Q: Population effects of combat losses

[Derek Pullem]

Originally posted by rafiki
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

Now you see why its not as straight forward as everyone thinks

 

[Orm]

Originally posted by 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.

Since the manpower pool does not keep track of nationality, that would complicate it, yes. But my solution would remove what is most obviously wrong with the system now. The losses in the soldier POPs would be pretty much random when it comes to nationality, but then so are the replacements if the manpower pool is kept the way it is now.

 

[OriginalRafiki]

Originally posted by Derek Pullem
Now you see why its not as straight forward as everyone thinks

Hehe, if we were striving for straight-forward, we'd probably be playing Solitaire instead

Rafiki

 

[Derek Pullem]

Originally posted by beowulf
Since the manpower pool does not keep track of nationality, that would complicate it, yes. But my solution would remove what is most obviously wrong with the system now. The losses in the soldier POPs would be pretty much random when it comes to nationality, but then so are the replacements if the manpower pool is kept the way it is now.

Ultimately it's a game design thing - is it important to distinguish between cultures or are the nations homogenised when it comes to the army.

Not my call - Paradox's

 

[OriginalRafiki]

Okay, new thought, a bit simpler and therefore perhaps more implementable. It's been aired previously, so consider this a refresh/clean-up of it

Manpower represents what you have available in your soldier POPs. Whenever you use manpower, you deduct a number from your soldier POPs, evenly distributed among them, according to size. At some point you will no longer have any soldier POPs left, and you will have to start converting other POPs if you wish to keep on reinforcing your units.

When raising units, all manpower is taken from a soldier POP of that culture in the unit's home-province

This does:
- Make sure that your economy is affected by pro-longed wars of attrition.

This doesn't:
- Take into account that you might have larger losses in one culture cmpared to units of other cultures.
- Make sure that you need to provide your POPs (that now are in your units) with certain goods. However, this can be solved by increasing militancy in the general population if you don't supply your units properly with these goods.

That last one will change supply to be more that just £'s (which some people have asked for). Also, it might increase militancy differently according to where a POP is on the jingoism/pro-military/anti-military/pacifism-scale.

Rafiki

 

[unmerged(12885)]

stopping manpower gain has exactly the same end result as recruiting directly from pop. Only it doesn't change game mechanics (so would require no change in code, only a change of the 'manpower growth rate' to zero). Which is why I advocate that.


Now onto ethnicities, I don't know if I believe the answer presented for not having manpower regenerate. As it stands now does the current manpower pool have anything to do with ethnicity?

Lets say I have a small number of british soldier pops, but I change a ton of indian pops to soldiers. The ratio of indian to british manpower to indian manpower is 1:9 (1 british soldier per 9 indians).

I start raising a massive army of british soldiers. Go to some big war, I keep reinforcing my soldiers. This brings manpower down to zero, but I keep reinforcing.

The manpower itself at this point is 90% indian manpower. But the unit I'm reinforcing is 100% british.

Does the game tell me that even though I have 150 manpower I cannot reinforce because even though I have 150 manpower, its all indian, but the divisions I'm reinforcing is british?

I'm guessing no.

Which means the current system doesn't model ethnicity in reinforcements either.

 

[Dievs]

I would suggest tagging the soldier POP's themselves, if that is possible.

When raising a division, mark 10,000 of a soldier POP in it's home province/nationality as used.
When reinforcing, mark the number of replacements in the same place.
If 100% of the soldiers are used, then no new troops.

It does seem rather straightforward to me.

 

[unmerged(9214)]

Originally posted by Jack Frost
(clip)
The manpower itself at this point is 90% indian manpower. But the unit I'm reinforcing is 100% british.(clip)

Is it so that one could build large amounts of ethnically English divisions in peacetime, let the army maintenece go down and then reinforce the army to full strength with indian troopers and still keep the good attributes of English divisions?

 

[Derek Pullem]

I'm sure it won't surprise any of you that these arguments have been presented for and against in betaland already.

But as:

1) I need to get back to work
2) I have to test the latest beta
3) They made me Vicky bug forum mod

I'll have to let you carry on this on yourselves. The issue is not being ignored in beta - just we can't tell which ideas get tested first (NDA) as when the patch comes out Paradox's decision is final. If there were 10 diferent ideas tried, each one would have some supporters and lead to pointless discussions AFTER the event.

Of course discussions like this BEFORE the event are very helpful to Paradox and the betas. We just can't promise anything.

 

[Orm]

Keeping track of culture would complicate it too much IMHO.

A great problem is mobilization... it seems to me that when you mobilize, soldier POPs are created from workers starting in your lowest numbered province (I assume). When I mobilized 70 divisions as Sweden they all had the same home province. If losses to soldier POPs are implemented that has to be changed too or it will lead to disaster.

Is that being looked at for the patches too? Mobilization has to be changed to randomly taking POPs from the provinces or something like that.

Originally posted by Energizer
Is it so that one could build large amounts of ethnically English divisions in peacetime, let the army maintenece go down and then reinforce the army to full strength with indian troopers and still keep the good attributes of English divisions?

If you have 9000 indian soldier POPs and 1000 english, you can build a complete division in the home province of the english POP, go out and take 90% losses and then immediately reinforce it to full strength. The division will still be english.

 

[Dievs]

So, what I would propose is having the existing manpower calculations, but keeping all this information for each province or state that has soldier POP's, and for each nationality separately.

Thus, you can run out of Canadian troops but still have some in England or India; The soldier POP's can't do anything useful until their boys have returned home, and there should be no exploits of foreign manpower.

 

[unmerged(576)]

Slighlty related, although perhaps already answered somewhere in the depths of this forum, but when the army is decommissioned do the soldiers return to the labour force and, more importantly, is the problem unemployment modelled? I ask this because again, like the effects of casualties on the labour force, the return of soldiers from the front also caused huge economic problems and thus political ones.

 

[unmerged(12885)]

Interesting. Aside from memories of "Born on the 4th of July" with Tom Cruise, I can't think of any examples of this. I don't doubt at all you are correct, but could you give some examples of what large scale negative effects this had and why? I love trying to figure out how to model this stuff


As a side - maybe if manpower was divided:

National, Colonial, Native.

So a colonial division can only reinforce from colonial manpower, etc.

It isn't a perfect model of ethnicity, but its easy for the player to manage, and could be easily displayed in the ui (100:10:0 next to the manpower icon).

I still think the answer to this is to not have manpower regenerate. The rest of the effects then happen naturally, and are not an additional burden on playability.

 

[Dievs]

Anyway, the manpower regeneration should be so that the losses fully recover in 40 years or something.
If you need half of the whole game time to recover, then it's quite appropriate.

 

[Powerslave]

I see several flaws with the current system. many are being addressed here.

First I really do think that manpower in whatever system it uses do need to be seperated by culture. Has annyone raised anything else than state nationality troops? For example playing Britain you need 1 small soldier pop in England while the rest of your soldier pops is from your indian provinces where you can't build any factories anyway. Then you use this poor small soldier pop to create a couple of million soldiers.

Secondly there is also a problem with the current system that MP is generated on a linear scale of the pops that are soldiers while workforce efficiency is not. Usually when I start a new game I change the biggest pop(s) I have to soldiers and free up more small soldier pops for use as my workforce. This also applies to officers. This way I do not only get much larger MP output but also a higher income.

Well trirdly MP regeneration itself should also be looked over. Perhaps Jack Frost has the perfect solution no MP at all.

Anyway I wouldn't expect to much. Alot of things has to be balanced and the AI needs to be able to use whatever system that is being at work efficiently which the AI is quite good at now.

Until a patch comes along and make things better I'm gonna make me some house rules.

 

[unmerged(12885)]

More thinking on the subject:

removing regeneration would also fix the negative manpower problem.

As has been reported all over the boards, as the game starts most countries have negative manpower. This is a side effect of having manpower regenerate, as a country has more deployed units then solider population.

 

[Dievs]

Originally posted by Jack Frost
More thinking on the subject:

removing regeneration would also fix the negative manpower problem.

As has been reported all over the boards, as the game starts most countries have negative manpower. This is a side effect of having manpower regenerate, as a country has more deployed units then solider population.

I disagree - in that case the units are created magically in the scenario file, breaking the usual constraints - manpower regeneration is not a factor.

 

[unmerged(6105)]

If not anyone have dsiputed this yet I can say that soilder POPs DO lose men when your men on the field die. Currently (1.1) they lose 1/10 of the losses, which was what I where to suggest.

 

[Spruce]

Originally posted by Jkris
If not anyone have dsiputed this yet I can say that soilder POPs DO lose men when your men on the field die. Currently (1.1) they lose 1/10 of the losses, which was what I where to suggest.

well should be somewhat higher, perhaps a ratio of 1/4. I can imagine they mean the injured ones that will live are wounded - can you still treat them as labourers or farmers?

 

[unmerged(12680)]

Originally posted by Powerslave
Secondly there is also a problem with the current system that MP is generated on a linear scale of the pops that are soldiers while workforce efficiency is not. Usually when I start a new game I change the biggest pop(s) I have to soldiers and free up more small soldier pops for use as my workforce. This also applies to officers. This way I do not only get much larger MP output but also a higher income.

POPs size doesn't effect factory/RGO output?? I was completly sure it did...

Originally posted by whyamihere
Slighlty related, although perhaps already answered somewhere in the depths of this forum, but when the army is decommissioned do the soldiers return to the labour force and, more importantly, is the problem unemployment modelled? I ask this because again, like the effects of casualties on the labour force, the return of soldiers from the front also caused huge economic problems and thus political ones.

As Soldier POPs never work anyhow, I doubt that this is modeled. The Soldiers would simply go back to not working. Veteran pensions for everyone!