The Tactics of winning battles

[Pellaken]

So I posted this thread earlier
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?740933-How-to-win-wars
and got a lot of really good responses. Some included...

Some factors:

• If you only have one good leader, consider making one good stack and trying to use that as much as possible.
• Don't waste troops on a leaderless or very-poor leader stack.

[*]Terrain - keep an eye on the terrain for each province. Attack only when favourable. If need be, wait to be attacked.

• An attacker can get up to a -4 penalty, if he attacks into mountains which also have a river crossing.
• Don't even consider doing this unless you heavily outnumber the enemy, and have good morale and good leader.
• You can often bait the AI into attacking you when the terrain is against him. Manoeuvre a stack to avoid the enemy and end up sieging one of their mountain provinces. Leave it there. Either you win the siege, and get WS, or else he comes attacks you, and you massacre him even when other factors are against you.

[*]Battle management / rotating stacks

• Consider making two stacks, and rotating them in battle.
• Attack the enemy with stack 1. Keep a close eye on the battle.
• Before morale reaches 50%, move your second stack into the battle as well.
• As soon as it arrives, move your first stack out again.
• Repeat once the first stack has regained morale.
• Keep an eye out for other enemy stacks that could engage your backup stack, especially if you can't give it a good leader.

[/LIST]

Battles
- Battle defensively only. Whoever starts the attack "usually" gets hit with an attack penalty.
- When war breaks out simply get your stacks and don't carpet siege but simply stand there sieging a close group of enemy provinces and wait.
- Let them mess around (even if they're carpet sieging you) and do whatever they want and eventually they're create a big stack and attack one of your stacks.
- Once they attack, jump into the battle with your other neighboring stack(s). Remember, you're not trying to conquer territories at this point, you want to kill off their manpower. With the attack penalty + troop count, you should win the battle.
- Then rinse and repeat. Do this until you're confident that you've widdled down most of their major stacks then go on the "wipe them out" offensive, only initiating battles if you have a huge troop count advantage. If not, go back to doing the siege/wait routine.
- Once you've actually wiped most of their major stacks, only then should you start carpet sieging to win the war.
- Don't carpet siege using the button to "break off a piece of stack for the siege". Do it using the "split stack in half" button. This avoids getting the cavalry ratio penalty and decreasing your fighting power. I usually only split in half ONCE, it lets me siege twice the provinces while still keeping my troops very safe. If I know I can cover 100% of their provinces, I'll split more times.
- Always keep your troops sieging nearby one another and always make jumping into any new defensive (aka, attack penalty for them) battles that pop up a priority above completing the siege.
- Try to siege the war leader's weak allies first and make separate treaties with each one, save the war leader for last. This gets your max rewards.
- Keep your stability up to +1 and kill off War Exhaustion whenever you can, however, try to be super stingy with Diplo power during a war (aka, don't buy Diplo techs and ideas that come up until after the war). You need this for negotiating.

3. Bait by figuring out travel times from province to province and tricking the AI into attacking a small force that a larger one can respond to rapidly. Pin them into battle then pounce.

Rather than narrow down the war topic, I'm curious if anyone else has tactical tips?

 

[unmerged(465279)]

You should put 'How to' in the title so people can find this on search engines.

 

[axzhang]

Posted the following in that thread too:

No one added using mercs. Especially as Burgundy (and pretty much as any decently sized country), I use mercs well into the 1600s. Use only infantry though to cover your combat width.

Infantry mercs are for dying and not impacting your most precious resource, manpower. Use your regular troops in cav/artillery to inflict the majority of damage.

Also a general tip - if manpower is scarce, click on the "consolidate" regiments button in your army. Non-full strength armies have severe penalties that will make you lose the battle.

 

[Van Tuber]

You want to keep in mind how your army will line up compared to the enemy, particularly in the early game when cavalry destroys infantry. For instance if you greatly outnumber the enemy you will end up with your infantry lined up against cavalry which is less than optimal. Instead attack first with an army that so that you counter the enemy cavalry with your own as best you can, with the rest of your forces arriving soon after. (When fighting different tech groups this may not be completely doable while keeping combined arms bonus). As I've mentioned, this becomes less important later in the game.

 

[Contiguous]

Battle defensively only. Whoever starts the attack "usually" gets hit with an attack penalty.

Hold on - don't attackers get a morale bonus?

 

[xyra]

i heard its a .5 morale bonus vs up to -4 pips... pips win

edit. not enough information:

a high tech infantry has about 60 total pips.
the -4 applies to offense-shock, defense-shock, offense, fire and defense fire -> 16 pips total
so defendending in moints with a river makes up for 1/4 of the pips a unit has.

Another Edit..
that means if the defender forgot to upgrade his techlvl26 mercs as he reach techlevel 30, fighting against another techlevl 30 army, the armies would be equally strong beside the morale difference. in the beginning of the game the techlevel difference gets larger: 1 vs 19, again not counting the difference in morale