Remove national force limit

Fuzzy2022 · Dec 10, 2020

The idea that a nation has a hard limit on how large its army can be without incurring penalties just doesn't seem like a satisfying game mechanic. Instead I think this limit should be within each general's army. This means that instead of having a global force limit each general would have their own force limit, representing their own ability to manage troops. The maximum number of troops that a general could manage would be directly attached to the combat width, and likely would need to double once cannons are introduced.

Some of the advantages here are:

The force limit is more realistic, being based on the amount of generals a country can use rather than the will of the gods saying that you have too many troops
Small countries have more chance to fight larger ones as they could build an army of similar size, but the economic burden would make it close to impossible to sustain
Mercs become more valuable as they no longer take up force limit while also remaining economically nonviable for small, poor countries
This allows for more flexibility with the generals, such as making colonial generals that have half the force limit, but are their own general pool (similar to how naval captains will be in the next update)

This also means that all of the force limit ideas would no longer work, but those could be replaced with increased number of generals, maybe at a conversion of 1 general per 10% force limit. Of course a penalty would need to be introduced if you have troops that don't have a general. I think that this could be done by having them cost increased maintenance similar to having troops over the force limit works now. And if the army gets too big for the general there should a penalty such as reduced drill gain and a scaling 10% less shock and fire damage at double the force limit. Of course you will likely never be above a general's force limit since it is tied to the combat width.

I'd love to hear what you guys think and if there are any potential problems I hadn't thought of.

drawar · Dec 11, 2020

The idea of eliminating this limit is not in itself bad especially with the changes for mercenaries.
However, I don't think what you are offering is better.

If we want to eliminate this “arbitrary” limit, it is rather on the manpower side that we must look. For example, if you have 30,000 manpower. This means that you can recruit up to 30 full regiments. The manpower of demobilized regiments returned to the manpower reserve.
This means that you cannot store manpower by creating permanent regiments in advance to allow your manpower to rebuild before a war.

If you fully mobilize your manpower capacity in a regiment, it means that you will not have manpower reserves to cover the losses suffered by the regiments, but you can always merge incomplete regiments to remake complete regiments.

Finally, we could also possibly put penalties according to the percentage of manpower mobilized in regiments or killed.
Maybe also to put options to increase its maximum level of manpower and/or its reconstitution speed, but with consequences/costs.

Note also that this could also make it possible to link the garrisons of forts to the manpower, or even to make garrisons of regiments stationed in a fort.

With a few small changes (siege, fort), it could do some cool things or also a new gameplay for small empires that could literally play more defensive. Finally, the great emires too, although they could well decide to have a more defensive front and another more offensive.

Fuzzy2022 · Dec 11, 2020

This is an interesting idea, but I feel like it is straying a bit far from what the game is now. Doing something like this would force a rework of manpower, force limit, ideas, and potentially other combat areas. This also links the size of an army strongly with development and less so with cost, I cant say I know much of how the creation and removal of armies work at this time, but I'm not sure this type of a rework makes much sense. All the same I appreciate the input!

drawar · Dec 11, 2020

You can always use a mercenary to have more troops, which can give a certain advantage for the "small" rich empires or if you get into debt (especially if you can repay yourself with the peace treaty).
Commercial empires can be quite wealthy, but few provinces, or with great autonomy, would be more dependent on mercenaries.

We can also imagine ways to recruit advantages depending on military points for example, but by negatively affecting the targeted provinces or via penalties affecting the empire overall, or by giving privileges to orders.
The most important thing would be that vassals could provide manpower to their overlord.

After that, it is normal that great empires can more easily mobilize more soldiers.

But this idea would also negatively affect great empires. Indeed, those can store a lot of manpower by mobilizing as many regiments as possible and then let their manpower regenerate.
There, whether you mobilize permanently, just before or during a war, the result for manpower will be the same.