Understanding Military Slider vs. Spending vs. Brigades vs. Soldiers

[Nerva]

I had assumed there were some simple relationships between the Military Spending slider percentage in the Budget Screen, in comparison with the actual amount of money spent in the right-side column, in comparison with the number of Soldiers, in comparison with the number of available Brigades... but the more I look at the numbers, the more confused I get.

For starters, the total number of Soldiers reported in the tooltip near the top of the Population Screen, is significantly less than the number of available brigades * 3000 -- instead, when I look at various savegames, the number ranges between 2200 and 2500 soldiers per brigade available.

Next, when comparing saves from 1843 vs. 1844, both with 31% Military Spending, I see the cost increased from 213.9 to 245.6 -- a 14.8% increase in one year. Yet the number of Soldiers increased from 89842 to 93713 (just +4.3%) and the number of available brigades increased from 39 to 42 (+7.7%), with a corresponding drop in the number of soldiers per brigade. Stranger still, is the increase in cost per Soldier (+10.1%) and per Brigade (+6.6%), despite the fact the Military Spending slider was unchanged at 31%.

I also see there are individual costs shown on the Budget Screen for "Soldiers" and "Officers", but they only add up to roughly half the spending shown at the right, and the soldier/officer costs are unchanged from year-to-year for a given Military Spending slider %.

So, I am at a loss to understand what drives the numbers I'm seeing. Can anyone lend some expertise on this subject?

When I change the Military Spending slider with the game paused, the projected spending changes proportionately -- spending doubles when I increase the slider from 31% to 62%. But for some reason, the cost relationship change over time, even when accounting for the numbers of soldiers or brigades. I am wondering if the remaining increase is due to the economy growing from year to year?

 

[Rauko]

AFAIK the first brigade in each province becomes available just with 1000 soldiers.
About spending, I have no clue, sorry.

 

[Owl Raider]

You have to remember that the correlation between number of soldiers and number of brigades isn't linear, as brigades are province dependent. Say if you have 1.5k soldiers in province A and 1.5k soldiers in province B, you'd think you have enough soldiers for 1 brigade(3k soldiers total) but you'd be wrong as brigades don't use soldiers from different provinces together. Therefore you'll need to have 3k soldiers in either province to get a brigade from it. So rather than looking at the overall number of soldiers(which is only meaningful when it comes to your economy, not your military) you should look at the number of soldiers in specific provinces within your nation if you want to see how many brigades you can support.

As for the military slider(I assume you mean the one below social spending not the military supply slider at the top) than you forgot that it also includes officers, not just soldiers. Officers are generated by the AI automatically unless you switch it off(it's defaulted to on and most people don't know/bother/forget it), so it's not something you actively pay attention to most of the time. Still, it's included in the calculations and officer salaries are obviously higher than soldier salaries so their impact on your economy is significant. This also affects your cost per soldier and cost per brigade calculations as you need to include officer costs in there too and while soldiers promote to officers the actual promotion rate isn't linear but relies on the soldiers' economic status, administrative efficiency, etc, which in turn will lower your cost per soldier and cost per brigade costs back down. Whether it fully adds up or not depends on the way Paradox' rounding system works, but that's the main gap you missed in your calculations.

As for changing the military slider and not seeing an immediate effect, it probably has to do with when pops get payed which is a hidden value. We don't actually know whether pops are payed daily, weekly or monthly nor do we know at what specific day they get payed. So for example if they get payed monthly on the 9th each month than if you raised your slider on the 10th than it would only be noticeable on the 9th the following month as that's the first time the salary would be increased. Nor do we know what happens if the people who are supposed to pay the workers don't have all the necessary funds, for example poor capitalists who can't pay their craftsmen their full salaries. We don't know whether the capitalist are in debt to the craftsmen and eventually pay them or whether it gets ignored and these craftsmen demote to farmers/laborers never seeing their hard earned cash from the previous employers. Again, because we don't know how exactly this works and whether it's even uniform between the different pop types, it's all guesswork.

What interests me the most in this conversation is why you actually care about all these numbers. They're pretty insignificant as a whole and don't really affect your game play at all. So why delve in so deep into the Paradox math in the first place?