Troop Quality

[Shai]

Suppose that, instead of being able to recruit a new army and have it at full capability in 3 months, you had to wait longer, especially if the Quality DP is high?

It would be interesting if you had to wait a year or more before a newly raised army was fully capable. Then we'd see hastily recruited GREEN troops being rushed to battle, in an emergency. We'd learn to value the TRAINED soldier. Just a thought.........

 

[Castellon]

Sounds like a good idea! How long did you have in mind 6 month, a year?

 

[unmerged(8022)]

Good idea, and maybe also make soldiers with military experience better, then soldiers who never have fight a war.

 

[unmerged(10416)]

Not very implementable, since the soldiers who fought and won great battles won't be around for long. Not with the food they ate back in those times and the sanitary conditions... and the averagy life expectancy... and the monarch's frequent unwillingness to pay his troops...

But leaders should be able to improve a little as they win battles

 

[Carolus Rex]

EU3 perhaps.

 

[Galleblære]

Originally posted by Karl Martell
Not very implementable, since the soldiers who fought and won great battles won't be around for long. Not with the food they ate back in those times and the sanitary conditions... and the averagy life expectancy... and the monarch's frequent unwillingness to pay his troops...

But leaders should be able to improve a little as they win battles

But not all the soldiers die/retire at once. You could say an army grows with experience, tactics, morale if it has been used over many years. What knowledge old soldiers have, is passed over to young recruits etc.

Therefore, the complete destruction of an army would be truly devestating, as much more than mere men is lost.

 

[Shai]

Castellon....

It would depend a lot on the period. Some folks with a more intimate knowledge of the period can probably show that poorly trained recruits were the mainstay of most armies.

The Russian, French, and OE advantages of large troop pools would be mitigated if they were treated as raw cannon fodder, as opposed to all being equally skilled in a mere 3 months.

What I envision is that a standing army (ie: that which we keep on hand rather permanently) would garner training points which, once reaching the level of seasoned or veteran, are maintained. This would similate the addition of new recruits over the years without having to keep track of such minutiae.

Newly raised armies would have no training points and would have to go through the same period of 'leveling' sans war, or learn the hard way, through actual fighting.

It would certainly make a great challenge.

Would I still be inclined to tackle that 30K Moldavian army that's been training for the last several decades?

Just how worrisome IS that Russian horde that was just recruited?

Will I give up winter campaigning completely? lol .... I have a feeling I would, and that would be historical.

Perhaps not terribly apropos, but the Romans did not consider a legion to be seasoned before its twentieth year.

 

[Castellon]

Originally posted by Shai

Perhaps not terribly apropos, but the Romans did not consider a legion to be seasoned before its twentieth year.

Ha! Nice to know.
Though I don't think too many of the original members of the legion would still be alive and still in that legion after 20 years.

 

[Arilou]

Three months was about the average time before a recruit was ready for war. A lot more training was done in their spare time though.

You should note that most soldiers never actually saw battle.

 

[unmerged(9994)]

I don't see how this would work in EUII, with the constant splitting and merging of armies.

 

[Carolus Rex]

Originally posted by Eddie Teach
I don't see how this would work in EUII, with the constant splitting and merging of armies.

As I said...EU3 perhaps.

The game would have to be on a much smaller scale for it to work correctly....

 

[Castellon]

Originally posted by Eddie Teach
I don't see how this would work in EUII, with the constant splitting and merging of armies.

Well,
Splitting, both armies have the same Rating.
Merging, the rate is calculated on a percentage basis from all armies merging.

Simple.

 

[unmerged(9994)]

But if you have, say, 1957 infantry, 3102 cavalry and 4 cannons from a veteran army with a rank of "4" joining 2970 infantry with a rank of "1" the result won't be very accurate. And of course, this calculation will have to be done constantly, since both human and AI armies often march into the same provinces to give battle. Also, how would you handle the international armies that so often pop up. Would they also have that calculation made to give them a temporary rating?

You're right, it is probably something they "could" do. I have a feeling though, that it wouldn't be worth the reduction in performance.

 

[Castellon]

Originally posted by Eddie Teach
But if you have, say, 1957 infantry, 3102 cavalry and 4 cannons from a veteran army with a rank of "4" joining 2970 infantry with a rank of "1" the result won't be very accurate. And of course, this calculation will have to be done constantly, since both human and AI armies often march into the same provinces to give battle. Also, how would you handle the international armies that so often pop up. Would they also have that calculation made to give them a temporary rating?

You're right, it is probably something they "could" do. I have a feeling though, that it wouldn't be worth the reduction in performance.

1957+3102+40=5099 @ 4.000 =20396
vs 2970 @ 1.000 = 2970
=23366/8069
=2.896
Pretty simple!
I don't understand the rest of your post Re:merging foreign armies, since this does not happen.

 

[unmerged(9994)]

Foreign armies do fight together, that's why you'll get the messages "You have lost a battle to country x" "You have lost a battle to country y" for the same province. You would have to perform the operation every time 2 or more separate armies fought together in a battle to determine their overall effectiveness, not just when you merged 2 armies. Also, if 2.8 was the number the computer was using, it would likely have 4.007 or 3.955 rather than '4' stored to use in its calculations. I realize multiplying fractions is rather trivial for a computer to do, but they would have to multiply them quite often, and use up memory to store the temporary values of the whole force as well as the real values of each individual army. This would probably also complicate the algorithm for determining the winner of the battle.

I think this is a good idea, but if it causes perceptibly more lagged play or more CTDs, it's not worth it. I don't claim to know exactly(ok, not even ballpark really) how much stress this change would put on the system, but it obviously would put some.

I just thought of another bad side effect this would probably have. The AI would probably not use the veteran advantages to the same degree as the players would.

 

[Castellon]

Well as you mentioned this already happens! When we are talking about level we mean Morale, And in fact the computer tracks everything to 5 decimal places (it only stores to 3 though).
So again I do not see your point.

 

[unmerged(9994)]

My first point was that any additional variables, algorithms etc. will reduce program performance to some degree. It is up to the programmers to both make that degree as small as possible and determine if the reduced performance is acceptable. To me, the change sounds beneficial, but to a small enough degree that I don't want to have noticeably worse performance for it.

My second point was that throwing in another variable would make it all the harder for the AI to perform well. The AI would not know when to use their green troops to fight, or when to use veterans, they'd be less likely to have large veteran armies, etc. It would basically make them just a little easier to beat. Or, they could tweak the AI to keep these factors in mind. They would still probably perform worse than the human, and there would be added processing time taken up by these calculations.

I have a 1700 Mhz processor, and this game still occasionally crashes on me. There are many small enhancements like this that could be made, but they've got to be careful of pushing the envelope too far. This game is already more involved than any others I've played.

 

[Director]

Originally posted by Castellon


Ha! Nice to know.
Though I don't think too many of the original members of the legion would still be alive and still in that legion after 20 years.

Sergeants never die... thought you knew that!

Different armies recruited and trained differently, with some "standing armies" enlisting men for 20 - 30 years and feudal levies brought out only for a few months.

The current morale and technology systems work OK. The biggest problem is the ability to operate numerous armies. Monarchs did not have the management talent to form multiple field armies (and did not trust those generals they did have) until around the time of Louis XIV.

Just my 2g...

 

[unmerged(6042)]

The current morale and technology systems work OK.

I disagree. I think the morale system works very poorly indeed. Even when one's army wins a battle, it loses morale as it fights to that victory. Many times, one's army can be winning big, yet run out of morale and run away from a force it was about to annihilate. What sense does that make? I know if I am winning a fight, I feel great even if I am getting tired while doing it. One could argue that in the chaos of battle, anything can happen, and winning armies (or armies that could have won) could easily be set to flight by some miscommunication. But how often did such really happen? Flukes are called such for a reason.

Morale-based losses should not happen without a reason. Morale should not decrease without a reason.

Being shot at with firearms and cannon was enough initially to cow many American natives, for instance, so tiny European forces being able to defeat them easily makes sense.

But setting bayonets and walking right into withering clouds of musketry eventually became of a way of life for European soldiers, so having them lose tons of morale if they're not really losing the battle does not.

I have faced one too many instances where I've had fully paid troops at high tech levels run away from armies of rebels a fifth their size, or pirate fleets a tenth their size. This part of the battle system is ridiculous, because exceptions (smaller forces driving away larger, etc) are the rule.

 

[Castellon]

I would not say that getting defeated by smaller forces in the norm, but it does happen. I think you just remember those more than the others.