upon. It would be nice if other nations have chances to form, without Muscovy & its bonuses sweeping everyone away.

 

[EarlKonrad]

Muscovy is always overpowered & has been since EU1 came on the scene. The game is set up so it can hardly fail, & all the Russian minors +Novgorod, & hordes are just canon fodder for it to feast upon. It would be nice if other nations have chances to form, without Muscovy & its bonuses sweeping everyone away.

You sure about that? Russia hardly ever formed in EU 3 and I recall reading people complaining that Russia would also hardly ever form in EU4 before Third Rome (but I started playing after that expansion so I can't really comment on that). True, Novgorod is poised to fail from the start -- which I'd argue is a necessity if you want Russia to form as if both they and Muscovy were on equal footing than people would complain about Russian never forming. The Horde AI is just sad and has been mistreated and abused for a long time.

More than any buffs that they got, Russia's strength lies in the fact that Scandinavia and the PLC regions haven't ever got any meaningful update so their only true rival are the Ottomans. That said, the moment you buff either PLC or Scandinavia I can assure you that Russia -- when controlled by an AI -- will return to being weak.

 

[FreeKing]

This is only my own experience, but since 1.30 I've not seen Russia form.... either Russia fails to get the necessary provinces or the neighbors eventually overwhelm them. Have even seen Novgorod make a comeback.

I'd guess it can be attributed to the AI debt spiral and resulting broken alliances that lead to Muscovy quickly falling to the wayside.

 

[EarlKonrad]

This is only my own experience, but since 1.30 I've not seen Russia form.... either Russia fails to get the necessary provinces or the neighbors eventually overwhelm them. Have even seen Novgorod make a comeback.

I'd guess it can be attributed to the AI debt spiral and resulting broken alliances that lead to Muscovy quickly falling to the wayside.

That has been my experience too, but I'm also seeing Muscovy not indebt and running a lot of artillery across their armies.

I guess you win some and lose some.

 

[Sfan]

It may also just be luck. It's really hard to draw conclusions based on one's own games. There just aren't enough.
I could argue that the Ottomans and Russia are too strong this patch based on this current game, even if some people see the opposite result.

And that's with a fairly successful Commonwealth countering both of them, and an AQ alliance that blocks the Ottos.