Non national culture pop soldiers?

[Gihren Zabi]

I'm playing as Prussia in vanilla Vicky (actually started the game over the summer, but went off to Bath in England for the fall semester) and so I've mainly been using my German POPs in useless RGOs for my factories. I still have plenty who are not craftsmen or clerks, but I was just wondering if it makes sense to use Poles or other non Germans as soldiers?

And when the war with Austria comes along, are my southern German troops going to cause grief for me? How difficult of a war is this? My standing army is about 18 divisions and I have 40 in reserve. I'm just a little worried about getting mobbed by the Austrians and southern German states.

 

[unmerged(106891)]

IIRC, non-national POPs are more likely to revolt. Furthermore, if a soldier POP revolts then it's respective unit also has an increased chance of revolting.

So, to my point, if you have non-national POPs in your army, then those units are more likely to revolt. Having non-national POPs in your army doesn't, however, make them of worse quality (unless they come from a colony, for instance, but your own POPs would also be of worse quality in that situation).

What is often seen as an exploit is promoting your national POPs to soldiers, making military units out of them, and then demobilizing those soldier POPs whilst making your minorities into soldier POPs. This way you get the best of both worlds - large manpower pool, yet reliable army.

 

[Dysken]

Non national pops are only half as effective in RGOs an factories. As such it makes no sense at all having your loyal citizens dying in the battlefield meatgrinders, use minorities for that.

 

[Jingles]

I always prefer to use my minority troops in the most bloody of battles. I prefer to keep my most reliable national culture divisions to uphold internal order.

An interesting fact is that you won't be able to promote additional non-national culture soldier POPs yourself, even with a full-citizenship party, except by mobilization doing it automatically for you.

So, a method I discovered of getting more non-national culture soldier POPs is to invade another country, and drive their war exhaustion up through a long bloody war. Let them continually retake their territory again and again. Eventually, when the war ends and you either annex or take territory, the land will be full of soldier POPs the AI converted to fight you. Now you've got fresh cannon fodder.*


*Note: sometimes after annexation the converted soldier POPs will revert back to their original occupations, for some reason I haven't figured out yet.

 

[Gihren Zabi]

How likely would an army of Poles be to revolt though? Since there is a Polish Revolution event scripted into the game and all.

 

[Jingles]

I could be wrong, but afaik non-national culture divisions do not have an inherently lower reliability. However, if they are of colonial or irregular etc. quality then they will. But by themselves just because of their culture they do not have a lower reliability.

 

[Indefatigable]

An interesting fact is that you won't be able to promote additional non-national culture soldier POPs yourself, even with a full-citizenship party, except by mobilization doing it automatically for you.

Are you sure? When I have a pro military, full citizenship party in power I can turn any POPs into soldiers, even non-national culture POPs.

 

[unmerged(106891)]

Are you sure? When I have a pro military, full citizenship party in power I can turn any POPs into soldiers, even non-national culture POPs.

Only in states and not colonies, though, isn't it?

(I'm not entirely sure)

 

[Jingles]

I know playing as Austria with the full citizenship Federalists in power I can't convert my North Italians or Czechs into soldiers, but that may be due to them being Anti Military (can't remember if I tried during war or not).

Now that I think of it, yes if you have full citizenship + pro military or jingoism you can convert non-national culture POPs in your STATES to soldiers.