We need an auto army management function

[knul]

As for the micromanagement of rebel hunting, I think the problem lies with the rebel system itself; automating armies to deal with wack-a-mole rebel armies is at best a patch. Rebellions should be genuinely threatening and dangerous. I'm thinking about the American Revolution, the Eighty Years War, the War of the Roses. Rebellions should not be a chore to be automatated away but exiting and dangerous events.

 

[safferli]

Um, eh, back to game topics now, please.

 

[highsis]

yes, let us not get this thread locked down by digressing if we are trying to get the Dev to heed us.

 

[highsis]

As for the micromanagement of rebel hunting, I think the problem lies with the rebel system itself; automating armies to deal with wack-a-mole rebel armies is at best a patch. Rebellions should be genuinely threatening and dangerous. I'm thinking about the American Revolution, the Eighty Years War, the War of the Roses. Rebellions should not be a chore to be automatated away but exiting and dangerous events.

Micromanagement requirements doesn't make it more dangerous, just more tedious. This game isn't on real-time. You can stop and assgin orders which will be ALWAYS efficient than Auto-rebel-hunting. Thus, using auto-hunt makes it more dangerous, in fact. It's just a lot less efforts. There is no point of forcing players to make unneeded efforts.

 

[unmerged(215686)]

I support the inclusion of an option to delegate armies/provinces to AI control...

though I retain the right to not use that option myself.

 

[knul]

Micromanagement requirements doesn't make it more dangerous, just more tedious. This game isn't on real-time. You can stop and assgin orders which will be ALWAYS efficient than Auto-rebel-hunting. Thus, using auto-hunt makes it more dangerous, in fact. It's just a lot less efforts. There is no point of forcing players to make unneeded efforts.

Read my post: I am arguing for a more dangerous rebellion system in which rebellions are much larger and can really threathen your nation instead of raising a 3K army here and there. If a standard rebellion would consist of as many troops as your own army, there would be no micromanagement tedium: you have to fight a full-blown war!

The mechanism that rebellion causes small armies to appear that can be crushed easily but require dull intervention is IMO outdated and should be replaced by a better rebellion system (I must add that HttH's additional of "rebels with a cause" was a a very good step forward).

 

[Foelsgaard]

Promote better interface! Down with automation!

Enabling players to do aggregate actions with a few clicks instead of having the amount of clicks rise linearly with the amount of stuff to do is a much much better solution that just handing control over to the AI.


Generally we'd want to play the game instead of letting the AI do it. What we don't want is to click once or twice for every of the 100 regiments or buildings we want to train or build.

Aggregate actions is the way to go!

 

[ddudee]

I also don't play past 1600 because micromanaging rebels in colonies and small boring wars with no chance of losing. The concept isn't difficult, make it as if some armies I assign belonged to a vassal and assign a geographic area where they are alowed to work. I think that is the whole point of viceroyalties.

 

[highsis]

Read my post: I am arguing for a more dangerous rebellion system in which rebellions are much larger and can really threathen your nation instead of raising a 3K army here and there. If a standard rebellion would consist of as many troops as your own army, there would be no micromanagement tedium: you have to fight a full-blown war!

The mechanism that rebellion causes small armies to appear that can be crushed easily but require dull intervention is IMO outdated and should be replaced by a better rebellion system (I must add that HttH's additional of "rebels with a cause" was a a very good step forward).

I misunderstood. Sorry.

 

[Garak]

Read my post: I am arguing for a more dangerous rebellion system in which rebellions are much larger and can really threathen your nation instead of raising a 3K army here and there. If a standard rebellion would consist of as many troops as your own army, there would be no micromanagement tedium: you have to fight a full-blown war!

The mechanism that rebellion causes small armies to appear that can be crushed easily but require dull intervention is IMO outdated and should be replaced by a better rebellion system (I must add that HttH's additional of "rebels with a cause" was a a very good step forward).

Just a nitpicking point, the rebels with a cause system came with IN, not HttT. I agree in general that rebellions would be nice if they were more dangerous. However, you have to be careful, for fear of ending up with the insane rebellions you get in Victoria II.

 

[Orinsul]

Its not just rebels, the whole military side of it gets tedious quick if youre not playing the game as a war game, and many of us dont and wouldnt play the game if thats all it was.
you don't need viceroyalities or theatres fo anything complicated enough to never be a plausible patch edition
a simple on/off automation switch on each unit would suffice and would be a small enough thing for the developers to do without having to charge for it.

 

[knul]

I also don't play past 1600 because micromanaging rebels in colonies and small boring wars with no chance of losing. The concept isn't difficult, make it as if some armies I assign belonged to a vassal and assign a geographic area where they are alowed to work. I think that is the whole point of viceroyalties.

I would also like to create viceroyalties, like releasing vassals. In my first DW game I played as France and I created a form of "viceroyalty" by releasing Normandy as a vassal and giving it all the territory I conquered in India. So basically my oversees territiries were indirectly controlled, had their own standing army which I couldn't just use anywhere I wanted.

In general I would love to have more options in releasing vassals, f.e. an East Indian Company as vassal in oversees territories.

I misunderstood. Sorry.

No worries, I shouldn't have snapped against you as I did.

Just a nitpicking point, the rebels with a cause system came with IN, not HttT. I agree in general that rebellions would be nice if they were more dangerous. However, you have to be careful, for fear of ending up with the insane rebellions you get in Victoria II.

Ahh, my bad.

Of course, if rebellions become bigger than they should be less frequent as well. And balancing would be quite difficult, but still for EU4 it would be a nice idea.

Its not just rebels, the whole military side of it gets tedious quick if youre not playing the game as a war game, and many of us dont and wouldnt play the game if thats all it was.
you don't need viceroyalities or theatres fo anything complicated enough to never be a plausible patch edition
a simple on/off automation switch on each unit would suffice and would be a small enough thing for the developers to do without having to charge for it.

But what would units "switched on" do? Automation is frustration if the AI doesn't do what you want.

 

[Orinsul]

But what would units "switched on" do? Automation is frustration if the AI doesn't do what you want.

yes it is, but its less frustrating than having to do it yourself when you really just dont care
we dont need a perfect solution, we just need a solution.

 

[themrwho]

With regards to army management, (this is not auto-management though) one improvement I can think of is to have an option to seperate stacks into tactical units. This is what I do manually (a lot!) and I think it would help many users if not most.

Normally in peace time I 'park' and in war time maneuver military units in relatively small stacks or tactical units, which I call brigades. Each of those can 'fight' on their own - what I typically use is 8 inf + 4cav per brigade initially and 16 inf + 8 cav in late game. This is a force large enough to remove most rebel armies but not big enough to fight (main) enemy's main stacks. Obviously for the main fights many brigades converge in one of my border provinces, combine to a single unit, follow & fight enemy stacks, then re-organise into brigades. Now at this stage, it would be great to have a 'un-combine' button, seperating say 60+ units into as many as possible brigades.

I don't know how other people manage their armies and don't want to believe everyone uses the same size or style, but due to game concepts I assume many people use similar park & move separate AND fight combined system? If so, this 'un-combine' button might save a lot of time, as I find this is the main repeatitive job while playing the game.

Programmatically I imagine there could be a typical 'brigade' setting somewhere, so that un-combine button would know how to do that, so any user can set their typical army composition in this setting once and use it repeatedly over centuries.

As this is related to army management, I would also like to hear about how you manage your armies, is there a better method that works for you, without requiring any changes to the game?

Thanks

 

[highsis]

beta really should add this change.

It won't certainly affect the game speed that so many people use as an excuse to defend some poorly implanted features, so why not.

I will be so glad that I will sing songs that honor PI for days if this goes into the game.

 

[-Jester-]

One thing I think might be a good idea would be to expand on the rebel hunting feature. Give your armies an AI toggle option to either "rebel hunt" dramatically smaller enemy armies or to attempt to evade dramatically larger enemy armies.

This would take care of my biggest pet peeve with large wars: after you have won the war, you have to chase around a bunch of dinky annoying armies as they pop up and run away from you over and over again. That is not fun or challenging.

It would also handle the less annoying issue of forgetting about your small occupying forces and having them wiped out by an enemy force you forgot about or didn't notice.

 

[the343danny]

Hello guys, I'll do a little necro here because this is something I'm really interested in.

I only ever play SP but it gets incredibly boring sometimes because there is no challenge whatsoever unless you play like you are 5 years old once you get past the speedbumps of having a small nation in the first few centuries. Because of that, I resorted to simply doing hands off games because it is more entertaining than smashing everything that gets in your way. The way it is now with the poor AI and the godly player, the player doesn't even need to build his empire carefully because any weaknesses in the player's empire will be offset by his near godly ability to smash any nation that decides to challenge you, provided that he is not 10 times the player's size. For me and many others, it is only fun to play in the first two centuries because of the uncertainty of the game, or at least more so than the rest of the game where for example with BYZ, its a race against infamy and time to conquer the old empire as fast as possible with the worst outcome being too slow to bring everything that once was Rome to the new Rome.

However, if I had an option to let the incompetent AI control my armies, I can be on equal footing with the other nations in terms of military prowess and defeat my enemies based on the structure of my nation rather than relying on AI incompetence. Sure, thats not always the case, but theres many moments where such an option will be wonderful to me to be able to use. It seems like the only counter argument on why an option cannot be included concerns the convenience of the development team, for those who do not want it do not need to use it and it will not have any threat of dividing up the community considering this will mainly be for SP use, not MP.

Or, if anybody knows a way I can do it myself without needing the team to do it for me, can anybody tell me? I have a feeling it may be possible considering we have rebel control and AI retains control over armies and diplomacy when I tag switch to another nation.

 

[Vainfall]

A better setup might be limited the number of troops you can control during a war and have the AI control the rest of the forces once your empire reaches a certain size. Once the war gets going these are the only troops you can control. This will limit the amount of brain power needed to play

lol

 

[Ashantai]

Having seen what the AI does to ruin my Empire even if I give it to them for a year there is no way I want the AI controlling anything of mine. The Hunt Rebels feature is a disaster, unusable at current time, and I can't imagine giving the AI control of an army in war time would be any better. Having seen how the AI just sits in winter provinces with attrition killing them by the thousand and the ludicrous tactics it uses, I don't want them controlling my army.

What about fleets? Humans take naval attrition...the AI will just drive them into the ocean and wait there until they sink!

 

[George LeS]

Having seen what the AI does to ruin my Empire even if I give it to them for a year there is no way I want the AI controlling anything of mine. The Hunt Rebels feature is a disaster, unusable at current time, and I can't imagine giving the AI control of an army in war time would be any better. Having seen how the AI just sits in winter provinces with attrition killing them by the thousand and the ludicrous tactics it uses, I don't want them controlling my army.

What about fleets? Humans take naval attrition...the AI will just drive them into the ocean and wait there until they sink!

On the last point, EUII had a feature by which, if you left a fleet out too long, it automatically returned to port. It was similar to retreats by losing fleets in EUIII. I've argued for some time that this should be revived, and could be the basis for adding attrition for AI navies.