Outnumbering enemy troops on a front shouldn't override battle width/brigade limits

[freeaxle]

Having a blast with Brazil in SoI but I've found some strangeness when calculating the brigade count for attacker and defender in the battles. I was fighting a war with one front in the Amazon with 200 brigades on one side and 400 on the other. The terrain limited capped the number of brigades each side could bring, but the cap was 2x as high for the side with 400 brigades vs the side with 200 - the war became a series of battles of 16x brigades vs 8x.

I'd suggest that the front limit should apply equally to both sides, such that if both can fill the front (with some buffer to account for needing troops across the entire front-line) they should bring equal numbers to the battle otherwise winning any front/battle just becomes a matter of bringing more bodies to fight than your opponent. From an army comp point of view, it makes having the latest tech and a well balanced force of artillery/infantry inferior to good-enough infantry and lots of them.

The fact that brigade supply doesn't seem to affect anything at the moment (morale stayed at 100% for units with 0% supply over 4/5 years...) is certainly not helping, although even if it was applied looking at the supply numbers suggest it would still be far too easy to support deployed troops than is historically accurate.

 

[Vellsi]

You can read how the interactions and calculations work on the wiki: https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Land_warfare#Preparations_for_battle
The combat width bonus for the larger force is intended and it gets some randomization added, to not always make frontline progress binary just on army size, but over time it will lead to the larger force wining more decisively.

I believe the intention is to avoid stalemates against opponents who are likely to win anyway. Defending gives you a numerical advantage, as infantry has higher defense than offense values. If you have a huge force but could not deploy it, that would lead to battles taking forever, despite being eventually lost anyway. It also has major implications on army size and army composition, as one would get punished for raising a large army when a small one would have been all that could push a certain front and the decrease in upkeep meanwhiles goes into economic growth. Given that fronts move over time this all leads to weird issues of calculating combat width before wars and and all those AI problems that would introduce.

While it might not be as important an argument from a game design angle, we should also consider that warfare in 1830 wasn't about sitting in trenches and bunkers with machineguns. Connecting more troops to a target, be it by flanking or stacking people tighter, used to dominate military strategy in the years beforehand, which also gave rise to the value of artillery. One could argue the game captures that to some extent with the troop count deployment advantage when outnumbering the enemy.

We could of course make the argument that a prolonged war might allow a defender to outlast an enemy economically, win battles on other fronts to turn the tide of the war or interrupt supply lines, but if this becomes core design, then large nations will be locked in endless wars with permanent upkeep of standing armies, requiring drastic balance adjustements to economy and scaling.

 

[freeaxle]

The combat width bonus for the larger force is intended and it gets some randomization added, to not always make frontline progress binary just on army size, but over time it will lead to the larger force wining more decisively.

I believe the intention is to avoid stalemates against opponents who are likely to win anyway. Defending gives you a numerical advantage, as infantry has higher defense than offense values. If you have a huge force but could not deploy it, that would lead to battles taking forever, despite being eventually lost anyway.

Yes, I agree that is the intention of the current system but I think that it reduces every war to a question of who brings the most bodies, which eliminates any interesting decisions around troop composition, terrain, etc. There are areas of the world where you shouldn't be able to push through just by having a numerical advantage because you simply can't use your numbers past a certain point - jungles, mountain passes, etc. Smaller armies using terrain to even the odds against larger forces (chokepoints, etc) has been a tactic since forever, and is certainly a staple of most strategy games.

The numbers advantage should purely be a question of if you've filled front and your opponent hasn't, beyond that why should it matter if you've brought twice as many troops as your enemy if you can only actually use a tenth of them due to the terrain, width of the front, etc?

It also has major implications on army size and army composition, as one would get punished for raising a large army when a small one would have been all that could push a certain front and the decrease in upkeep meanwhiles goes into economic growth. Given that fronts move over time this all leads to weird issues of calculating combat width before wars and and all those AI problems that would introduce.

I would argue that this is a good thing. The game already has an issue with countries sending every soldier they have to minor conflicts because every soldier added brings advantage. The current system just means that big powers always win because they can always afford to send more troops which is neither historically accurate nor interesting.

I agree that having more troops should mean something in most contexts, the issue I have is that it always means something in every context, and the ability to consistently bring 2x as many brigades to a battle (which accounts for a bit more than a 2x1 advantage) means that every other factor becomes unimportant. This boils war down to a single number which makes it entirely uninteresting. Enforcing battle width limits on brigade counts and having large enough battle widths in permissive terrain allows both - terrain that make sense while also requiring enough troops to contest larger battles in good terrain.

 

[fodazd]

In the release version of the game, this is how it worked: It did not matter at all how many troops you brought to the front, because how many of them participated in a given battle was determined purely by terrain. It was extremely stupid.