Paradox: Please remove Shattered Retreat and Coalitions

[brobman22]

I think diplomatic range should be tied to a tech and diplomacy instead of the devs just cutting diplo range in half and if you shatter then the army should retreat to the closest ally which makes having close allies even more important instead of just removing mechanics that with tweaking could be quite fun.

 

[Perico del Puñalico]

I have had zero problems winning wars so far. I am playing ironman and I actually haven't lost one war yet, and I am winning them just as fast as before. The non-moronic thing to do is to pick your enemies carefully. You still get a good amount of warscore for winning battles. Don't waste your time chasing adventurer armies; let them come to you.

I am also playing ironman and won every war and defending a couple of jihads so far, but I can not do it as fast as before. You cannot pick your enemy if you are defending, or if someone declares a jihad on your realm, for example.

Waiting for an army is a way of wasting time actually. The time you are waiting for an attack, you must have the troops ready. And this leads me to the next point:

If you want to end quickly, then yes you have to chase him. If you want to roleplay the game (which is what CK2 is meant to be, because it is CK2), then you should wait until he is worn and tired of attacking you again and again (which is how many adventurers did and lost in history). Just stay in your territory and defend against the adventurer's menace.. why do you even need to chase him? You are not on the offensive here.

I need to chase them because I want to end it quickly. What happens if while I am waiting for a next wave of my current adventurer war, some other declares war on me and I have to defend against two?

This is, indeed, something I usually do when I want to debilitate an enemy. I sometimes check if he is facing and adventurer, and press my claims there so he had to split armies to both. I don't want that happened to me.

By the way, if someone wants to roleplay the game, shattered retreat of thousands of miles should be completely discarded. And even more, I don't beleive that any real medieval lord facing a real adventurer and with a defeated army in his realm would wait for an attack to his levies army, instead of trying to solve the thing once and forever.

 

[Olaf the Unsure]

I sort of see it as a failing of Crusader Kings itself for promoting so much warmongering in the game for so long. The game isn't supposed to be about conquering the world or even Europe. It's just as much about growing a strong dynasty and the politics of the time just as much as warring over land.

I definitely agree with this. Most of the expanding I do is by marriage or intrigue. Paradox games are very poor war games, so I tend to avoid war as much as possible. Which is why CK2, with its many role playing features, can be such a fun game.

And which is part of the reason I hate the new SR mechanic. Most of the wars I fight are defensive, and I hate that an enemy can invade my land, lose badly (get "shattered") but yet still wander all over my realm besieging everything in sight. If they would shatter back to their own territory, I'd be happy to let them sit there and plot against me until they decide to try again. But, too often, that's not what happens. I instead have to play Whack-a-Mole just to get them to leave.

That's neither historical nor fun - nor consistent with what the game is really about.

 

[Ranjid]

Those shattered retreat mechanics make single county conquests against big foes more tedious than ever. It was moronic before, but now you don't even get the battle warscore anymore. You have to siege down half their damned realm to get the needed warscore. Wars were WAY too long before, if you had no 10k retinue to assault every holding. Oh, this didn't change at all. It's still the same snowballing as ever. It just makes the wars at the start more tedious, boring and unnecessarily long. Why was there a need to prolong those wars even further?

Instead of making progress on the AI part, so it wouldn't prolong unwinable wars just because, PDX made them even more resilient. Sorry, but there's simply NOTHING positive about a 10 year long war, just because your enemy can retreat and replenish all the time. It didn't work that way back then. It shouldn't work that way in the game.

And don't get me started on county claims, which net about 5-7% warscore from the wargoal...

 

[Bortron]

I am also playing ironman and won every war and defending a couple of jihads so far, but I can not do it as fast as before. You cannot pick your enemy if you are defending, or if someone declares a jihad on your realm, for example.

Waiting for an army is a way of wasting time actually. The time you are waiting for an attack, you must have the troops ready. And this leads me to the next point:



I need to chase them because I want to end it quickly. What happens if while I am waiting for a next wave of my current adventurer war, some other declares war on me and I have to defend against two?

This is, indeed, something I usually do when I want to debilitate an enemy. I sometimes check if he is facing and adventurer, and press my claims there so he had to split armies to both. I don't want that happened to me.

By the way, if someone wants to roleplay the game, shattered retreat of thousands of miles should be completely discarded. And even more, I don't beleive that any real medieval lord facing a real adventurer and with a defeated army in his realm would wait for an attack to his levies army, instead of trying to solve the thing once and forever.

I would recommend studying the topic. In particular the viking age in the British Isles. Those "adventurer armies" were active for years, even decades, in Saxon territories. Unlike CK2, medieval rulers did not have a magical map that told them where there enemies were and how many troops they had. Many rebels and raiders were able to carry out operations for many years, often with almost complete impunity. Your problem is that you want the game to be easy and simple; personally I prefer the increased complexity. If you are attacked by another enemy before you can defeat the first then it sucks to be you; this game, like history, is not supposed to fair.

 

[Olaf the Unsure]

Granted, these mechanics could use some slight tweaking, but they are actually more realistic than before. That shattered army you see retreating is not a cohesive force you should be able to attack, it just a symbolic representation of a retreating army that is regrouping. Where they retreat to is sometimes a little weird, granted, but that is the only problem. If you ignore the defeated army and siege enemy provinces instead you will defeat the enemy in nearly the same amount of time as before when you would unrealistically chase down the enemy army until you completely annihilate them, which was extremely unrealistic for a time when casualties were relatively light.

If the war is offensive, I agree with you - no need to chase a shattered army across Europe once it has left your realm. I'm not sure, though, that folks are really advocating that.

The bigger problem is defensive wars, where shattered armies retreat deeper into your territory yet somehow survive and prosper. In this instance, you have to chase them unless you want them parked in your realm forever.

 

[Kurek]

People keep complaining about chasing armies being annoying. That's the whole point of the change It buffs defense, not offense.

The fact that so many people are complaining about it is an indication that it's WAD.

devs add a feature that massively changes the way a core component of the game works and many customers complain about it being tedious as hell and makes the game less fun. DON'T COMPLAIN IT'S WAD!!!!!!!!!!!! what a great response.

I don't chase beaten foes. I besiege castles, limit attrition, and take territory, as it should be.

Doesn't quite work like this though, I defeated a dude's army and he retreated into the fog of war, I settle down to besiege some provinces, meanwhile his army gets reinforced and he sends his army back down coming into my territory before I had taken any provinces, forcing me to abandon my siege to take his army down again (didn't have enough men to cover both the siege and the battle), which happened a few times until I played whack a mole chase the shattered retreating army for half a year. I guess it'll work the way you said a lot better at King and Emperor levels or multi-duchy levels with more than 3-4 thousand soldiers involved but at lower levels it just adds a massive amount of tedium to the game making it less fun for me.

 

[philanthropic19]

If the war is offensive, I agree with you - no need to chase a shattered army across Europe once it has left your realm. I'm not sure, though, that folks are really advocating that.

The bigger problem is defensive wars, where shattered armies retreat deeper into your territory yet somehow survive and prosper. In this instance, you have to chase them unless you want them parked in your realm forever.

1. MANY people have complained in this thread that they "have to chase" shattered armies in offensive wars. They should understand that the point of shattered retreat is that they shouldn't chase the army and instead they should siege enemy holdings.
2. Yes in defensive wars, if the shattered enemy army retreats further into your territory, this is stupid. That's why the mechanic needs tweaking.

 

[Ispil]

The weights just need to be set better in the defines so that it favors retreating into home territory or neutral territory. Also needs to be more against retreating through provinces with an active enemy troop, to prevent immersion breaking nonsense that can happen. It also needs a smaller minimum distance due to the general size of provinces in vanilla CKII.

 

[Bortron]

If the war is offensive, I agree with you - no need to chase a shattered army across Europe once it has left your realm. I'm not sure, though, that folks are really advocating that.

The bigger problem is defensive wars, where shattered armies retreat deeper into your territory yet somehow survive and prosper. In this instance, you have to chase them unless you want them parked in your realm forever.

Yeah, I agree with that for the most part. They should retreat towards friendly territory.

 

[02mo]

Hmmm, unfortunately I would have to agree Shattered Retreat doesn't make sense. I'm in the middle of an IronMan game, just updated to patch 2.51 (without Conclave) so my ruler died, and I've just been hit with a massive revolt. The leader of the revolt is my half brother, Duke of Khotan (its a Zoroastrian play through).

My capital is Samarkand, and I also hold the counties in the duchy of Kashgar, I assembled my troops in Kashgar while he besieged Yarkand, by the time I got an 8k stack ready to take on his 3.5k (there's 2 other faction 7k stacks besieging other provinces), I went to fight him and defeated him in battle. 1.6k of his stack have presumably used Shattered Retreat to go straight through the remaining 1.5k stack of stragglers that had assembled in Kashgar and are now marching through Samarkand to presumably join up with the larger stacks? I'm already at -16% as one of the other big stacks managed to siege down Roudehen in Rayy. In addition my brother is a Direct Leader and a Flanker, but is comfortably outpacing my commander who is an Administrator.

 

[Olaf the Unsure]

Just remove them yourselves if you want to. Why do you need some corporation acting as your daddy when you can fix problems yourself?

Maybe because I'm paying them, not the other way around?

 

[ImTheMan]

wars get a lot more expensive, but i think it works quite well, attack enemy troops and win->get decent war score->siege somewting while they running->chase em off when they come back after a siege is done. chasing them around would be annoying yes - but then just don't.

 

[wthomas]

Relying on welfare of others makes you weak. You can't buy your way into independence.

Hey Ted Cruz, stop making this about something it's not.

 

[Notthemama]

1. MANY people have complained in this thread that they "have to chase" shattered armies in offensive wars. They should understand that the point of shattered retreat is that they shouldn't chase the army and instead they should siege enemy holdings.
2. Yes in defensive wars, if the shattered enemy army retreats further into your territory, this is stupid. That's why the mechanic needs tweaking.

Yeah, but part of the game is being fun to play. I like starting at the count level. Shattered retreat makes taking on larger armies an extremely difficult proposal at the count level. Also, wars were already too long, and now they are longer. Realistic or not, I think the shattered retreat is a poor idea from the gameplay perspective.

 

[Fork Breaker]

The features need balancing? Certainly. They slow down player progression? Well, most players I have seen here, are after 200, maybe 300 years, powerful enough to beat everything into oblivion that isn't controlled by a player. You can't blame Paradox to try slowing things down a bit and making the game a bit more difficult. Slower game progression is a poor argument for a game that spans a 700 year timeline, in which, after 300 years, most players do not have any mentionable challenge.

There are several ways they could make endgame CK2 more challenging without broken coalitions mechanics though. Mainly, there could be more limiting internal factors, which would not become issues until the player has achieved significant size. Making it more difficult for large empires to manage their realms would deal with the problems which occur at this point in the game, without locking mid-sized kingdoms into place through massive coalitions. Coalitions are an unecessary and arbitrary addition to this game, and I would much rather see factors such as distance between an owned county and a realm's capital come into play. Tax income could be severely decreased from faraway vassals and counties. More events causing instability in such regions could be implemented, increasing revolt risk or causing vassals to provide less levies unless kept in line. These vassals could take increasing opinion hits over time if the player does not deliberately placate them. Distance could make it less likely for the player to discover plots or successfully imprison enemies. Those are just ideas off the top of my head, but what I am getting at is that there are much better ways to make large empires more difficult to manage. Coalitions might have been meant to make mid- to endgame harder, but at a certain point they won't really make the game more challenging, because there won't be a coalition big enough to keep the player from smashing it. So really, they're just arbitrary speedbumps, expecially considering they have very little basis in the reality of Medieval Europe.

 

[Hecaton]

Yeah, but part of the game is being fun to play. I like starting at the count level. Shattered retreat makes taking on larger armies an extremely difficult proposal at the count level. Also, wars were already too long, and now they are longer. Realistic or not, I think the shattered retreat is a poor idea from the gameplay perspective.

That's the biggest thing I worried about. They made it an order of magnitude harder to fight from a numerical disadvantage. I think they decided that things needed to be 'harder' or some crap so just added artificial difficulty to the game.

 

[Saeronor]

The shattered retreat mechanism is precisely there to prevent you from chasing a defeated army. There was nothing more annoying than the "ping-pong strategy", when the winner of a battle would just follow back and forth the losing army from one province to the other, until they are completely annihilated.
Before 2.5, the army that lost the first battle pretty much lost the entire war.

Now, with the addition of the shattered retreat and the reinforcement in friendly territory, the loser can come back in force and get a chance to change the outcome (especially if the winner of the first battle is sieging, and thus has not been reinforcing).

Great addition. Wars are now much more interesting.

There was a nummber of alternatives which would not result in mechanical (and historical) silliness.

The problem of annihilating losing army in quick succession? Introduce significant Attrition penalty if you move winning army from a province before certain amount of time passes. This way you can actually choose - catch your opponent, but at a severe cost. Increase/decrease the cost depending on authority, ruler stat combo, whatever. Set some % treshold so 10,000 men are not stuck because of a random stack of 50.

There were many things medieval armies would prefer to do after winning - looting and scavenging, arguing about prisoners and recognition, celebrating, treating wounds, actually getting everybody back together... Entire campaigns went in a different direction due to vassals either being too disorganised and unruly or simply too busy to fully exploit a success. We are not exactly talking a monarch being able to play a drill sergeant here. Hell, the results of the battle, at least immediately afterwards, could be completely unclear (eg. the extent of victory) even for commanders, let alone a direction chosen by the bulk of losing army.

Losers? Much easier - whatever losses are calculated during battle along with morale hit could easily represent global numbers, ie. from both actual battle and unfortunate events during forced retreat.

 

[Ranjid]

It's clear they simply copied the SR mechanic from EUIV. I don't like it in EUIV. But I can cope with it, since you still win, once your enemies' manpower runs out. AND the battles actually cause casualties. Now, in CKII there's almost no casualties at all. Combined with the fact that levies replenish over time and the minuscule war score gains from battles, due to low casualties, you have to fight full strength enemies a couple of times. This isn't a problem when facing weaker enemies. But enemies on the same level or maybe even stronger ones? Not a chance. Not to mention the devaluation of mercenaries. They're simply way too expensive to use for prolonged warfare. Currently, you hire them, use them for 1-4 battles, until you have a decisive lead and then end the contract. But now you have to keep them around for the whole war.

EUIV's manpower replenishes a good deal slower. You need about 10 years, to get from 0 to max again without any modifiers. In CKII it's not even 2 years. Combined with the ridiculously low casualty rate, this means longer wars and huge disadvantages for the attacker. Especially attackers relying on mercenaries. This isn't thought through at all. It's a badly implemented C&P job from EUIV, where they forgot what makes it "work" in that game.

 

[Notthemama]

That's the biggest thing I worried about. They made it an order of magnitude harder to fight from a numerical disadvantage. I think they decided that things needed to be 'harder' or some crap so just added artificial difficulty to the game.

Honestly, if they have made it miserable to play and try to move up as a count, I'm finished. Most of the time, when I get to the King or Emperor level, while I might play a couple generations, I usually leave off soon afterwards, and start again a count.