Warscore is broken as well

[Novacat]

The point being that, the game does not actually "let you" achieve the 'total victory' that most guys who feel the Warscore system is broken seem to think they have achieved when they have destroyed all of the target countries regiments and occupied all of his provinces. While it might be nice if it was possible to engage in total war, it isn't unreasonable that it is not an option in a game like EU4.

I consider it very much unreasonable. Not everyone in EU4 is a chivalric European. If I decide I am sick of my enemy's continued resistance despite being utterly defeated and decide to burn his whole country, population and all, to the ground, the game should very well let me. Either that, or the enemies in this game should not be so damn stubborn about letting go of more than one or two provinces after I had occupied their entire country, driven their war exhaustion to 20, and killed every army they had.

 

[Anthropoid]

I consider it very much unreasonable. Not everyone in EU4 is a chivalric European. If I decide I am sick of my enemy's continued resistance despite being utterly defeated and decide to burn his whole country, population and all, to the ground, the game should very well let me. Either that, or the enemies in this game should not be so damn stubborn about letting go of more than one or two provinces after I had occupied their entire country, driven their war exhaustion to 20, and killed every army they had.

Maybe you could make a mod?

 

[mcmanusaur]

Lets stop and consider here what "occupying" a province really means, or at least is LIKELY to "mean."

Military occupation is "effective provisional control of a certain power over a territory which is not under the formal sovereignty of that entity, without the volition of the actual sovereign".

First off we should note that many provinces in the game are enormous. Many probably include two to three major towns, if not two or more full fledged cities. This would also mean multiple castles or other fortifications, half-dozen or more villages, as well as agricultural, mining and foresting/hunting outposts. The forces involved in "sieging a province" can be as small as two thousand soldiers.

Obviously "occupying" a province does not mean, nah CANNOT mean, either (a) occupying all of the settlements and installations in the province, nor even (b) driving the enemy out of every one of them, much less (c) destroying all of them or (d) killing all of them.

Just because the game doesn't reflect the difficulties of occupying large swathes of land doesn't mean you're not occupying large swathes of land when you "occupy" multiple provinces. It's great that you have reverse-engineered some sort of BS reasoning to preserve your narrative or whatever, but that's not an excuse for the game's deficient handling of these topics. At the very least you can have killed every single soldier of the enemy army, and for most of the time period in which the game takes place peasants that prefer one overlord (likely of foreign blood to begin with) over another of foreign blood enough to rebel is quite dubious.

These points are corroborated by the fact that, rebels fighting to liberate the province, can spontaneously spawn in a province that the player has "occupied."

The obvious comparison to patriot rebels is the French Resistance, which occurred well after France had been "occupied" for all intents and purposes, and which had little impact over the Nazi's negotiation power if they cared to sign treaties regarding France's territory.

In sum, you are taking things too literally if you think that "occupying" a province in game terms means that that province is completely and totally pacified, all possible combatants eliminated, all communities fully occupied and garrisoned, etc., etc.

What occupying a province is probably meant to mean is that one or perhaps two key strategic forts or perhaps towns have been besieged, causing some damage and death, and eventually the defenders of those settlements/installations surrender. The town in question likely still harbors would be rebels, to say nothing of all the other towns, castles, forts, etc. that any given province is likely to comprise. By taking control of one or two strategic points, the attacker has "occupied" the province, and can begin the process of garrisoning it enough to properly resist efforts to take it back.

What you describe as "full occupation" is closer to annexation, really, but the game's "occupied" label is as occupied as things get, so I believe it means something like occupied.

The "other towns and castles in a given province" simply don't exist within EU4, and they don't magically begin to exist to explain away the shortcomings of one of the game's core systems. "Occupied" just means occupied, or as close to occupied as you can get. The idea of a king whose entire army has been destroyed and whose entire country (or a series of the most defensible points therein) has been occupied relying on partisan rebels to give him negotiation power is plainly ahistorical as far as I know.

Never mind the fact that lightly occupying a rival country as you suggest is a really bad idea and therefore ahistorical compared to fully occupying a particular section of a country, which is how EU4's warfare should really go in more one-sided wars.

Wouldn't necessarily disagree, and these are some things that mods can address.

I have yet to hear of a mod that changes the way warscore is coded, but do let me know if you see one.

The point being that, the game does not actually "let you" achieve the 'total victory' that most guys who feel the Warscore system is broken seem to think they have achieved when they have destroyed all of the target countries regiments and occupied all of his provinces. While it might be nice if it was possible to engage in total war, it isn't unreasonable that it is not an option in a game like EU4.

100% warscore is total victory within the game, in that there's nothing more you could do to add to your victory even if you had unlimited resources. Total victory is an option, and there's nothing to indicate otherwise until you get to the peace offer screen, which is stupid.

When you've got them at 100% Warscore they are not utterly crushed, with no possibility to turn the tide. They still have the capacity to engage in diplomacy, they still gather a small amount of tax from the provinces you have occupied, and if rebels spawn they can even 'take back' provinces. This combined with the fact that they can engage in diplomacy means that a nation at 100% WS is hardly the helpless totally defeated entity that one might think.

They can engage in diplomacy in which they have little to no leverage, and rebels "liberating" provinces does little to increase that leverage unless the rebels happen to be intent on restoring the previous king (which is far from always the case). A nation with -100% warscore is every bit as helpless as they look, and there's no point in making stuff up otherwise to cover up the failures of the warscore system.

 

[Chevaresqye]

I don't have exhaustive knowledge of the period, so I cannot say what proportion of wars were short and simple as you describe. However some very famous wars during the period (100 years war, 30 years war, 80 years war) lasted a long time, involved nearly every power in Europe at one point or another, bankrupted many nations, depopulated whole regions and were seemingly nearly as great a scourge on land as WWI and resulted in rather minor exchanges of territory afterwards. That is what I meant by ridiculous.

I agree that destroying all of the AIs regiments and sieging all of his provinces in order to get him to some of the wargoals that require 100% seems a bit gamey. But I don't think it is 'broken' nor even bad design. In order to take things from the AI, he has to be soundly beaten. You can often easily take 2 provinces for 50% WS, sometimes even less. You can easily rackup 50% WS just from battles and occupying two or three provinces.

None of those wars you listed had a totally occupied situation; all of them ended up with stalemate. A province would change hand upon being occupied and may get return when peace treaty is signed. The occupier may decided to keep the province at the cost of rebel risk and aggressive expansion. Simple, but need to be write in source code.

 

[Novacat]

Maybe you could make a mod?

A cursory check in defines should tell you theres no way to change the base warscore costs of provinces...

 

[Xara]

`
yesman
enter

Take anything you want.

 

[Karrde]

I consider it very much unreasonable. Not everyone in EU4 is a chivalric European. If I decide I am sick of my enemy's continued resistance despite being utterly defeated and decide to burn his whole country, population and all, to the ground, the game should very well let me. Either that, or the enemies in this game should not be so damn stubborn about letting go of more than one or two provinces after I had occupied their entire country, driven their war exhaustion to 20, and killed every army they had.

Countries in the time period (generally) didn't have the manpower or resources to devote to such a task.
A little bit of research shows that the estimated French population circa 1600 was 16 million people with an army size of 50-100,000.
Germany(HRE) had ~20 million
England and Wales ~4.5 million

Take a France vs HRE war
I'm confused as to how you expect an army of 50-100,000 that has fully 'occupied' the HRE to exterminate 20 million people.
Warfare for most of the games timeframe (especially in Europe on which the game is modelled) was quite different to warfare of the victorian era (I actually think they could cut EU short by 30 years and make VIC2 start with the french revolution and it's diplomacy system is a better way to model the events that happened)

 

[Novacat]

I'm confused as to how you expect an army of 50-100,000 that has fully 'occupied' the HRE to exterminate 20 million people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire

Very easily.

 

[Anthropoid]

Lets examine this as dispassionately as we can. Here is a list of the "provinces" of France when the nation was dissolved at the time of the French Revolution. These more or less reflect what is in the game, even at start in 1444. Lets focus on one province in particular. I'll just pick Orleanais as I know a bit about that one.

In 1428-1429 alone, Orleanais Province saw at least five important battles/sieges: Orleans, Beaugency, Meung, Janville, Jargeau. In each of those battles, the English suffered between 2000 and 4000 casualties and in each battle there were anywhere from 3000 to 6000 combatants on each side. Each has its own wiki page so you can look them up for yourself.

Presumably with this string of battles/sieges in 1428/29, the French had pretty much regained "control" of the province of Orleans, a territory that must have been something like 20,000 km^2. France in the 1450s seems to have had about 18,000,000 population. Whether Orleans should be 1/10th or 1/20th of that total I cannot say. Given Orlean was a major city perhaps it is safe to say it should be on the higher end, but given this is just bbs hypothesizing, lets low ball it at 1/20th = 900,000 residents in Orlean in ca. 1450. At least three cities / major towns (Orleans, Blois, and Chartres) with each of those perhaps having between 150K and 200K each? I dunno. . . maybe my numbers are a bit high . . . Even if we go with 500,000 total population for all of "Orlean province" . . . we still have the fact that in real history, there were at least half-dozen battles/sieges to wrest provisional control of the province back from the English by the French. Something like 10,000 to 15,000 English casualties . . . yet, in game 2000 guys (even less if the garrison is somewhat depleted) can gain (in your mind) "total control" of this province?

You know what, your right. The game is totally broken. I don't even know why we are playing it.

 

[mcmanusaur]

Lets examine this as dispassionately as we can. Here is a list of the "provinces" of France when the nation was dissolved at the time of the French Revolution. These more or less reflect what is in the game, even at start in 1444. Lets focus on one province in particular. I'll just pick Orleanais as I know a bit about that one.

In 1428-1429 alone, Orleanais Province saw at least five important battles/sieges: Orleans, Beaugency, Meung, Janville, Jargeau. In each of those battles, the English suffered between 2000 and 4000 casualties and in each battle there were anywhere from 3000 to 6000 combatants on each side. Each has its own wiki page so you can look them up for yourself.

Presumably with this string of battles/sieges in 1428/29, the French had pretty much regained "control" of the province of Orleans, a territory that must have been something like 20,000 km^2. France in the 1450s seems to have had about 18,000,000 population. Whether Orleans should be 1/10th or 1/20th of that total I cannot say. Given Orlean was a major city perhaps it is safe to say it should be on the higher end, but given this is just bbs hypothesizing, lets low ball it at 1/20th = 900,000 residents in Orlean in ca. 1450. At least three cities / major towns (Orleans, Blois, and Chartres) with each of those perhaps having between 150K and 200K each? I dunno. . . maybe my numbers are a bit high . . . Even if we go with 500,000 total population for all of "Orlean province" . . . we still have the fact that in real history, there were at least half-dozen battles/sieges to wrest provisional control of the province back from the English by the French. Something like 10,000 to 15,000 English casualties . . . yet, in game 2000 guys (even less if the garrison is somewhat depleted) can gain (in your mind) "total control" of this province?

You know what, your right. The game is totally broken. I don't even know why we are playing it.

Yes, it's more logical to assume that this game simply doesn't represent the costs of war and occupation, and thus has an arbitrarily restrictive warscore system because of that shortcoming, then it is to assume that the "occupation" in the game intentionally represents some mystical "sort of occupied but not" status and that the warscore system reflects the correct amount of negotiation power one should have in such circumstances.

 

[Anthropoid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire

Very easily.

Genghis Khan, his generals and successors preferred to offer their enemies the chance to surrender without resistance in order to avoid war, to become vassals by sending tribute, accepting Mongol residents, and/or contributing troops. The Khans guaranteed protection only if the populace submitted to Mongol rule and was obedient to it.

Sources record massive destruction, terror and death if there was resistance. David Nicole notes in The Mongol Warlords: "terror and mass extermination of anyone opposing them was a well-tested Mongol tactic."[4] The alternative to submission was total war: if refused, Mongol leaders ordered the collective slaughter of populations and destruction of property, as the source of oppressive evil. Such was the fate of resisting communities during the invasions of the Khwarezmid Empire.

Doesn't even sound like Hitler. Perhaps this style of warfare has been neglected in the game given it was conducted by some of the cultures that are playable in the game. Given the focus is on Europa I guess that is an understandable (though no less forgiveable!) error.

Yes, it's more logical to assume that this game simply doesn't represent the costs of war and occupation, and thus has an arbitrarily restrictive warscore system because of that shortcoming, then it is to assume that the "occupation" in the game intentionally represents some mystical "sort of occupied but not" status and that the warscore system reflects the correct amount of negotiation power one should have in such circumstances.

LOL . . the game represents what the game designers intended it to represent. And you and I bought it, and we have got our monies worth for our EULAs I think. Beyond that, the complaints that 'warscore is broken' are being made about fundamental game mechanics that are seemingly as old as the EU series. In sum, if it cannot be modded as Novacat seems to think, then all of this is just so much whistling in the wind.

If it can be modded then threads such as this one seem to generate far more heat than light.

 

[Novacat]

Doesn't even sound like Hitler. Perhaps this style of warfare has been neglected in the game given it was conducted by some of the cultures that are playable in the game. Given the focus is on Europa I guess that is an understandable (though no less forgiveable!) error.

That was mainly to refute people whom have said that small forces could not inflict massive damage on a large hostile civilian population... The Mongols certainly could, and did.

 

[Anthropoid]

That was mainly to refute people whom have said that small forces could not inflict massive damage on a large hostile civilian population... The Mongols certainly could, and did.

Its a culture thing I think. When you are killing people who you barely regard as human, it isn't such a problem to kill as many of them as you can and destroy everything you can destroy. Certainly the Mongols perpetrated this style of warfare numerous times during the preceding centuries. Perhaps some wars even reflected style of 'total war' during the period in question. Was there a specific conflict you had in mind?

 

[mcmanusaur]

LOL . . the game represents what the game designers intended it to represent.

And from what I hear according to Paradox the game is intended to represent empire-building with an emphasis on war over peace. In reality the game has a rather mediocre representation of war itself (warscore is pretty broken by my estimation and the battles themselves aren't terribly engaging), along with several punitive mechanisms that deter the player from engaging in what is apparently the focus of the game, and an equally mediocre representation of peacetime activity. EU4 succeeds in some ways, but not particularly in the ways the devs intended from what I can tell.

And you and I bought it, and we have got our monies worth for our EULAs I think.

I've certainly got my money's worth, and I do still enjoy the game (more than any other strategy game this year) despite its flaws, but that doesn't make some of the design decisions any less bone-headed.

 

[Novacat]

Its a culture thing I think. When you are killing people who you barely regard as human, it isn't such a problem to kill as many of them as you can and destroy everything you can destroy. Certainly the Mongols perpetrated this style of warfare numerous times during the preceding centuries. Perhaps some wars even reflected style of 'total war' during the period in question. Was there a specific conflict you had in mind?

Manchu invasion of China, Timurid invasion of India, Ottoman invasion of Mamluks, Russian invasion of Siberia, hell, even Napoleon invasion of Europe. People like to make it sound like these were rare events that almost never happened during the EU4 period, yet they did, and were huge defining characteristics of that period.

 

[Anthropoid]

And from what I hear according to Paradox the game is intended to represent empire-building with an emphasis on war over peace. In reality the game has a rather mediocre representation of war itself (warscore is pretty broken by my estimation and the battles themselves aren't terribly engaging), along with several punitive mechanisms that deter the player from engaging in what is apparently the focus of the game, and an equally mediocre representation of peacetime activity.

I've certainly got my money's worth, and I do still enjoy the game (more than any other strategy game this year) despite its flaws, but that doesn't make some of the design decisions any less bone-headed.

Hmmm, without knowledge of PDS' ledger books, I'd be hard pressed to agree at their design decisions being "bone-headed," no matter how "flawed" or imperfect I might agree the simulation is from the standpoint of realism or historical fact.

Even the most hardcore "strategy game buffs" do not play strategy games because they want to come to grips with reality or historical facts.

 

[Anthropoid]

Manchu invasion of China, Timurid invasion of India, Ottoman invasion of Mamluks, Russian invasion of Siberia, hell, even Napoleon invasion of Europe. People like to make it sound like these were rare events that almost never happened during the EU4 period, yet they did, and were huge defining characteristics of that period.

Not familiar with the eastern ones. My understanding of the Napoleonic wars was that most of the casualties were actual combatants, not civilians. The 30 and 80 years exacted a much higher relative civilian toll I believe. But in that case, the perpetrators were mostly brigands and not _so much_ soldiers carrying out the official orders of a commander as a strategy to punish those who refused to submit.

 

[Novacat]

Not familiar with the eastern ones. My understanding of the Napoleonic wars was that most of the casualties were actual combatants, not civilians. The 30 and 80 years exacted a much higher relative civilian toll I believe. But in that case, the perpetrators were mostly brigands and not _so much_ soldiers carrying out the official orders of a commander as a strategy to punish those who refused to submit.

Napoleon did managed to subjugate most of Europe in a few wars, though.

 

[GamingHUD]

A cursory check in defines should tell you theres no way to change the base warscore costs of provinces...

Have you tried altering this:

MAX_ANNEX_SIZE = 10000, 						-- _DDEF_MAX_ANNEX_SIZE_ (Max number of provinces that can be annexed at once)

To see what effect it has? It doesn't necessarily read as something that would effect the province cost, of course, but then taking it at face value comes across as a redundant value, so maybe, just maybe.

Edit: Just tested it myself, didn't really effect anything that I could tell.