Nice text, but how many sieges we see lifted because attrition, lack of money and/or supplies in this game? A 30k army can't forage the same area for an entire year.
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The game doesn't model that.
See my post above. The game doesn't care where you are, it uses your manpower and nothing else.
Even in that game: I war Ming now, have 0 manpower. Surely it would make sense to recruit local Mongols and Manchu from the occupied Ming provinces? But no, the game doesn't know it, each month it scavenges manpower from my provinces which are occupied by Ming.
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Lol. Utter bs then?
What Cato says is irrelevant, there are more than enough books treating the subject, and it's not only about the Romans, for example there were antique versions of the Suez channel that were built because of supply issues. Try this. The logistics of the roman army at war, Jonathan Roth.
True and I've got nothing to add here....
...just a reference to the prussian siege of Olomouc in 1758, which couldn't be sustained as a supply convoy of over 300 carts with amunition and food stretching over 40 km, was captured by enemy austrian troops.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belagerung_von_Olmütz
Oh, yeah, I've forgot: there weren't any supply sysrems in the EUIV era....
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Lol. Utter bs then?
Try this. The logistics of the roman army at war, Jonathan Roth.
I prefer Supplying War: From Wallenstein to Patton by van Creveld as that was the most approachable of my required readings at MCWAR on the topic and covers the actual logistical issues faced by armies in the EUIV era.
Your own source places the upper limit for Roman overland supply at 320 km (200 miles) - on roads, to a fixed siege, without needing to keep up with armies. For an army on the march, he supplies no examples of continuous supply from the rear; his grain calculations make it impossible for wagon logistics to match the army advance rate and they get worse if forage is used.
Engel's does a far better job on the numbers and frankly the Roman Army is about the worst classical example for EUIV warfare. Rome was filthy rich on a relative scale, even compared to her peers, on a scale not seen until after the EUIV period. When drawing on the better part of a millennium, we have a few examples of local supply lines for distances always below those found in many EUIV provinces.
Regardless, I suggest we look at the actual campaigns of the EUIV era. We have actual foraging orders from Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Murad II, Babur, Marlborough, Washington, Montcalm, etc. We have orders for the British attempt to supply their American Army from the homeland, and we have reports of how miserably the premier shiping power of the late 18th century fared tried to create continuous supply lines centered on two of the best harbors in the world at that time.
So? Historically, what we had was armies increasing in effective fighting power when they were half a world away from their manpower pools. Being able to do that when cut off from the home territories is how it should work.
Frankly, I view "manpower" just like I view "monarch points" - as an ahistorical kludge to make the game interesting. I see nothing added to the game by making manpower contingent on provinces being occupied or not. The AI cannot even handle naval attrition currently; making it so the AI has to calculate path dependent resupply systems is asking for the AI to get even wonkier in wars.
How should AIs decide when to dogpile? Say the Turks are crushing the Mamelukes, when should Ethiopia attack? Tripoli has overrun a border fort in the West so much of the North African manpower base is locked away. The Ottomans have occupied Gaza and cut off the Levant. Only the Nile river can supply new manpower so if Ethiopia strikes now, the Mamelukes are finished ... except suddenly a Polish/Austrian alliance declares on Turkey and marches through the Balkans. White peace by the enemies and now the Mameluke combat potential quadruples over night.
When should AIs peace out? If I am England vs France and I break their doomstack once, and then offload 1K armies onto every province I can reach by fleet access and spamming MA; should France calculate manpower based on removing the carpet sieges or based on the manpower it can currently access?
This is the real problem for you - historical wars were not fought about manpower denial. This is an era of maneuver, political pressure, and limited warfare. Your proposed change makes attrition the dominant strategy easily. EUIV is already biased far too heavily towards attrition and total war, let's not make the optimal strategies tilt further in that direction. Historical wars were decided by capturing politically salient fortresses and not pursing wars of annihilation; let's try building the engine to reflect that.
True and I've got nothing to add here....
...just a reference to the prussian siege of Olomouc in 1758, which couldn't be sustained as a supply train of over 300 carts with amunition and food stretching over 40 km, was captured by enemy austrian troops.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belagerung_von_Olmütz
Oh, yeah, I've forgot: there weren't any supply trains in the EUIV era....
Not for marching armies, no. We have a few dozen examples for sieges receiving supply convoys - not supply lines as understood in military science. Most of them were ruinously expensive and typically required detaching a huge portion of the army to defend them. They were used to sustain sieges after forage became impossible.
The whole point of a "supply line" is that its continuity matters and even temporary disruption causes significant hardship (e.g. Rommel in North Africa). Sending out a single convoy does not create a supply line. If the line is cut behind the convoy, it changes operations not at all. If the sending province is besieged, it again does not change the setup.
HOI4 AI manages, more or less.
In any case, I don't care as much about historical accuracy (in fact, I don't care at all for the most part) as for some consistency and common sense. Right now I am not a fan of the current system at all - maybe my thought is bad indeed as you say, but I don't like the current system.
For example, in the same game Russia attacked me and moved its 100k army to occupy me. What I do? I take my 50k stack, march with it from Pacific to Baltic and occupy every fort there. AI is like a blind kitten already, and lack of any confines is worse for it than for the player. Later I pwned Ming by doing about the same, but also spamming 1k units to occupy lands without forts.
When smaller Russian and Ming stacks approached, I just pwned them, regenerated, waited for another stack to come, repeat.
I'm confused.
Currently you dislike the fact that the AI can too easily be defeated by using ahistorical carpet siege units to deny the AI resources. Your solution is to make using these carpet siege units more effective at hurting the AI?
Take your Russia example. You lure the Russian army into the East. You then go for a carpet siege of his manpower pools while he is forced to keep his army concentrated (otherwise you will pounce with your 50K). Now his 100K takes attrition without reinforcement. With even 2% attrition on average you will outnumber him in about 3 years doing nothing else.
I just see this making incoherent AI strategy worse.
No, in my view moving 50k to St. Petersburg from Xilin Gol shouldn't be feasible in the first place. As well as sitting in Chinese mountains with it and watching Ming killing itself. My example was to illustrate how silly it is and how AI already can't handle any of it.
What I want is exactly to have some "limited warfare" as you said earlier. So that Russia doesn't attempt to carpet siege me and that I can't carpet siege it either with our entire armies.
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Why? Spain and Britain moved much further distances. Marlborough moved from The Netherlands to Wien across hostile territory.
Large marches in this era were routinely done with forage, bypassing forts, and were not viewed by the generals at the time as being range limited.
The reason we get carpet sieges in EUIV is because that is the most effective way to win the war. You can get no reward for holding some fort on the Amur. The AI does not even bother to calculate the cost of marching thousands of miles for the wars of its allies.
As always, the big problem is that the game has decided that peace must be hard to secure. You are going to have slog it out with heavy combat for years, you may as well go for a maximal peace. The truce timer, coalition, and AE systems all reinforce this. Making it harder to wage war, as expected by game theory, makes it more important to win each war and makes it that much more likely that Russia will need to carpet siege.
Also I looked up that Marlborough move. Do you really want to compare marching 400km in Western Europe with marching 5500 kilometres in Siberia and Russia, mostly through taiga?
That random Danish perma-claim in India is hilarious and I love it. I specifically waited for it to happen before tag-switching to Russia in my last northern game. <3
Britain, as noted went across the entire width of Europe in a single campaign. Spain had a few campaigns that went overland vast distances in South America. As well as marching their full forces across the Alps into the Netherlands. Napoleon left a reasonably well detailed plan for marching from Egypt to Delhi.
Yes.
If you cannot march the last hundred miles, you cannot march the first hundred either. I think the games representation of Siberia is abysmal and attrition would be murder high for large scale armies ... but mile marker 1000 is exactly as hard as mile marker 100.
Because let's be serious. Taiga is not going to have wagon transport - the trees are too dense to allow anything resembling cartage. You are stuck foraging. How did the Russians actually send troops through the taiga? Well records indicate that foraging was done. If you can forage for 100 miles, you can forage again for the next hundred. Once you start living off the land, you can keep doing it indefinitely.
So yes, when Napoleon drew up actual plans to march thousands of miles it wasn't crazy. And it was done at least twice. First to march from Suez to Mysore and then, when allied with Russia, to go through Southern Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Napoleon literally planned to send units from Paris to India. I would need an awful lot of evidence to say that Napoleon of all people was ignorant of logistical realities.
None of it is "much further distances". Spain would have to march all the way from Panama to Patagonia in order to merely get "further".
The conquest of Siberia was done by a very small number of people and very incrementally, yes - one fortress, another fortress, and so on.
I fail to see how it equals being able to move 100k back and forth through it. And that's the original point - traversing 5500 kilometres through Siberia with 100k army.
You seem to have lost the original point - I am not saying that it is impossible to move a great distance or that nobody ever done it. But "Napoleon planned it" or "England marched through Europe with it" or even "Gengis Khan sort of moved it nearby in the same direction" doesn't mean that it makes sense to casually walk huge armies through one of the most unfriendly regions on Earth.
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You are looking at a "solution" that doesn't address the fundamental problem - having a 100K army just sitting in any of those locations is utter nonsense.
Historically sending 100K soldiers into the first province past Perm should result in about half of them deserting and half of the rest dying from starvation. This was because the land had terrible supply to frontage ratios (which is why the Mongols liked using obscene amounts of frontage). Historically land could support a certain amount of military force per mile of frontage. This was highest in areas of dense settlement and higher in enemy lands (where you could forage more aggressively). The provinces of Siberia should be able to support extremely small forces only.
But they should support those forces the whole way through. Whatever the first block of taiga supports is the same that the last block of taiga supports.
Worse, sitting in one place, as EUIV often defaults to doing, was by far the hardest thing for an army to do. Nobody should be able to send 100K armies through Siberia. Nobody should even be stationing that many troops there. Once one army passes through it should take years to be able to pass through another.
So why not just make attrition sufficiently punishing to stop people from pressing through? Because the AI sucks at dealing with attrition. It has been exceedingly difficult for the AI to deal with the paltry attrition from sieges, let alone something that is an army killer. Path dependent problems are NP hard, solving them well has terrible scaling and Pdox is not going to have a hundred AIs able to come close to human satisficing with reasonable computational loads.
So in summary:
1. Your proposed change makes moving armies thousands of miles stronger.
2. It rewards attritionary warfare immensely.
3. It does not stop ahistorical use of Siberia.
4. It would make the AI easier to beat.
5. It would take a lot of computational and coding resources to implement.
The easy solution would be to just rework places like Siberia with some special mechanic that precludes moving armies through. But the powers that be have decided to ignore history so we can have fantasies like the 17th century Oregon Trail instead. The ahistorical army movements are simply inherent to the limitations of using provinces that model high density areas well to also model low density areas.
I think that the issue is not the good will of PDX or their willingness to implement new stuff into the game. We want a lot of things, but EU4 is limited by a 32 bit engine and the average client PC, so a lot of things need to wait until EU 5 and better average home computers.
Pdox has made a general decision with EUIV to ignore historical logistics in favor of expanding player engagement in various areas. The Great Lakes of Africa were impassable to the locals (who were after all slave traders) until the mid nineteenth century; one of the tribes did not even make contact with Portugal until the 1930s. The map includes vast swathes of uncolonized land that was simply impassable for every army of the era, even a number of the settled provinces would have been hard pressed to support 1000 soldiers on the march.
Pdox has decided that something other than historical logistics determines which provinces are PTI, uncolonized or colonized. As long as we allow such provinces to be "playable", we will always have a bunch of ahistorical things happening. Adding in ahistorical supply line limitations is not going to change that.