Q: Population effects of combat losses

[TheDarkside]

Originally posted by rafiki


Other than that, I like the idea of recruiting directly from a province's soldier POP(s). Need to think about how to handle re-inforcements, tho' seems a bit rigid if they have to come from the same province (allthough this might be more accurate?), while it will add to the micro-management if you have to select province each time you recruit.

Re-inforcing from other provinces opens a different can of worms. Can you e.g. have units with mixes of home-province and/or culture/religion?

Rafiki

Perhaps it woulda have been better then if armies did not have home province or culture. So then when you create divisions they use a small amount of people from each soldier pop you currently have. Reinforcing then could use the same method.

So instead of a manpower number, you have a number which directly relates to the population of all your soldier pops.

BTW: when you reinforce units, are you required to supply some goods? I saw plenty of screen shots where division require guns/cnaned food, artillery, etc.. but if you reinforce, do they require a small percentage amount of those same goods based on the divisions strength?

 

[OriginalRafiki]

Originally posted by TheDarkside
Perhaps it woulda have been better then if armies did not have home province or culture. So then when you create divisions they use a small amount of people from each soldier pop you currently have. Reinforcing then could use the same method.

I don't think this is the way to go, since you loose the aspect of unit loyalty and culture. Also, it will remove the basis for regular/colonial troops, unless you have seperate overviews for each.

Originally posted by TheDarkside
So instead of a manpower number, you have a number which directly relates to the population of all your soldier pops.

It does directly relate to the headcount in the soldier POPs, allthough I don't know what the factor is

Originally posted by TheDarkside
BTW: when you reinforce units, are you required to supply some goods? I saw plenty of screen shots where division require guns/cnaned food, artillery, etc.. but if you reinforce, do they require a small percentage amount of those same goods based on the divisions strength?

Nope, only manpower.

It seems a bit simplistic that military units only need money and no goods for upkeep, but that's a whole other discussion than manpower, POP-headcounts and combat losses

Rafiki

 

[TheDarkside]

How about this then:

You get a list of all your current soldier pops, and you drag em over to an empty new division, filling it up to max. So here you see I take an entire swedish soldier pop of 5,000- eliminating it. Then drag another soldier pop to add the last 5,000 to complete the division. That leaves one swedish pop with 2,000 left.
Also, you can have mixed divisions, like where I take Norwegians and Russians and have a division of 70% Norwegian 30% Russian.

Also perhaps you don't need to have divisions of 10,000... If all you got is a soldier pop of 3,000 people, then you can create a small div of 3,000. Reinforcing would be the same way, just drag soldier pops over until you fill it up how much you want.

There may be some glaring problems with this, since I havent played game yet so I don't know much about the army system yet.

 

[Orm]

Originally posted by TheDarkside

There may be some glaring problems with this...

Well, apart from the click-fest this would turn into if you have 100's of divisions, I like the idea.
There are more factors to building a Victoria division, they can have added brigades of different sorts, and can also be of different qualities.

 

[Dievs]

Originally posted by MadViking

So basically, you can convert a lot of your other POPs into soldiers, get lots of manpower, make bucketloads of units, wage a long and bloody war, and when it is all over you can convert the soldier POPs back into something more usefull.

Well, there is a simple solution to that - don't allow converting soldier POP's away, if there is no free manpower.

So if you have soldier POP's that give manpower for 10 divisions, you build these divisions, your available manpower goes to 0. If you kill these 10 divisions, the manpower should still be at 0, and these POP's should be tied up, requiring goods and be unable to convert, until there is once again enough manpower to release them.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I was also under the impression that recruiting soldiers had a permanent impact on the labor force if those soldiers were killed. I have been wondering how countries could build these massive armies with no seeming negative impact on the economy. Sure, if England wanted to build a 3 million man army in 1850, it could have, but their industry would have gone to hell rather quickly. If they lost 2 million men in a war, those men would not soon be replaced and I imagine a revolution would have occured; like in GAME OVER. I can't understand why it is like this. There must be a better way that is workable and not catastrophic to the AI.

 

[unmerged(576)]

Can I just add my voice to this? I find it rather disconcerting the way I'm hearing its working. I'd also subtract the soliders from the pop. Abstract manpower doesn't make any sense, historically or gameplay wise. The loss of men in wars has played a vital role in the economic problems many nations faced. Hell, its the reason women were able to eventually gain suffrage.

 

[unmerged(21575)]

I really dislike this system as well, it just doesnt seem right to have an infinite amount of soldiers, wars of attrition cannot be fought anymore, it really dosent make too much sense.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Well I take hope in the fact that almost everyone agrees; including Paradox I believe; that it is a problem and they are looking at alternatives.

 

[unmerged(13259)]

It does appear to be something that is easily fixed with a patch.

What they need to do is make it so soldier pops are raised from a province (so they have the province culture and identity) and that ANY laborer group in that province can be converted to a soldier pop. That is you can force even high level like upper classes to soldiers, but of course you would only do that if you ran out of lower classes.

Then once you have the soldier pops up, these are your armies, each is from specific provinces, maybe many from one etc...but each has the culture of their province just like it is now.


Then you just need to work out the manpower pool. I think you should have to allocate how many workers you want in this pool for replacement for the army before you can use them, say by a lag of about 3 months...so you have to plan ahead to replace losses else you won't have the trained replacements...or perhaps you could penalize by having to quickly reinforce with untrained soldiers drawn from the laborer pops...thus reducing the quality of the soldier pops...

There should be a cost associated with allocating labor pops to be ready for call up to be used in manpower replacements. These pops should still be working in the economy as before but be able to be shipped off as reinfocements, but to allocate them to this reinforcement pool should cost something.

So you could raise a huge replacement pool (possibley capped at a percentage of population, or perhaps percentage of soldier pop, else if you go over this level discontent ensues in the land), but creating this pool would cost money or resources or both, and perhaps this pool is only temporary, so you cant raise a big pool and keep it for years...so you only raise a pool when you need it.

Anyway this way the losses in the army would come from laborers and thus affect the economy, and manpower would be tied to population and pops and cost to raise, plus be temporary.

Also the reinforcements would have to come from the same province as the soldier pop they are reinforcing to maintain the culture of the soldier pop, if you ran out of reinforcements from a certain province and were forced to spread other province reinforcements into different province's soldier pops, then those mixed pops would suffer penalties to cohesion, combat skills etc...

 

[Sol Invictus]

From all I have read on these forums, it appears that Paradox is well aware that the system is far from ideal, but the need to help the AI is forcing these mental gymnastics. The solution to the massive armies is simple and could be accomplished several different ways, but the rub is the effect this has on the AI. There just has to be a better way to handle this that wont cripple the AI. I would prefer that the manpower system is made reasonable and to help the AI with some bonus if need be because I consider the current system worse than a cheat.

 

[unmerged(5110)]

Originally posted by rafiki
Perhaps it should be changed so that taking losses in the field makes you loose people in your soldier POPS?

That way, if you take large losses in the field and wish to have the manpower to replace them, you'll need to start converting your other POPs to soldiers to cover the losses, which seems a reasonable consequence to me.

Rafiki

AFAIK this happens.

 

[Syt]

Originally posted by XieChengnuo
AFAIK this happens.

Not (yet?).

 

[unmerged(12885)]

The solution to the massive armies is simple and could be accomplished several different ways, but the rub is the effect this has on the AI.

I think these are different issues, although somewhat related.

I personally don't care about having ahistorical army sizes, or having units represent regiments instead of divisions or what have you.

On the other hand representing the effect combat casualties is another issue entirely.

A long drawn out war of attrition with hundereds of thousands to millions of deaths should result in serious damage to your economy. Further, massive casualties on a global scale should have a devestating effect on the world market, as demand for all common goods drops significantly.

Further, the need for manpower to replace losses during a long hard war should result in significantly reduced industrial output.

There is a relationship between the two - if army sizes are too large, but the effects of combat casualties are properly modeled then wars will be TOO devestating to a nations economy. As it is, with regenerating 'manpower' it seems like the effects of ahistorically large losses are offset by softening the effect.

On the other hand, thinking through this further an easier solution comes to mind:

Stop having manpower regenerate.

This would effectively be the same as having troop count come directly from soldier pops, and would not require a change to underlying game mechanics.

On the other hand, since I don't have the game, I don't know what effects this would have on the rest of the game. Plus I'm not sure if the AI as is would be able to cope with the change - if it depends on the regeneration of manpower, or if it has the ability to convert peasants to soldier pops should the need for manpower arise.

So it seems like the solution here is two fold:

Reduce the size of each unit by half (or more?). Reduce manpower and reinforcement costs by the same.

Stop manpower regeneration.


The AI still gets plenty of units to play with, and the system properly models the effects of combat casualties.

You as a player, faced with the prospect of taking of province that is defended by 100,000 troops then have a decision - is it worth the possibility of losing 50,000 workers to take it?

Raising that question alone is revolutionary for strategy games.

 

[Derek Pullem]

From an intellectual viewpoint I agree with you, Jack Frost. However after several long discussions with other betas and Evil Overlords (TM) I have come to realise that there is a flaw to manpower regeneration. And its the link from POP culture to division. With no manpower regeneration the logical conclusion is that reinforcements must be allocated. From where - which culture? Can we have mixed culture divisions? If we did - could the game and the player cope with the bookkeeping involved. Will we end up with divisions with 25% British, 15% Irish, 40% misc Indians and 20% Africans. Is this realistic?

The manpower mechaism is odd - although you could say that it reflects men wounded and returning to the colours. But micromanaging 500 units ethnic composition or producing polyglot divsions is also a problem.

The issue is whether battle casualties have a significant effect on a countries manpower / population and whether the player is ever forced to switch manpower from the factories to the forces. If this objective can be achieved then the regenerating manpower becomes less important IMHO

 

[Orm]

I may be wrong about this but it seems to me that combat losses are immediately put back into the manpower pool, correct?
If so, that should be removed, only disbanded troops should be returned to the pool. Then the number
[# of soldier POPs] - [# of deployed soldiers] - [# of soldiers in pool] should be enumerated and detracted from the soldier POPs, starting on the smallest of them.

I'm suffering from sleep depravation, so I probably missed something obvious to everyone else.

 

[Derek Pullem]

But not all Soldier POPs are the same - did you take casualties from your Swedes or were the bulk of the deaths from the Nowegian divisions. Thats why it gets complicated.

 

[OriginalRafiki]

Perhaps a mechanism so that when you re-inforce a unit, the re-inforcements are taken from that unit's home province and base culture.

This would require a mechanism for how you re-inforce when that pool is empty. Perhaps a sort of cascading list of priorities for where reinforcements are taken from:

- Home province, same culture
- Province in same state, same culture
- Province anywhere, same culture
- Same state, different culture
- Any province, any culture

With a morale/org penalty that increases the further you get down the list, informed via the nice tooltip that pops up on the reinforce button.

This works best for individual units; haven't quite thought through how it would work for larger armies.

Rafiki

 

[unmerged(18365)]

My 2 cents. Please forgive my poor English.
Current system of manpower and soldier POPs could bó described in following way. There is a special RGO called "military service", special farmer called "Soldier POP" assigned to this RGO could easily produce special raw material called "manpower" in order to resupply your army.
This raw material has only two differences from coal or iron-first, maximum amount of this material could be stored depends on total amount of your special farmers, and second-this raw material could not be baught/sold on the world market.
Please, correct me if i'm wrong, but this conscrpting model sounds a little bit cinical, and in addition this model causes serious doubts about realism of this game.

 

[OriginalRafiki]

SchultzR, what you describe is pretty much what the system is like now, other than that you don't have the soldier POPs working in RGOs, their contribution to manpower is implied.

Rafiki