War What is it Good For?

[jju_57]

Please fix the war mechanics. What I'm referring to is how wars are resolved. I can take over smaller backward countries and that's not the problem. I'm referring to say Ottoman vs. Egypt at the start. I can't get the Lower Nile till I take their entire country which is bogus IMO. So the first fix is to allow me to request the state/province I actually want and not be forced to settle for some other spot.

The next area is late wars where one side wins overwhelmingly. I know you can add more CB's but they soon exceed 100% war score way too fast. As Germany in a great war against France, Russia and say UK if I get 100% and occupy every province in all of their countries I should be able to dictate many many requests. I'm not talking about painting the map grey. I do want to take a few places but I may want to force liberation on multiple countries, humilate multiple countries, do other things and also allow my allies to get what they want.

And this is for the great war. If this happened in say 1890 I couldn't even add any CB's unless I had lots of jingoism.

A complete and total victory should allow for way more then 2-4 requests.

 

[Mr. Wiggles]

Total victories should be damn hard too
And war a costly affair

 

[jju_57]

Total victories should be damn hard too
And war a costly affair

I agree. But if you have one there should be appropriate rewards. The problem with V2 was it actually encouraged small war after small war 5 years after the last one ended. And they put in the bad boy stat to try and limit that. One bad mechanic caused the need for another bad mechanic.

 

[Paghalay]

Enter the Imperator Imperial Conquest CB. Your expansion isn't stopped by some arbitrary war score mechanic, but war exhaustion, which is bad due to the internal issues it causes between cultures. Cultures which you now have more of due to the conquest.
It causes a more natural stoppage to war, due to actual necessity not due to the game telling you that you can't take more, just because.


Yet another reason why Imperator was taken too young

 

[Krautkopf]

When it comes to Vic3 war system, I just hope they adopt a few elements from HOI4, like divisions, the battle planer and the army/army group system of organization. That would make life so much easier.

 

[Guedes]

I agree. But if you have one there should be appropriate rewards. The problem with V2 was it actually encouraged small war after small war 5 years after the last one ended. And they put in the bad boy stat to try and limit that. One bad mechanic caused the need for another bad mechanic.

Thats because Vicky 2 is an old game (launched 10 yers ago) that was not war focused to begin with. The war system in Vicy 2 was appropriate to what it was meant to be; in most games the economics and politics are just mild distractions between the wars you wage while you paint the map, whereas in victoria 2 it was exactly the opposite. Most fun i get from Vic 2 is taking some middle rank country and becoming a #1 GP through industrialization, colonization and imperialism alone, while conquering through war as minimum as possible.

That being said, i also expect to War diplo be significantly better than it was in victoria 2, but than again since we are talking about a 10 year old game that should be a given.

 

[Mr. Wiggles]

I agree. But if you have one there should be appropriate rewards. The problem with V2 was it actually encouraged small war after small war 5 years after the last one ended. And they put in the bad boy stat to try and limit that. One bad mechanic caused the need for another bad mechanic.

Great european powers could not occupy big areas of other european nations, it was too expensive. Just think at all the troops you need to keep mobilized to occupy a piece of France, villages, cities, with a population in constant turmoil.
They usually came to agreement with the enemy and put some areas under military occupations until the war reparations were paid.

I would make the conquest of big patches of PROPER land (of recognized/civilized countries) un-economical. Unless you already have a minority/majority population of your own culture already there. Or historical claims recognized by your own people or other countries. Or if said territories have a small population and you have many migrants to dump there.

 

[Kovax]

I agree that it should be POSSIBLE to take a capital region, but the cost should be quite steep, as in close enough to 100% war score to be the only really significant term of the peace treaty.

I also think the cost of forcing the liberation of small countries should be significantly lower, and more size dependent. As it is in V2, the costs of most war goals are so close that there's rarely much point in taking a cheaper war goal when it's only a trivial amount more to go for the big one.

I liked the "discounts" on war goal costs for different CBs in EU3, where depending on the CB, the peace settlement cost of a war goal could be reduced by 25%, 50%, or 75%, and the infamy cost of taking a province could range from 0.8 points for taking a tribal province to 8 points to annex a single-province state. Taking something that's not discounted by the CB means paying full settlement and infamy costs for it. In contrast, in V2, you generally either got a CB to take it for free, or else paid full price. I was never fond of "all or nothing" game mechanics, when the real world works mostly in shades of gray between the extremes.

 

[Victor Cortez]

I don't like obscure counters that somehow represents what's going on (even though I understand that sometimes abstractions are needed and good).
For example, war exhaustion is not something that should increase just because you're at war. It should be linked to the actual losses of the population or the monetary expenditure. (and possibly the losses should impact the lower uneducated classes, while higher costs should impact the higher, educated classes).

Also, I don't like the hard caps like EU4 has (can't remember the exact name here, but basically the number of regiments you can have before penalties). I'd rather it be linked to actual buildings and expenditures (soldiers need a place to sleep, need constant training, salaries etc...)

 

[jju_57]

Great european powers could not occupy big areas of other european nations, it was too expensive. Just think at all the troops you need to keep mobilized to occupy a piece of France, villages, cities, with a population in constant turmoil.
They usually came to agreement with the enemy and put some areas under military occupations until the war reparations were paid.

I would make the conquest of big patches of PROPER land (of recognized/civilized countries) un-economical. Unless you already have a minority/majority population of your own culture already there. Or historical claims recognized by your own people or other countries. Or if said territories have a small population and you have many migrants to dump there.

Then how did Napoleon do it all the way to Moscow? History says otherwise.

BTW I already said not to paint the map your color. But instead I may want to break up Russia into 5 smaller countries, break up UK into Wales and Scotland, humilate all the countries, take a state from Netherlands and Belgium, the Ottomans who were my ally might want a few states from Russia and war reparations all around. V2 mechanics won't allow this.

And I also mentioned that you can't take certain provinces unless you take all of them.

 

[Cymsdale]

Also, I don't like the hard caps like EU4 has (can't remember the exact name here, but basically the number of regiments you can have before penalties). I'd rather it be linked to actual buildings and expenditures (soldiers need a place to sleep, need constant training, salaries etc...)

Well the number of regiments you could have in V2 was basically limited by the number of actual soldier pops you had (setting aside mobilization), which seems like a straightforward way to cap it.

 

[Kovax]

Well the number of regiments you could have in V2 was basically limited by the number of actual soldier pops you had (setting aside mobilization), which seems like a straightforward way to cap it.

It had that as one cap, and the ability to afford upkeep as a second cap, which in some cases was higher than the first, in other cases lower.

 

[Leoreth]

Can you give a historical example of a war that had as extensive consequences for the loser you are talking about? All of this sounds rather abstract. "I want to be able to..." I want to be constrained in the same way historical actors were constrained.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

Well the number of regiments you could have in V2 was basically limited by the number of actual soldier pops you had (setting aside mobilization), which seems like a straightforward way to cap it.

It seems to be a thing in V3 that all pops have a place of work to represent that infrastructure needed for them to do their work. So you don't have free-floating bureaucrats, you have them working in government buildings producing bureaucratic capacity (and other things I guess). I suspect the same is true of professional soldiers - they work at military bases (forts, barracks?) that you have to build. It would be interesting if these also produced some side-effect quantity like military tradition.

 

[Woifee]

Can you give a historical example of a war that had as extensive consequences for the loser you are talking about? All of this sounds rather abstract. "I want to be able to..." I want to be constrained in the same way historical actors were constrained.

World War 1 comes to mind.

 

[Roland Traveler]

Then how did Napoleon do it all the way to Moscow? History says otherwise.

BTW I already said not to paint the map your color. But instead I may want to break up Russia into 5 smaller countries, break up UK into Wales and Scotland, humilate all the countries, take a state from Netherlands and Belgium, the Ottomans who were my ally might want a few states from Russia and war reparations all around. V2 mechanics won't allow this.

And I also mentioned that you can't take certain provinces unless you take all of them.

Napoleon set up puppet regimes, found local powers willing to help him, and plunged France into a demographic and economy disaster to support an army large enough to conquer Europe. The closest time he came to occupying an entire nation for a significant amount of time turned into an infamous quagmire that literally coined the term guerrilla warfare.

 

[Guedes]

Continuous long term direct foreign power occupations are rare throughout history and frequently come with a very steep price. Most successful occupations used to put puppet leaders at power or foreign dynastic branches (like the mongols did) with fairly large portions of power and state bureaucracy in the hands of a subservient local elite.

 

[Limbojack]

I don't mind being able to occupy the capital province, for a steep cost, of course. But making it easier to add wargoals, at least the way you're describing it, sounds like the perfect way of making sure that world conquest will be more than possible in Victoria 3.

 

[Leoreth]

World War 1 comes to mind.

I hope we do not model the war/diplomacy system after the most singular event of the game's time period.

 

[Kovax]

The ability to keep an army in the field for extended periods was limited, particularly over distance. Taking and holding a border region is one thing, taking and holding large swathes of territory far from home should be prohibitively difficult to pacify and maintain, while you get essentially next to nothing from it for years until it begins to accept annexation. That should also depend heavily on factors such as ethnic similarity, previous ownership, common culture and religion, and so on.

I have no objection to being able to take significantly more territory than in present games, but it should prove nearly impossible and economically crippling to hold more than one or two recently taken regions. "Blobbing" depends on using the resources of newly-captured land to take more land, but if that newly-captured land requires the constant attention of most of the forces used to take it in the first place, "blobbing" becomes impossible in the short-term, and only begins to be meaningful over a period of around half a century or longer.

Basically, that limits the usefulness of wars to reclaiming foreign-held cores, seizing sources of badly needed resources, a few colonies seized in primitive territories, or one or two naked expansionist grabs at most before your country suffers more than it gains by the acquisitions. Anything beyond that becomes an unrealistic "map painter".