Troops origin as tactical problem

[migdeu19]

The thread is very simple, near to be stupid but I consider it very interesting.
The idea is that depending of army/troop origin (culture or inclusive religion), and the kingdom or military commander who are serving, the troops maybe, fighting with another state decide to support the opponents. For example to give a better explain. If you are playing as a Ptolemaic and you are fighting any other faction, your egyptian (native) troops maybe decide to join the enemy side, during the war or suddenly in a battle. Or another option, for example as a Roman, if you have troops from samnite culture origin, and you are fighting against a samnitic city, they very probably decide to join your enemy army.

 

[Denkt]

Units don't have culture and manpower is a global resource which are produced by freemen of all cultures. But culture do have impact on loyalties. A freemen not of your culture will be less happy and thus less productive while characters not of your culture will have less max loyalty which increase the risk of defections and civil wars.

 

[Chipmunk216]

Units having culture and otherwise being tied to their province of origin (as they were in Victoria, I think) would be a great addition at some point. A revolt of all of your Samnite soldiers would be an interesting dilemma. Alternatively, imagine that after losing a battle in which many soldiers from a particular province die, you suffer loyalty penalties there--or that another province is annoyed because of excessive recruitment, potentially entailing bad economic effects. This would make you think seriously about how to balance where you levy your forces from, and could add another layer of depth to military strategy.

 

[monstermash]

scenario 1. yes I cant wait for some of my army to revolt because I forgot to move the wrong troops around and now the enemy has a new army marching for my capital
scenario 2.im Rome I'm fighting in Hispaniola I have 30k troops the enemy has 10k so I send my 10k Hispaniolains to guard Rome because I don't want them to revolt the 10k enemy troops are marching for my capital I don't notice because they left there lands undefended and I'm trying to quickly siege all of a sudden there is 20k enemy troops coming back at me

I know I can just pay more attention to which units are from what culture but that seems like a lot of micro trying to weed out the culture I'm fighting.
I think they can just have a Button that allows to sort by culture in the unit organization tab this should make it easy to not have the wrong troops fighting

though it does sound like a cool feature it might end up just with you wanting to just conquer all a certain culture before recruiting troops from that culture even if they give a buff.

 

[Will Steel]

Victoria 2 (and more importantly Victoria 1 which had far better troop system than Vicky2) had manpower system like that.

Any soldiers you recruited depended on 4 factors:

a) Their home province
b) Their culture
c) Their religion (for example Germany had Catholic and Protestant north-German soldier types)
d) Soldier population in their state

But that was a different game. It didn't have centralized manpower - it was concentrated in soldier Pop types which aren't present here to let us differentiate between cultures of the troops.

I imagine Imperator Rome will use the same or similar system from EU-Rome. Which means a centralized manpower for every nation, where cohorts don't have any unique culture but display in a tooltip "raised from Cyrenaica" or such. Which means if those regions rebel, there is a chance the cohort will go too.

It was a bit prone to exploit though. The centralized manpower meant that you could recruit all your cohorts from Rome itself, without distributing them around and worrying what will happen if for example Greek provinces rebel (despite using manpower from those provinces). It was just a question of time and convenience.

 

[hoprlessNewb]

These seems cool, in theory, but has the problem that it would quickly become annoying once the novelty wore off, and that preventing it would come down to tedious micromanagement.

And it doesn't even make sense for the titular Rome, when you think about it. Sure, a unit may originate from a specific city/province/etc, but why would the reinforcement always come from the same city and culture? This isn't the 19th to early 20th century, where that mechanic actually made historical sense. Wouldn't you eventually get a "Ship of Theseus" problem, where it breaks immersion for a unit to still be culturally homogeneous, 100-200 years later?

 

[migdeu19]

These seems cool, in theory, but has the problem that it would quickly become annoying once the novelty wore off, and that preventing it would come down to tedious micromanagement.

And it doesn't even make sense for the titular Rome, when you think about it. Sure, a unit may originate from a specific city/province/etc, but why would the reinforcement always come from the same city and culture? This isn't the 19th to early 20th century, where that mechanic actually made historical sense. Wouldn't you eventually get a "Ship of Theseus" problem, where it breaks immersion for a unit to still be culturally homogeneous, 100-200 years later?

may be, with some porcentual quantities like in Vic 2 with provincial culture, you can mix the armies in the way that with some quantity of for example roman soldiers mixed with a majority of samnites and under a Roman commander (and may be his charisma), the possibilities of revolt decreases. And also, with edicts, laws (like citizenship extension), culture/religion acceptance in the state (for example the egyptians cultures in Hellenic Ptolemaic kingdom) cause a -x% possibilities of revolt (perhaps with the dice system of ck2 events), or with technological advances and always with the cultural conversion of the province.

 

[Kinkness]

The thread is very simple, near to be stupid but I consider it very interesting.
The idea is that depending of army/troop origin (culture or inclusive religion), and the kingdom or military commander who are serving, the troops maybe, fighting with another state decide to support the opponents. For example to give a better explain. If you are playing as a Ptolemaic and you are fighting any other faction, your egyptian (native) troops maybe decide to join the enemy side, during the war or suddenly in a battle. Or another option, for example as a Roman, if you have troops from samnite culture origin, and you are fighting against a samnitic city, they very probably decide to join your enemy army.

Units having culture and otherwise being tied to their province of origin (as they were in Victoria, I think) would be a great addition at some point. A revolt of all of your Samnite soldiers would be an interesting dilemma. Alternatively, imagine that after losing a battle in which many soldiers from a particular province die, you suffer loyalty penalties there--or that another province is annoyed because of excessive recruitment, potentially entailing bad economic effects. This would make you think seriously about how to balance where you levy your forces from, and could add another layer of depth to military strategy.

I like these ideas. Idk about soldiers straight up switching sides, but at least refusing to fight, and or defecting right after the battle would be an equal blow. With a small chance that they do join the enemy army during the fight itself.

With this mechanic though depending on the frequency of it, they may need to lower military upkeep to allow for more units as a whole, otherwise it'll get to the point where you're blocked straight out from fighting anyone or anything due to the situation, and can never get enough soldiers to counter the defecting.

 

[Puking Panda]

Historically there's a number of examples where Auxilliary/Socii troops rebelled agianst the Roman Empire such as during the Social War, the Gallic Wars(most Gallic allies/auxilliary forces turned on Rome after Vercingetorix united most the Gallic tribes), the Illyrian Revolt, the Revolt of the Batavi and probably most famously Arminius' revolt. The accurate portraying of all these revolts would require Cohorts to have their own culture at least. Either way having this adds a whole lot more flavour, especially if they get their own culture-specific bonusses such as Rhodian archers, Numidian skirmishing cavalry and Gallic/Germanic Heavy cavalry.

It might also be done by creating a more dynamic overlord/subject system where subject countries contribute fully integrated military units that are fully under control of their overlord and where wars are frequently fought to force other countries to be your subject instead of annexation, sort of like CK 2 instead of EU 4. This would more closely resemble the relationship Rome had with it's subject peoples before

 

[Thure]

Historically there's a number of examples where Auxilliary/Socii troops rebelled agianst the Roman Empire such as during the Social War, the Gallic Wars(most Gallic allies/auxilliary forces turned on Rome after Vercingetorix united most the Gallic tribes), the Illyrian Revolt, the Revolt of the Batavi and probably most famously Arminius' revolt. The accurate portraying of all these revolts would require Cohorts to have their own culture at least. Either way having this adds a whole lot more flavour, especially if they get their own culture-specific bonusses such as Rhodian archers, Numidian skirmishing cavalry and Gallic/Germanic Heavy cavalry.

It might also be done by creating a more dynamic overlord/subject system where subject countries contribute fully integrated military units that are fully under control of their overlord and where wars are frequently fought to force other countries to be your subject instead of annexation, sort of like CK 2 instead of EU 4. This would more closely resemble the relationship Rome had with it's subject peoples before

Socii seems to be better represented as 'Feudatory' vassals. That fits them perfectly and allows them to rebell against their overlord. The federati could be the same way maybe.

 

[Puking Panda]

Socii seems to be better represented as 'Feudatory' vassals. That fits them perfectly and allows them to rebell against their overlord. The federati could be the same way maybe.

Whether or not their overlord can fully integrate their subjects's armies into their own is the question though. If they are going to be the same as EU 4's vassals it's going to be an absolute chore to work with them.

 

[Gordonthinker]

This plus making troops into recruits and vets. Veterans have a higher chance to be loyal to their generals and possibly political turmoil. Use veterans from other cultures such as mercenaries. They have a higher chance to be bribed to side with the enemy or could have demands of their own depending on if they're Greek, Libyan or Alaric. Each has it's advantage and disadvantage.