When the indirect approach no longer work, what is your basic strategy for defeating in a land war ''blobbers'' like France or the Ottomans ?

[BaronNoir]

Seems (and is) a very basic question, but kinda at the core of the game.

At one time, you will have to face directly a superpower that have high quality troops that significantly outnumber yours, merc or not merc, ideas or not ideas, they simply have twice or thrice the number of your soldiers. And there is no trick this time : no ally to make a diversion, no island or straits to trap stacks, nothing. It's an all out slugfest.

As I never got the grasp on how wiping (and not merely repelling) ennemies with any reliability, my tactic since the very early game remain the same.

A)Create a continous line of fortresses (sometimes, two contiguous provinces will be bessieged, allowing a small window to defeat one stack becore the other stack backtrack and reach the relief force. Tend to not work very well against Ottomans or France, since they have enough troops to bessiege both provinces and reinforce both with 50-100-150k troops. This however make sure that a single fortress falling does not mean the defence collapsing at onc (each taken fortress is bessieged ASAP and stormed, with a minimal cost if done quickly)

B)Choose an objective that will be ''heldable'' for a while (in the ''no trick'' scenario depicted above, it's going to be a fortress on my border than can will be stormed on day one of the war)

C)Play for 5 years a whack-a-moke game : ennemy bessiege your fortress, wait till a breach is made, counterattack, withdraw to zero attrition, repeat while attempting to blockade the coasts

D)Make the ennemy allies sign white peace

E)When you have maximum war score and the ennemy is war exhausted, counter-attack (if possible, reach the ennemy capital, if not just take fortress a bit deeper in their lands)

 

[Hazes4ever]

Attack when they are at war with somebody else otherwise save scum.

 

[Cookiepie]

Accept that forcelimit is just a number and/or outmanuever them (relatively often they just sit on a fort or two as you carpet their land, if you feel fancy try to trap them on an island)

 

[BaronNoir]

Attack when they are at war with somebody else otherwise save scum.

Yeah, that what I meant by ''trick''-obviously, this is the go to way, but sooner or later, you will have to do it alone.

 

[Jiben]

Either "just" repell them and return after you have grown stronger, gotten allies or see that they went into another war etc.

Another way can be to try and cheese/rush their forts. Barrage and maybe even assault their forts and advance like lightning. If you beat the ottomans in one or two battles move like lightning and occupy constantinople for 30-40 ish% ws.

If that won't work slug it out, play defensive by mountain forts while going into debt/slackening recruitment before pushing when you either bleed their manpower dry our you beat their armies.

But honestly. You gotta plan for those blobs. if you go oh shit when the ottomans invade and you have no plan, no allies then you allready failed, you knew this would happen eventually.

 

[Terixis]

Make the biggest doomstack you can and focus on only fighting their smaller stacks in advantageous or neutral terrain, preferably while they're sieging your own mountain/hill forts. Do this for a long time and eventually even the Ottos will run out of manpower and you can siege their stuff down to take for yourself. If you do zero prep for fighting them beforehand and have no military ideas, wall of forts, or are simply too small, you're just going to get rolled.

 

[BaronNoir]

The doomstack issue is where I have issues, since it massacre my manpower

 

[Big Bad France]

Make sure you are using armies at full stack width and a full back row of cannons. Reinforce one of these into another and you won't lose any battles. The AI rarely runs a full back row of cannons. Everything just sort of trickles in as reinforcements for them, so as long as you also reinforce, the AI won't recover from the losses they take in the first couple of phases.

 

[Blust]

Depends if you want their land or just a white peace. Usually I do nothing but defend and melt their manpower for the first two or three years, then once the "length of war" modifier is going to the negative I'm on the offensive, making it decrease their moral and taking forts and capital asap

 

[Stratagyfan101]

If we're talking about the Ottomans, just ignore and avoid them until 1600 when they are significantly weaker and simply never catch up. I've seen the Ottomans never even achieve 5 morale. At that point they can come at me with 600k men, I'll have 40 warscore in the first year and they'll have half a million dead. If you are playing a strong enough country or can secure good allies early enough, the best anti-Otto strategy is taking Constantinople so they can't form an Empire rank government, and then boxing them out of Mamluks. If they allied Aq Qoyunlu, then they literally won't expand, except for a few Balkan provinces. The trouble of course is building that coalition, especially if you are playing in the Balkans. Poland and Austria usually load up on relations too quickly, Hungary is worthless, Muscovy can act as a deterrent for a while, but its army management is the worst in the game and by 1500 is so indebted it won't honor a call to arms.

France is a problem because they usually have super troops and a lot of them. So I usually just avoid France, either using them as an ally, or letting them be my last war.

 

[BaronNoir]

I have a completely different experience this expansion. The Ottomans are extremely strong in later game when I do not actively engage them from the get go. (BTW, I thank you all for the advice-this is the kind of thing I attempt to do. Ally with a stronger country, attack when they are at war, build forts, fight defensive in good positions....my issue was, what to do when all those tricks are no longerr sufficient, and you have to attack head-on the blob ? Yes, you should avoid it, but sometimes (always ?) you need to do it...

 

[bokorthedust]

One underrated feature when fighting numerically superior enemies is scorching the province where the battle will take place. The AI can't handle that, so it's a kinda AI abuse too, but everything's fair in love and (Ottoman) war. Set a bait with a smaller stack, wait for the AI to lock in, then scorch to province for 5 mil and pour in your reinforcements. You'll make it, because scorching slows down enemy movement, the battle starts, the AI starts reinforcing, but can't process the increased travel time so he arrives piecemeal, allowing you to defeat him in detail.

I'm not saying it'll work every time, you have to keep in mind the other factors too, like terrain and quality, but it really throws a wrench into any AI's war effectiveness if you play your hand right.

 

[Nostalgium]

I have a completely different experience this expansion. The Ottomans are extremely strong in later game when I do not actively engage them from the get go. (BTW, I thank you all for the advice-this is the kind of thing I attempt to do. Ally with a stronger country, attack when they are at war, build forts, fight defensive in good positions....my issue was, what to do when all those tricks are no longerr sufficient, and you have to attack head-on the blob ? Yes, you should avoid it, but sometimes (always ?) you need to do it...

Then you just have to grit your teeth and settle in for a long, long war. A trick I sometimes use is to let an enemy siege down a chokepoint, move past it, then bombard/assault it to take it back, trapping the army for a stackwipe while their reinforcements have to take out the fort. It's a nice way of slashing down some 40k men or something.

With the Ottomans in particular though, their strength is in numbers. The wider you can make your front, the better; if they can concentrate their infinite manpower in one place, you lose. If they spread it out, you can divide and conquer. You defeat the Ottomans one stack at a time, whenever that is possible. Even if that means sacrificing some of your own land to the Hordes while you go scythe down smaller stacks. Obviously, they will rebuild, but the AI is notoriously bad at consolodiating fresh armies during wartime, so you can kill the trickle-style reinforcements much easier than a full stack.

 

[jdavis86]

I think the keys are scorching, getting a feel for AI movement, and good fort placement. A good military build helps too of course. Take advantage of internal lines as much as you can.

For example, I played a Bharat game where by the early 17th century there was a massive Timurids to the west and a full mandate full reform Ming to the east. Bharat has pretty good MIL ideas, and with quantity I was strong enough to hold both fronts. Place forts in mountains as much as you can and placed in a way so that the AI can not easily walk between them (they'd have to walk back out of ZOC and then back in). Scorch the land. By the time you get tech 16 cannons you can really bleed them. It takes at least a couple wars on VH to really kill a big AI though. Depending how things go, once you get full war score from battles (+40) and length of war has ticked down pretty substantially, go on the attack, peace out any allies, and go siege their capital. It seems quite challenging to me to completely bleed something like a massive Ming or Ottoman, but you can get your warscore to a place where you can hurt them in a peace deal, rinse, and repeat, and each time you do it they'll be weaker the next.

 

[dD_ShockTrooper]

Place forts on islands across straights, like Corfu. This will bait armies into sieging them. Blockade the straight crossing and re-occupy their return province. Now once they finish the siege they can never come back to the mainland unless another army occupies their return province again.

 

[RedArmy]

Go over your diplo relations slots. It does not matter if you spend one, two, three or even more diplo points per month in order to have to more allies to beat a strong ennemy. You can also apply this strategy just before a coalition declares war on you.

In peace deals, take centers of trade, look at the map of goods to take the most interesting ones, bordergore your ennemy (take coast lines), spawn rebels and liberate vassals to get more free lands.

 

[necro84]

My favorite strategy as a muslim nation is to ally the Ottomans and get Syria as a vassal before Ottomans conquer Anatolia. After that Ottomans would defeat Mamluks for me and reconquer all Syrian provinces. If possible I try to get one province from Dulkadir or Karaman too, that way Ottomans can't complete their missions and lose interest in expansion. I get negative modifier for the relations but one province isn't enough to break the alliance.
If I want prevent Russia from forming I vassalize Ryazan and hope that PLC will keep Smolensk.

The best way to defeat stronger nations is not leting them becone strong in the first place. It may be slower and weaker start for me but mid game is much easier

 

[jonjowett]

Preparation:

• Get your professionalism up as high as possible (so you have a ready source of manpower)
• Save mil points so that you can go ahead of time in mil tech at the start of the war (especially if the enemy is also ahead of time)
• Fill out at least one military idea group (except naval ideas!)
• Build max-quality forts to protect all of your borders (preferably on defensive terrain)
  • If you can afford it, build a fallback line of forts between your border and your capital, so that one fallen border fort doesn't expose your capital
• Get some allies
  • Even if they won't help you against the uber-blob, they will deter opportunistic neighbours from attacking you while you're weak.

During the war:

• Use scorched earth on forts in defensive terrain; attack the enemy when they besiege.
  • Besiegers are treated as the attackers so they will receive all of the combat penalties from defensive terrain, and the scorching means they will be easily trapped in that province (and that any reinforcements will be slow to arrive).
  • Preferably, do this on occupied enemy forts. However, if there are none available, it may be worthwhile to sacrifice your own land.
• Keep your amies close to each other
  • You may be outnumbered overall, but local superiority will win battles. Win enough battles and you win the war.
  • Also, if you isolate your armies then an enemy who outnumbers you will happily wipe them out.
• If you're going to lose a battle, manually retreat asap.
  • This minimises your casualties.
• Regain manpower by slackening professionalism, calling in favors, or exploiting development
• If you have bad generals and excess mil power, hire some more generals and hope the RNG gives you something better
• If you're still low on manpower, hire some mercenaries
  • If you have <20% professionalism, it's probably worthwhile to slacken before hiring the mercs
• Be prepared to take burgher loans as soon as your treasury gets low (these 5 manually-triggered 1% loans are much better than the automatic 4% loans)
• Hope that one of the enemy's rivals attacks them from another direction while they're weak (and that your rivals don't do the same...)

Honestly though, I dislike these kinds of long grinding wars, so I tend to avoid early wars with uber-blobs. Instead, I passively block them wherever possible and focus on easy wars against smaller opponents. Eventually, my economy is significantly bigger than theirs, which makes them a pushover.

 

[iClipse]

I understand this is not really an answer to the question, but in general avoid fighting them in the first place. You say you have to engage eventually, I'd say there is usually another place to go to. The ottomans for example are often the last country I conquer. They might be 3000 development, but I'll have 25000 and I'll just beat them with numbers. + Core + trucebreak and do it again.

In general, fighting with superior numbers is the way to do things. If you can't muster the numbers yourself, exploit Diplomacy to get there. Go over your relations limit. Curry favors and call in 6-7 allies to beat them. It's also a way to grow when all your neighbours are bigger than you.

 

[Astalic]

There is a lot of specific case scenario, but in case of a defensive war you have an adventage if you have well placed fortification.
In case of a direct war against a bigger opponant, if i must declare, i need an oportunity. Like the +10% disc event or they are allready in another war or i have a 1-2 miltech adventage. For ottoman if i'm an european tag i like to wait their first war against mamluk. Their troop will be busy in the midle east and if they come back mamluk wil retake land and start to invade anatolia.

For France, best case scenario is a defensive war with an italian country (northern italy is really easy to defend because of the alps) and one miltech adventage. Naval invasion are easy to manage if you pay attention, the montainous fort in the alp are really strong.
You have something similar when you own all india (but if you do you can kill any AI, you have something like 2 k dev) and with persia vs otto.