Some easy questions

[notger.heinz]

As a beginner in Vicky/Ricky, there are some things that neither manual nor wiki answers:

1. What are the benefits of occupying an enemys capital, apart from 20% additional warscore?
(I somewhere read, it stops him from deploying/reinforcing troops. Is that right?)

2. AI countries keep building infantry divisions like mad. Don't they ever demobilize? If not, how big is your typical standing army? (Are 40 divisions as Britain too small?)

3. Do you prefer a large standing army or a large manpower pool to reinforce more often?

4. As Britain, when I convert a british farmer pop into a soldier pop, it allows me to build british troops. When I afterwards immeditately demobilize the farmer pop, I gain british troops supplied by indian manpower. Is this an exploit or is there a hidden string attached?

5. Does the Americal Civil War event fire in every game? Or the other way round: What are the prerequisites to fire and when does it fire (v2.01)?
(Britain still has a bill to settle with them tea-dumpers. )

Thanks in advance for your answers
Notger.

 

[Kryzantine]

I'm new myself, but I'll try to answer your questions:

1. Apart from strategic advantage and warscore, not that I know of. I don't think it stop the enemy deploying troops, however, they can simply deploy any province they control.

2. My typical standing army depends on my country, but I tend to keep it around 7% of my population. You could, BTW, see that on the population overview sheet.

3. I prefer a mixture: 5/7 of my soldiers get turned into my standing army and that keeps enough manpower to reinforce them if needed.

4. This one, I'm not qualified to answer. I'm a VIP person.

5. In VIP, it should fire no matter what. In vanilla Vicky, it still has a great chance of firing: the only prerequisite is that the Republicans win the election between 1854 (when they become active) and 1870. Since America has wealth voting rights, the Republicans are bound to win between that time frame: if not in the 1855 election, then the 1859 election for sure.

 

[OHgamer]

As a beginner in Vicky/Ricky, there are some things that neither manual nor wiki answers:

1. What are the benefits of occupying an enemys capital, apart from 20% additional warscore?
(I somewhere read, it stops him from deploying/reinforcing troops. Is that right?)

it also IIRC affects the ability of the nation to export products, especially from overseas colonies, as all products have to go to the capital first to be exported

2. AI countries keep building infantry divisions like mad. Don't they ever demobilize? If not, how big is your typical standing army? (Are 40 divisions as Britain too small?)

They rarely demobilize, they usually just keep maintenance down to ~10% so they'll have lots of 1000-2000 unit forces. Since military score is based solely on number of units, and not how completely deployed they are, a 1000 unit infantry provides the same score as a 10000 one.

3. Do you prefer a large standing army or a large manpower pool to reinforce more often?

Personally, I prefer a smaller standing army composed mainly of brigades units (esp artillery) and a large mobilization pool. Every time you expand your mob pool you add 4 points to your military score, and as the game engine calculates whether an AI nation should DoW you based in large part on relative balance of military scores, having a large reserve army can play a very good deterrent role.

4. As Britain, when I convert a british farmer pop into a soldier pop, it allows me to build british troops. When I afterwards immeditately demobilize the farmer pop, I gain british troops supplied by indian manpower. Is this an exploit or is there a hidden string attached?

Not an exploit, AI does it too. It's done to reduce the amount of number crunching that the game engine must do if it had to calculate where free manpower was to be calculated based on culture of the units. there is a set limit of new units you can build with each culture, but if you are below that limit you can build over the limit if you have the free manpower from other sources, and you can keep the units you do create fully staffed even if you are producing less than the needed manpower from one culture, with manpower from another. Again, it's done to reduce the number of statistics the game engine would have to collect each day for each nation about each solider POP in each culture. The game was developed in 2003 when processor speeds were much, much lower than today, so these kinds of data processing issues were important to ensure game speed could be kept tolerable.

5. Does the Americal Civil War event fire in every game? Or the other way round: What are the prerequisites to fire and when does it fire (v2.01)?
(Britain still has a bill to settle with them tea-dumpers. )

Thanks in advance for your answers
Notger.

Not 100% guaranteed, probably 90-95% of games will have it, but there is at least a 1:10 to 1:20 chance that it won't. Otherwise the game would be too predicatable and give too huge an advantage to the human player, so there needs to be a small degree of chance events like Civil War and Unification of Germany just do not begin.

 

[Eärendil]

1. What are the benefits of occupying an enemys capital, apart from 20% additional warscore?
(I somewhere read, it stops him from deploying/reinforcing troops. Is that right?)

It should prevent them from deploying their mobilized divisions. That's how it works for the player, but sometimes it seems like they can still do it anyway, I haven't done any proper testing on it though.

 

[notger.heinz]

7% of your population as soldiers sounds fine, but the AI tends to convert 25%!

 

[Pal]

It should prevent them from deploying their mobilized divisions. That's how it works for the player, but sometimes it seems like they can still do it anyway, I haven't done any proper testing on it though.

There´s an AAR ("The World is not enough") where a player gave 30 infantry divisions to the AI but it couldn´t deploy them because he had taken its capital. So it definately blocks deployment of forces out of your pool...

 

[unmerged(63310)]

There´s an AAR ("The World is not enough") where a player gave 30 infantry divisions to the AI but it couldn´t deploy them because he had taken its capital. So it definately blocks deployment of forces out of your pool...

It depends how it happens. In that AAR those units were shipped to the capitol and thus that capitol counts as home province in deploying and is why they weren't deployable. Same thing happens if you sell a territory with your army on it, it will ship back to your capitol and you won't be able to deploy if it's in enemy hands. However- the majority of units are tied to a home province and as long as that provinces is free you can deploy. If you are ever invaded and your reserves take awhile to deploy you will also notice that any with home provinces that are overrun can't be deployed until you capture those home provinces back. For most countries that is why some type of standing army is a necessity.