Should larger armies be slower?

[Metz]

Question in the title.

Would it make sense to have large armies be slower due to logistical and organizational reasons?

Also should encircled armies not be able to reinforce? Meaning that a port is needed or a connected land mass is needed so that an army can replenish.

 

[I_am_Nemo]

From a realism perspective, certainly. From a gameplay perspective, that opens some interesting possibilities, especially the supply line to reinforce aspect, that I'd love to see included.

However, I suspect that making the AI able to cope with that same supply aspect would be a greater challenge than EU4 has the resources to meet. If I recall correctly, the AI's difficulty in handling attrition is the reason we have capped attrition. Have to think this would be even worse, and probably not worth the resources, even if those resources did exist.

Maybe in EU5, when/if that happens. . .

 

[Metz]

Can the AI not be able to calculate supply limits in a province and split its armies to transverse them and then remerge when on a larger supply province?

If an enemy army is within x amount of tiles then the AI shouldn't split up.

 

[Bouchart]

Armies already take forever to move from one place to another in the larger provinces in Central Asia and Scandinavia.

 

[Quaade]

yes... however... think supply should be changed so it doesn´t favour the defender as much... But adjacent tiles gather together and suffer from having even 2 opposing armies just sitting together... As in... even defender will suffer from lack of supply when enemy army is taking supply from nearby provinces

 

[bbqftw]

Can you imagine what sort of disaster coding this would cause in conjunction with all the bugginess that already exist with merging armies?

Expect a chain merging army to get infinite travel time or something equally messed up..

 

[deathbypie]

Yes, but not in this game..

 

[Steel_atlas]

I dunno supposedly attrition used to be realistic but the ai couldn’t handle it and I wonder if this would fall in the same category

 

[tnlyons]

Maybe some armies; but you have plenty of examples throughout history of massive armies covering large swaths of land. So more than army size, speed should be tied to army drill.

 

[iquabakaner]

From a gameplay perspective, players would just end up splitting armies into 1 unit each to move faster.

 

[Quaade]

From a gameplay perspective, players would just end up splitting armies into 1 unit each to move faster.

could make splits and merging "disorganized"

 

[TheAzureLiger]

Maybe some armies; but you have plenty of examples throughout history of massive armies covering large swaths of land. So more than army size speed should be tied to army drill.

It already is right? Like to get the full 1.0 movement speed from before you need to have drill.

 

[tnlyons]

It already is right? Like to get the full 1.0 movement speed from before you need to have drill.

Yes I believe so.

 

[Quaade]

It already is right? Like to get the full 1.0 movement speed from before you need to have drill.

I think it technically can go to 0.9 now, compared to before the change... But haven´t seen the details on whether you get movement speed later on aswell... horde gets it free so I think they can get up to 110 or 120 depending on me remembering right... however, horde will likely not drill that much anyway

 

[CosmicChronos]

Attrition and supply limits feel like the most ideal ways to calculate movement speed, because if the supply limit of a province is say 50, then a army of around 30k should be able to move at the same speed as one of 10k; the number of troops would probably not slow down armies, since they would all still march at the same speed as smaller ones. The only thing I could think of then is that there is a difference in time between the beginning and end of a column depending on the size. Including movement speed bonuses into Professionalism would be quite realistic too, as better trained soldiers would probably better endure walking for hours upon hours.