The Potsdam Guards saw action in the Seven Years' War. It was not nearly a division-sized unit, but the concept lay there.NitrateCupcake said:
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
as i said wilhelm invented the concept of it, but napoleon shaped it developed it and put it to use.
fj44 said:Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia started it, not Napoleon. Just a minor historical footnote.
There were guards units long before Friedrich Wilhelm, he was just famous for being obsessive about his guards (including recruiting by any means necessary especially tall men, so that they were sometimes referred to as the "Potsdam Giants").
In the British Army for instance the Coldstream Guards go back to 1650, and many other armies had guards units before this.
The origin of the term is in guard units for the sovereign (eg Praetorian Guard in Rome or Varangian Guard in later Byzantine times), but it became a term for elite units, which were then used for key attacks, etc.
Napoleon used his Imperial Guard units as a combined group, which was unusual (before and after). He also had an usually high proportion of his French troops in the Guards (though he usually had many other allied troops as well).
In Victoria:
a) there is no combined arms effect
b) there is no soft/hard split, all unit are soft in HOI terms
c) there is no stacking penalty for land units (though there is a penalty for ships, which limits effective fleet size to about 30 ships)
d) the defence is greatly enhanced over the course of the game - entrenchment levels can reach as high as 140% (high army tech, plus engineers) plus fort levels and terrain bonuses. Attacking such highly entrenched troops is extremely difficult [Think WW1 trench warfare]
e) the time scale is longer, so the strength of the economy and its ability to support the troops is more important - maintenance cost includes supply requirement in HOI terms.
f) units are linked to the underlying soldier populations which provide their men - losses in the unit are reflected in the population
g) you can increase available manpower rapidly by converting pops into soldiers (though subject to limitations depending on government policy in V:R, eg pacifist can't do this, you need full citizenship policies to convert non-national pops, etc)
h) ability of troops change very significantly between 1836 and 1935 as more advanced techs are developed - these flow directly to existing troops without need to overt upgrading
i) brigades are included when units are created (only) - like HOI1 not HoI2/DD
Army design depends on circumstances - especially available manpower and budget. Native quality troops are extremely cost effective in terms of fighting ability per maintenance cost (1/10 maintenance cost of regulars), though they have the same establishment cost and have lower reliability and higher attrition losses.
I typically would only include artillery or tank brigaded divisions in armies with high proportion of that arm - they slow down the whole army a lot. You do want tanks if you really have to attack a well entrenched enemy though.
- 1
Huh?Shapirus said:
You were already told:
Vanilla infantry if you have absolutely no cash (not recommended for anyone) and need a large number of divisions to cover a large area (to act as militancy-reducers) and inflate military score.
Infantry-Guards for most efficient firepower per buck.
Infantry-Artillery if you are extremely strained for manpower and have obscene income. Though I would prefer using more guards to lower the causalties (atrittion causalties do not kill off pops!). Though it is good to have some to break through fortresses (Artillery reduces fortifications over time).
Infantry-Tanks for most shock. Uncivilized run away on sight. Against modern armies, useful only in large numbers (late game morale easily soaks shock from a few tanks) or as an addition to Infantry-Guard stacks against well-entrenched opponents.
Infantry-Engineers as a 1-division addition to every stack that will carry defensive battles due to their entrenchment bonus (especialy important early on).
Cavalry-hussars as "special" troops to arrive in provinces with favorable terrain and hold them till infantry force comes (so that is also is considered a defensive force) after which they GET THE HELL OUT of combat.
It seems there are some problems to get my point maybe because of my lack of english skill, but anyways I'd like to thank you all.
XD Can we call it 'toxic gas cloud' and abbreviate it to tgc?
Generally, I've been lost to playing Victoria over the second game. So I kind of get that pops come out of somewhere in the 5,000,000 total(taking Sweden by 1850 as an example) and then I have to place other "workers" into soldier roles?
It seems backwards, currently I can't figure out how to get out of -1 and -2 manpower as Sweden. I can't even replenish the ones I started with. Sweden needs kanon for music, so I tried disbanding and rebuilding them with artillery brigades, unless I can add and remove those brigades somehow, but I got no manpower back.
Cheats also don't fire, I tried 'money' and 'manpower' yet received none.
Manpower is essentially all your POPs in soldier class (as you alluded to, you can convert farmers, laborers, etc to soldiers by clicking on them and paying the costs), with your military spending in the budget as a multiplier, in a pool.
If you have negative manpower, it most likely means that you are not spending enough on that multiplier line item in the budget, but if you increase it, it should slowly grow every month (if you're able to! Some parties restrict the slider, pacifists especially).
I forget how the money cheat works, but the manpower one only boosts your pool to your current possible maximum, based on the rules above (the cheat is essentially that you get your max attainable manpower immediately instead of in 6 months).
If it's still negative even after the cheat, it means that you're not spending enough in the budget!