I interpret it as professional being a soldier for life while conscript is a peasant taken off the fields. You can train a peasant, but no matter how much you train them, at the end of the day, it's still just a peasant, waiting to go back to their farm - they are fundamentally not soldiers. Likewise, a badly trained soldier for life is still someone who chose to be a soldier and is equipped for all that entails. Professionalism is the overall level of training your troops get, while this would represent their backgrounds. (of course, the sum total of my exposure to AP is one multiplayer game with a buddy which didn't make it past the 1400s due to time constraints, so...)Well, I always though, that drilling armies and getting "professionalism" essentially transforms my army from a "conscript" army into a "professional" army. So in this perspective having distinct units that are "conscript" vs units that are "professionals" doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe I don't quite understand what "conscript" shall mean?
You could but it would be a huge change, probably beyond what the devs would be willing to do without just declaring EU5 (hopefully not, but probably). Most wars were financed by going into debt at least somewhat owing to the scale of the armies and the fact that peasants marching in battle lines were not peasants generating wealth. If you combine a few features:Unfortunately I don't believe EU4's fundamental design is compatible with a way of implementing limited warfare that doesn't involve RP, limiting transport capacity, or punishing the player. The middle is the softest and most sensible limitation, and so I believe it's the best.
- that organic swelling and contraction of your forces to resemble wartime spending vs peacetime security, as discussed. Possibly having statewide manpower pools that are connected to the prosperity of a state in order to help simulate that.
- downside of course then being you may have to track where each conscript regiment came from (which might be taxing as hell on the computational speed)
- higher overall troop costs (to incentivise not expanding them where possible or minimizing the expansion where necessary)
- elaborate on the borrowing mechanic (loans didn't just come out of thin air, they came from people, often the nobility - the Austrian Habsburgs borrowed from the Fuggers, the Bourbon dynasty from their court, etc) so that you are borrowing from a certain family in your court, not just from some abstract Bank of Planet.
Once upon a time I had a proposal (on reddit, not these forums) for a supply system where supply was determined by region based on the amount of food goods in the region (grain/fish/salt/etc provinces, the more production there was, the more supply there was) but I was informed that supply was not really a thing in this time period, and that most armies ate what they found as they went. Was that not true? And if it was true, why would a central supply chain slider make sense?I still think that this would be better represented as two different sliders: One for Army Maintenance like ammunition, uniforms, guns, shoes etc. with a second slider for logistics like food, water, blankets, tents, what this translates to is army maintenance affects the troops as it does now, and the logistics maintenance affects your supply limit in various provinces, and will scale with distance from the capital.
Edit: forgot to say but also, I see what you were getting at, GrandHistorian, about doctrines. I was placing the scope a little bit high. Playing up different parts of the army (and navy, I hope! You should definitely have naval or even amphibious doctrines) at the expense of the others, instead of how the army overall works.
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I'm not sold, I never really saw payment as an abstraction, more as a literal "we are not paying you as much and thus your willingness to fight for us is much lower". Which doesn't really gel with that solution, and for that matter not really with the "payment set to 200%" concept, since...I mean, maybe up to a point they're willing to fight harder, but that probably stops at like 125% tops instead of 200%. No amount of money is going to save your 8k stack against 30 or 40 thousand soldiers. I imagine just constant war exhaustion gain over time from not disbanding down to a threshold of conscripts, and the more you go over that by, the greater constant WE gain you incur? Maybe?Good catch. Maybe have individual armies be able to be mothballed? Clears out the manpower of conscripted units but you don't have to pay maintenance for them (professional units are, naturally, unaffected)?
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