Time for a break from this game.

[Gustav91]

Never fight France between 1460-1680. Never attack a bigger stack. Never attack with regiments less than 800 men. Mercs are the ones that siege and take the losses. Cavalry is king of the battlefield. Artillery is the killer on the battlefield. Infantry is the wall of meat. Generals is everything.

 

[Sian]

AE and/or collaition handling have been tweaked in the last couple of patches, from being at the dangerlevel of a wet noodle to something a bit more competent. Nations no longer blindly join solely depending on their respective AE, but also from expectations on who else likely to join, so they appear less powerful than they should be until they passes a certain threshold.

While you could prehaps argue that they did make Collaitions a bit too lethal (I've seen getting giant 100k collaitions against a Brandenburg that took 2! provinces, one of them Neumark which they have core on, the other with claim), and might need a bit of further tweaking, specially within HRE (lowering the penalty for being discovered claiming from 7.5 baseline to 5 might help), they're certainly both more competent at it and in your case completely expected as it looks like you've thrown everything and the kichten sink at Europe.

Try for an example to read about some of the Holy League wars that happened in Italy surrounding 16th century, which are very collaitionesque

 

[ceteris.paribus]

Never fight France between 1460-1680. Never attack a bigger stack. Never attack with regiments less than 800 men. Mercs are the ones that siege and take the losses. Cavalry is king of the battlefield. Artillery is the killer on the battlefield. Infantry is the wall of meat. Generals is everything.

Are you kidding? That's the best time to take on and cripple and wipe France out. You don't want to deal with them after they have full offensive + defensive ideas and colonial nation bonuses to land force limits.

 

[Wizzington]

If your first reaction to a setback is to quit rather than finding a way to fix the problem, I honestly don't know what you want from the development team. If you just want an easier game, there's gameplay settings for that.

 

[Orkonkel]

If your first reaction to a setback is to quit rather than finding a way to fix the problem, I honestly don't know what you want from the development team. If you just want an easier game, there's gameplay settings for that.

I feel like people are not really reading my posts, but I guess I'll continue repeating myself:

My first reaction to a setback is to start over from square one, figure out what happened and why, and either circumvent or solve the problem the next time, particularly if I'm in the early stages of the problem. You're saying that you don't know what I want from the development team, so I guess I'll just say it one more time in case you missed it the first three-four-five times I already explained why I was frustrated. I'll even go into specifics for you:

• I don't want my 13,000 army with various bonuses (infantry combat ability, discipline) and a 100 tradition general get utterly destroyed by a peasant rebel stack of 16,000. Peasants were not well armed, nor well trained, nor disciplined. But for some reason, in Eu4 they are. People tell me I need to harsh treatment rebels -- I made a mistake thinking peasants were not trained in the arts of ninja, but I will not make the same mistake again.
  
• I don't want to go to war against Austria, Bohemia, and Salzburg to attempt to force a Personal Union only for a year to pass and see Lithuania, Denmark, and Aragon joining the enemy side. These were not allies to any of my enemies when the war started, and I could not possibly know they were going to get called into the war. In past versions of the game, alliances were not made during wars. Maybe consider changing the way that the 'enforce peace' option works to allow people outside of wars some interesting ways to stymie their rivals' growth.
  
• I would prefer to fight the computer on a grand strategy scale without feeling like I must sacrifice cows and goats to RNGesus before deciding battles. Seriously, dice rolls ranging from 1-6 and general pips from 0-4 would take a way a lot of the random early game issues where armies just get obliterated due to weird rolls. Increase dice range and general pips caps with military tech and/or ideas.

The way developers make the game harder is by piling bonuses on the AI nations and making rebels more dangerous than most foreign armies, at least in the early part of the game. Watching your manpower and gold drain against rebels is not engaging gameplay, it is just frustrating. My gripe with coalitions is apparently something that most people have no problem with. To be honest, I'd prefer coalitions being something started by one nation; the nation must decide a type of coalition (punitive, defensive, etcetera); and that nation can then invite other nations to join it as diplomatic actions. This creates a much more interesting political landscape. For example, your nation can be the target of multiple coalitions at the same time and in multiplayer, it will be possible to create far-reaching political schemes. Another thing that would make coalitions more interesting would be separate peaces. Basically, like normal wars, except each participant has the -30 penalty to peace deals for being in a coalition war. It would make coalitions less of an all-or-nothing and add another layer of dynamic warfare to the game.

But whatever.

I made this topic because I was frustrated with how much more punishing the early game was compared to the last time I played. And I guess it's easier dismissing people like that with 'lol switch the settings to easy' than contribute to a meaningful exchange about the issues they perceive, or even saying something like 'okay, you seem to have a problem with A and B, we made them like this for the following reasons.'

 

[Gustav91]

Are you kidding? That's the best time to take on and cripple and wipe France out. You don't want to deal with them after they have full offensive + defensive ideas and colonial nation bonuses to land force limits.

I find it waaaay easier when I'm top of the world. After 1460s they've set England into a chaos they'll get out of first 100yrs later, they've taken a nice chunk of Burgundy. Castille and Aragon has lost their manpower and Austria is damaged in HRE-wars.

This is my exprience but I'm hated by the RNG God.

 

[ceteris.paribus]

I feel like people are not really reading my posts, but I guess I'll continue repeating myself:

My first reaction to a setback is to start over from square one, figure out what happened and why, and either circumvent or solve the problem the next time, particularly if I'm in the early stages of the problem. You're saying that you don't know what I want from the development team, so I guess I'll just say it one more time in case you missed it the first three-four-five times I already explained why I was frustrated. I'll even go into specifics for you:

• I don't want my 13,000 army with various bonuses (infantry combat ability, discipline) and a 100 tradition general get utterly destroyed by a peasant rebel stack of 16,000. Peasants were not well armed, nor well trained, nor disciplined. But for some reason, in Eu4 they are. People tell me I need to harsh treatment rebels -- I made a mistake thinking peasants were not trained in the arts of ninja, but I will not make the same mistake again.
  
• I don't want to go to war against Austria, Bohemia, and Salzburg to attempt to force a Personal Union only for a year to pass and see Lithuania, Denmark, and Aragon joining the enemy side. These were not allies to any of my enemies when the war started, and I could not possibly know they were going to get called into the war. In past versions of the game, alliances were not made during wars. Maybe consider changing the way that the 'enforce peace' option works to allow people outside of wars some interesting ways to stymie their rivals' growth.
  
• I would prefer to fight the computer on a grand strategy scale without feeling like I must sacrifice cows and goats to RNGesus before deciding battles. Seriously, dice rolls ranging from 1-6 and general pips from 0-4 would take a way a lot of the random early game issues where armies just get obliterated due to weird rolls. Increase dice range and general pips caps with military tech and/or ideas.

The way developers make the game harder is by piling bonuses on the AI nations and making rebels more dangerous than most foreign armies, at least in the early part of the game. Watching your manpower and gold drain against rebels is not engaging gameplay, it is just frustrating. My gripe with coalitions is apparently something that most people have no problem with. To be honest, I'd prefer coalitions being something started by one nation; the nation must decide a type of coalition (punitive, defensive, etcetera); and that nation can then invite other nations to join it as diplomatic actions. This creates a much more interesting political landscape. For example, your nation can be the target of multiple coalitions at the same time and in multiplayer, it will be possible to create far-reaching political schemes. Another thing that would make coalitions more interesting would be separate peaces. Basically, like normal wars, except each participant has the -30 penalty to peace deals for being in a coalition war. It would make coalitions less of an all-or-nothing and add another layer of dynamic warfare to the game.

But whatever.

I made this topic because I was frustrated with how much more punishing the early game was compared to the last time I played. And I guess it's easier dismissing people like that with 'lol switch the settings to easy' than contribute to a meaningful exchange about the issues they perceive, or even saying something like 'okay, you seem to have a problem with A and B, we made them like this for the following reasons.'

You are being too sensitive about Wiz's response. Having the developers lower the difficulty of the game overall just so you can legitimately claim to WC Ironman on Hard setting isn't exactly a realistic request. In fact, it is a waste of their time when they could use that time to give us more content or work on a new game.

IMHO, if you are really looking to "relax" just sandbox your campaign by playing on non-ironman and use the console commands codes to change any undesired outcome. No one is judging. But if your are looking to legitimately dominate the game, you should open your mind more, read strats and watch videos. The learning curve for this game is relatively steep. Its just your lack of patience and your negative preference for time that is doing you in.

 

[TheGrouch91]

The way you describe the situation during your Austria/Bohemia escapade it seems that Bohemia the Emperor was allied to whoever joined the war. And the emperor can always call his allies in when defending the HRE. Thats neither a bug nor unreasonable. It is working as intended and makes sense since the emperor acts like HRE itself which is like a semi-nation. (for lack of a better word)

Also always restarting when something goes wrong probably wont help much since every game is so much different everytime. Unless it is a very specific move very early in the gme you wont have nearly the same circumstances again. Which is great. This enhances the replayability of the game and makes every new start interesting. Mistakes and problems arent entirely avoidable. Better learn to deal with them than restart every time. You wont learn shizzle like that.

Your issue with OP peasants is understandable tho. They seem unreasonably strong compared to trained soldiers. But you have to make them challenging somehow or else players would just ignore threats like peasants. Guess giving them huge stacks of poorly equipped troops would make more sense thematically but eh... in the end they're a thread and thats what they're there for.


Just do some trial and error and dont give up if everything isnt going as planned (it never does btw). Learn the mechanics. Pay attention to details. Again almost everything is explained somewhere. (even when hidden... UI is always a problem in such games) It is all a numbers game and in the end it is only so much as adding them together and decide whether it will be a good result or not. And just... relax. It is a game. Made a mistake? Well sh*t. Whatever deal with it.

 

[omega20056]

Coalitions and pulling allies into existing wars should probably be tech based unlocks that come about in the 1700s.

 

[Aard Vark]

I don't want to go to war against Austria, Bohemia, and Salzburg to attempt to force a Personal Union only for a year to pass and see Lithuania, Denmark, and Aragon joining the enemy side. These were not allies to any of my enemies when the war started, and I could not possibly know they were going to get called into the war. In past versions of the game, alliances were not made during wars. Maybe consider changing the way that the 'enforce peace' option works to allow people outside of wars some interesting ways to stymie their rivals' growth.

I find this really annoying as well. The problem is that the AI doesn't make alliances in a timely fashion. If it's possible to make an alliance with the -X "at war" penalty, then the AI should have made that alliance beforehand.

 

[Aries666]

I feel like people are not really reading my posts, but I guess I'll continue repeating myself:

My first reaction to a setback is to start over from square one, figure out what happened and why, and either circumvent or solve the problem the next time, particularly if I'm in the early stages of the problem. You're saying that you don't know what I want from the development team, so I guess I'll just say it one more time in case you missed it the first three-four-five times I already explained why I was frustrated. I'll even go into specifics for you:

• I don't want my 13,000 army with various bonuses (infantry combat ability, discipline) and a 100 tradition general get utterly destroyed by a peasant rebel stack of 16,000. Peasants were not well armed, nor well trained, nor disciplined. But for some reason, in Eu4 they are. People tell me I need to harsh treatment rebels -- I made a mistake thinking peasants were not trained in the arts of ninja, but I will not make the same mistake again.
  
• I don't want to go to war against Austria, Bohemia, and Salzburg to attempt to force a Personal Union only for a year to pass and see Lithuania, Denmark, and Aragon joining the enemy side. These were not allies to any of my enemies when the war started, and I could not possibly know they were going to get called into the war. In past versions of the game, alliances were not made during wars. Maybe consider changing the way that the 'enforce peace' option works to allow people outside of wars some interesting ways to stymie their rivals' growth.
  
• I would prefer to fight the computer on a grand strategy scale without feeling like I must sacrifice cows and goats to RNGesus before deciding battles. Seriously, dice rolls ranging from 1-6 and general pips from 0-4 would take a way a lot of the random early game issues where armies just get obliterated due to weird rolls. Increase dice range and general pips caps with military tech and/or ideas.

The way developers make the game harder is by piling bonuses on the AI nations and making rebels more dangerous than most foreign armies, at least in the early part of the game. Watching your manpower and gold drain against rebels is not engaging gameplay, it is just frustrating. My gripe with coalitions is apparently something that most people have no problem with. To be honest, I'd prefer coalitions being something started by one nation; the nation must decide a type of coalition (punitive, defensive, etcetera); and that nation can then invite other nations to join it as diplomatic actions. This creates a much more interesting political landscape. For example, your nation can be the target of multiple coalitions at the same time and in multiplayer, it will be possible to create far-reaching political schemes. Another thing that would make coalitions more interesting would be separate peaces. Basically, like normal wars, except each participant has the -30 penalty to peace deals for being in a coalition war. It would make coalitions less of an all-or-nothing and add another layer of dynamic warfare to the game.

But whatever.

I made this topic because I was frustrated with how much more punishing the early game was compared to the last time I played. And I guess it's easier dismissing people like that with 'lol switch the settings to easy' than contribute to a meaningful exchange about the issues they perceive, or even saying something like 'okay, you seem to have a problem with A and B, we made them like this for the following reasons.'

I don't understand your hang up over this one battle. I am willing to bet that if run an infinite number of times you would win over 90% of the time. However, in any system were there are variable inputs some of which you control (morale, discipline etc) and others you don't (dice rolls) there is a capacity for that system to diverge from expected outcomes. Basically you got unlucky, does that mean the system should change? No, because the aspects you have control over will on average have a greater impact on the result than the aspects you have no control over. If every battle went the way it should do on average then the whole battle system may as well just be removed and the result computed in a day. Also peasant rebels are significantly weaker than your army, they get 0.8x morale and no modifiers from prestige, army tradation or any other source, so they are hardly ninja.

I actually don't have an issue with there being some randomness in battles from a historical standpoint either, I imagine throughout history observers of battles have felt one side almost certain to win and the other side going on to pull off an unlikely victory.

I had this beauty happen not long ago:

Prior to the battle you would say this is a near certain victory (we had same tech, I had better ideas). I was going to post and moan about it. However, I sat back, calmed down, had a think and came to the conclusion that even this result should be expected occasionally.

With regards to your PU war with Austria I have some sympathy there. However, as you can probably tell I like that there is a degree of randomness in the game such as nations being able to form alliances in defensive wars. For me this makes the game less predictable and forces me to plan for worst case scenarios. I would add though that you could have reasonably foresaw this situation, either Bohemia as the emperor called in those additional countries as they were allied (which is easily checked prior to war) or Austria made additional allies, most likely nations rivaled or hostile to you, which is more of a judgement call but still determinable.

 

[Beagá]

Seriously but how the hell you lost that? Four 0 in a row?

Coalitions and pulling allies into existing wars should probably be tech based unlocks that come about in the 1700s.

Nope.

 

[Aries666]

Seriously but how the hell you lost that? Four 0 in a row?



Nope.

I didn't see the start of the battle but a few days in I had lost over 50% of my morale which was base 9. I guess that I rolled 0 and they rolled 9 on the first fire phase which as they had more cannons must have decimated my front line.

 

[TheGrouch91]

Seriously but how the hell you lost that? Four 0 in a row?



Nope.

Canons are OP that's how.

 

[Beagá]

But look at the size of the cannon, they are toy cannons

Also, the spanish soldier came from... where exactly? They aren´t like that in Barcelona

 

[KillingMeSoftly]

If you are getting a coalition from taking a single province, then you have done something terribly wrong on the Diplomacy front.

1) You have accrued a lot of Aggressive Expansion prior to taking the province. This could be from previous conquests or you were caught several times fabricating claims.
and/or
2) You haven't used your diplomats to increase relations of the nations getting the brunt of the AE gain. It's simple; as long as their relations are positive with you, they will never join a coalition against you regardless of how much AE they have.

 

[Thrake]

Canons are OP that's how.

Well half the canons should have been dead meat as in the front line, and they had no general VS a 4/4/4. Orissa lacked canons but Spain had way too much; Orissa had better composition in the end, better ideas according to OP and a powerful leader; should have been a crushing victory.

Tbh I never really got defeated by peasants even when highly outnumbered; it happened that I lost much more than I expected or thought I could afford. That being said, as long as you're not at war, it's not really terrible. Peasants don't reinforce, so either you still have manpower, replenish and crush it at full strength, either you just consolidate, build a few merc and teach them a lesson. That one is costly but I tipically make up for it by being staying under FL for a while (up to the preparation of my next war).

Other rebel types are more annoying, because not as weak and they reinforce so loosing once does not make that much weaker.

 

[josh127]

I don't want my 13,000 army with various bonuses (infantry combat ability, discipline) and a 100 tradition general get utterly destroyed by a peasant rebel stack of 16,000. Peasants were not well armed, nor well trained, nor disciplined. But for some reason, in Eu4 they are. People tell me I need to harsh treatment rebels -- I made a mistake thinking peasants were not trained in the arts of ninja, but I will not make the same mistake again.

I agree rebel stacks are too powerful for a faction that provides little satisfaction in fighting, mainly because of terrain bonuses which I think should be removed for rebels. When it comes to fighting peasant rebels though, keep in mind they don't reinforce, so if you're not going to win do an early shattered retreat one province away, regroup a few months and hit them again. The second time should be a slaughter. Doesn't make the game fun, but it can at least avoid the rage quit.

I don't want to go to war against Austria, Bohemia, and Salzburg to attempt to force a Personal Union only for a year to pass and see Lithuania, Denmark, and Aragon joining the enemy side. These were not allies to any of my enemies when the war started, and I could not possibly know they were going to get called into the war. In past versions of the game, alliances were not made during wars. Maybe consider changing the way that the 'enforce peace' option works to allow people outside of wars some interesting ways to stymie their rivals' growth.

There really should be a lot more conditions for a country to join a war if they ally after the war begins. Easily beating Portugal to see "Surprise, we allied France and they went full force at you" is really not a fun game to play. Like a lot of the other things in the game that are there simply to make it difficult, it's frustrating when it happens once, but the real issue is when it happens the 3rd or 4th time in the same game. It gets old to the point that you don't care to continue playing.

 

[klingonadmiral]

You know that Spain has a stronger military than France in 1444? Just allly Burgundy and declare war ASAP.

 

[hwoosh]

You know that Spain has a stronger military than France in 1444? Just allly Burgundy and declare war ASAP.

Not true. You're forgetting the French vassals. France FL + sum of vassal FL is about twice the size of Castile's. They're a behemoth.

(But yes, with Burgundy as an ally you should be able to beat them handily.)