I thought stackwiping has been reduced drastically in Eu4. Personally for me, I'd much rather prefer having several decisive battles instead of fighting the same AI army several dozen times. It's quite tedious and not a lot of fun really.
Why are stack wipes in the game?
- Thread starter Pellucid
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I think stack whiping makes wars totally unintresting and promotes exploitive gameplay before fun and challenge. However, it has become alot better with EU4 mechanics/AI.
Baby I played EU2 ping pong. You know, the game where the enemy army was allowed to retreat to ANY province it had access to. Including your provinces.
In theory, a defeated army should be able to safely retreat behind its defensive fort perimeter. In theory. History has shown that, more often than not, a defeated and demoralized army isn't capable of a hasty, organized retreat, after which it is able to fight again as if nothing has happened. The retreat is chaotic at the best of times, losing significant portions of the army to desertions, capture, and bad communications, as well as enormous amounts of supplies and equipment. All this means that when the next round of engagements occurs, the retreating army will be in worse and worse shape, until it is ultimately forced to surrender or disband.
On the issue of fort mechanics, it's not realistic to assume that just because there is a fort in each province, an army can't maneuver its way around them. Battles are regularly fought far away from the forts. Of course, a wise commander will leave behind a few thousand men to siege the forts as his army pursues deeper into enemy territory - but that is a decision that the EU4 player can make. If the player wants to risk losing the army by pursuing the enemy into enemy territory without locking down the forts, that is the player's prerogative.
On the issue of fort mechanics, it's not realistic to assume that just because there is a fort in each province, an army can't maneuver its way around them. Battles are regularly fought far away from the forts. Of course, a wise commander will leave behind a few thousand men to siege the forts as his army pursues deeper into enemy territory - but that is a decision that the EU4 player can make. If the player wants to risk losing the army by pursuing the enemy into enemy territory without locking down the forts, that is the player's prerogative.
Can you name a major conflict in which this kind of carpet sieging was the order of the day? I can think of an awful lot of conflicts where commanders assaulted forts along the way (which is suicide in this game), but not many where large portions of enemy territory were under siege.
To be fair truely decisive victories were mostly introduced during the napoleontic wars, not before. Armies were often defeated and fully reinforced if not strenghtened even further before the enemy had had time to siege enough forts to reach the defeated army.
I understand that it is frustrating to not be able to defeat te enemy in one big battle because that is the way us westerners like to win our wars, that doesn't mean it should be implemented like that in the game.
Adding some form of desertion to retreating armies wouldn't be a bad thing per se in my eyes, but the thing is that because you can chase armies far into enemy territory when you shouldn't be able to means this would give the attacking army too much of an advantage.
I understand that it is frustrating to not be able to defeat te enemy in one big battle because that is the way us westerners like to win our wars, that doesn't mean it should be implemented like that in the game.
Adding some form of desertion to retreating armies wouldn't be a bad thing per se in my eyes, but the thing is that because you can chase armies far into enemy territory when you shouldn't be able to means this would give the attacking army too much of an advantage.
One thing that could make this situation a bit better is if the AI wasn't so willing to fight to the death in every battle.
The AI never makes a strategic retreat. Ever.
The AI never makes a strategic retreat. Ever.
The problem with this perhaps, is that wars wont' last very long, while in reality wars in the early modern period could last for years.
Crapet sieging isn't in the game due to the hard battles but due to the fact that it is possible. The battle situation is completely seperate from it.
Decisive battles would be highly ahistorical untill the 1800's.
Decisive battles would be highly ahistorical untill the 1800's.
IMO the problem is more that often armies dispersed instead of being reinforced after retreating. That is, a situation were it wasn´t wiped but instead Manpower went back to pool and army disbanded wouldn´t be bad sometimes.
Stack wipe wouldn't be bad if there was a way to then rebuild an army in a province. The issue is that once you lose your stack it's game over unless you're a Russia with Siberia. Remaking your army leaves you so vulnerable to just an army parading around eating your newly made stacks that there's mostly no winning after that. It only gets more obvious with the less provinces you have, and with the AI tanking its maintenance in peace time, jumping OPM's and the like is ridiculously easy, even a 5 province can be jumped then immediately stack-wiped to transition to instant carpet siege.
Not ahistorical, just rare. Battle of Pavia (1525) saw 15,000 Frenchmen killed, wounded, and/or captured. That's out of around 23,000 total. The AI is far too willing to destroy themselves and destroy their stacks.
The problem is how easy army is reinforced and filled with new men, replacing those perished. If reinforcements were realistic and required some sort of prepared supplies being distributed among drafted in specific conscription centers, then yes, remove current mechanics. But atm it's much better than hunting down a bunch of devastated regiments through half of Europe.
Shattered retreat should mean army losing ALL its heavy weaponry such as cannons, most of supplies and also significant amount of hand guns. It's not the case now, the army just retreats to nearby province and gets replenished from there regardless of its losses and distance from the capital.
Shattered retreat should mean army losing ALL its heavy weaponry such as cannons, most of supplies and also significant amount of hand guns. It's not the case now, the army just retreats to nearby province and gets replenished from there regardless of its losses and distance from the capital.
I don't know EU4's history as well as I know contemporary history, so off the top of my head the Franco-Prussian War comes to mind.
The wipe mechanic symbolized a complete route of the enemy forces beyond hope of regrouping. It's really not that unrealistic considering that for most of the game the armies are peasants pressed into service who kinda just wanna go home. Stackwipes also award a large amount of WS and WE which is realistic as most countries wouldn't be able to recover from having their army completely wiped out. Rome lost 10 entire legions to the Germanic tribes, that would be a stack wipe.
The problem with the mechanic is the fact that you can recover pretty easily from it if you aren't being carpet sieged. If you let the AI they will rebuild a 20k stack in about 3 months and use diplo points to burn of WE. If all else fails they will build dozens of mercs in 10 days which are for some reason readily available anywhere (I really would prefer the CK merc mechanic being used here). What this leads to is that a stackwipe is not as decisive as it should be in terms of finishing a war quickly. This is why I almost exclusively use the Superiority (holy war type cb) if I can, because it awards upwards to 4-5 WS per won battle and 10-15 for stackwipes. More importantly it also awards 1-2 for wiping a newly build 1k stack, which I find very reasonable. The only downside is that you carefully have to watch your vassals and allies or they will wreck your WS very quickly.
"Stackwipe" right at gamestart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Varna
The problem with the mechanic is the fact that you can recover pretty easily from it if you aren't being carpet sieged. If you let the AI they will rebuild a 20k stack in about 3 months and use diplo points to burn of WE. If all else fails they will build dozens of mercs in 10 days which are for some reason readily available anywhere (I really would prefer the CK merc mechanic being used here). What this leads to is that a stackwipe is not as decisive as it should be in terms of finishing a war quickly. This is why I almost exclusively use the Superiority (holy war type cb) if I can, because it awards upwards to 4-5 WS per won battle and 10-15 for stackwipes. More importantly it also awards 1-2 for wiping a newly build 1k stack, which I find very reasonable. The only downside is that you carefully have to watch your vassals and allies or they will wreck your WS very quickly.
"Stackwipe" right at gamestart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Varna
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There's also the problem fight has to go on for 12 days before one side can withdraw unless you mod the value, and by 16th to 17th century @ ingame IMHO it is too short to have any real impact other than odd cases where you have massive total sum of manpower from both sides involved in single pitched battle.
Not that I have any intention to choose sides in this discussion, but the franco dutch war comes to mind. In the first year of this war the dutch armies were completely defeated and had to retreat to 'fortress holland' after which the rest of the dutch cities were besieged by French, Munsterian and colognian armies.
The root problem is the strategic combat level. Historical maneuvers in this era concentrated on taking and holding land. Generally, if you sieged a province down you either ended up with said province being taken in the peace or you got an offsetting concession somewhere else of roughly equal value. This is completely not how EUIV works.
In EUIV to get anything from the AI you either need to be at war for forever while the war goal slowly builds warscore which even then that doesn't allow you to do simple things like vassalize a medium war target with a large warleader a lot of the time. Further, you have the problem that the AI is a cussed stubborn suicidal moron who won't give you anything ... and rapidly will give you everything. With siege attrition, the gap between what it costs to take a decent goal (e.g. Liguria) and what it costs to take 100% is pretty small. As long as the AI holds out to the bitter end, you pretty much have only three choices for how to rack up enough WS to get what you want.
1. Big sieges. You can drop enough manpower on your sieges to stop the AI from attacking. Siege attrition makes this pretty unworkable for most countries - too often you will just end up burning through scads of manpower. This is also slow until you are absolutely huge as you have to siege each province sequentially and that means years long wars.
2. Move dancing. Okay, drop off minimal stacks in every border province, keep a big stack back behind the border. Whenever the AI threatens to crush a siege stack, threaten to move in your big stack. Then the AI cancels their move. You cancel yours. Lather, rinse, repeat. This can be extremely manpower/cost efficient ... but it is microhell. You are also limited to how many sieges you can run at a time.
3. Take the wargoal, farm battle WS, and maybe blockade for quick WS. For this to work you want a lot of small battles and the best way to get those is either to let an AI alliance invade your land (then rolling the siege armies up) or stack wiping and then crushing the mercs the AI foolishly tries to raise. Sometimes it can be worth it to hole up in the mountains, bait the AI up there, and then reinforce the place ... but normally if you are poaching battles you really want to kill off the enemy stack so you can get your battle score up quickly.
4. Annihilation and carpet sieging. Here you pay a big up front cost to crush the AI early ... and then you siege everything in one go. It is the most highly parallel option and hence is the most time efficient. With high costs for big sieges, it normally beats option 1 silly on a cost/benefit basis. It is relatively low on micro hell and much faster than option 2. It can be quicker than option 3.
If you take either option 3 or 4, you basically beat the AI's main army once or twice to win the war, and then you do a lot of silly things to convince the AI that it actually has lost. Because of the silly things you need to do, period casualty rates make the game highly tedious if the enemy stacks survives like it did historically.
If you want to make casualties historical, then you need to start by making peace mechanisms and then war strategy historical. As long as the game makes big sieges so much more costly than anything else, you will create a huge incentive to stack wipe -> carpet siege. If, however, the AI would offer up decent peaces (e.g. territory or vassalization) for just a siege or two and a majority stack vs stack victory or two, then war wouldn't mostly necessitate stack wiping. But right now the AI won't surrender without a stack wipe - or something more costly - and things like siege attrition and the imbalance between defender/aggressor attrition push every war to stack wipe first, then dick around to get WS later. Ping ponging is an inevitable result if you can't wipe the enemy stack (and even less historical than stack wiping).
In EUIV to get anything from the AI you either need to be at war for forever while the war goal slowly builds warscore which even then that doesn't allow you to do simple things like vassalize a medium war target with a large warleader a lot of the time. Further, you have the problem that the AI is a cussed stubborn suicidal moron who won't give you anything ... and rapidly will give you everything. With siege attrition, the gap between what it costs to take a decent goal (e.g. Liguria) and what it costs to take 100% is pretty small. As long as the AI holds out to the bitter end, you pretty much have only three choices for how to rack up enough WS to get what you want.
1. Big sieges. You can drop enough manpower on your sieges to stop the AI from attacking. Siege attrition makes this pretty unworkable for most countries - too often you will just end up burning through scads of manpower. This is also slow until you are absolutely huge as you have to siege each province sequentially and that means years long wars.
2. Move dancing. Okay, drop off minimal stacks in every border province, keep a big stack back behind the border. Whenever the AI threatens to crush a siege stack, threaten to move in your big stack. Then the AI cancels their move. You cancel yours. Lather, rinse, repeat. This can be extremely manpower/cost efficient ... but it is microhell. You are also limited to how many sieges you can run at a time.
3. Take the wargoal, farm battle WS, and maybe blockade for quick WS. For this to work you want a lot of small battles and the best way to get those is either to let an AI alliance invade your land (then rolling the siege armies up) or stack wiping and then crushing the mercs the AI foolishly tries to raise. Sometimes it can be worth it to hole up in the mountains, bait the AI up there, and then reinforce the place ... but normally if you are poaching battles you really want to kill off the enemy stack so you can get your battle score up quickly.
4. Annihilation and carpet sieging. Here you pay a big up front cost to crush the AI early ... and then you siege everything in one go. It is the most highly parallel option and hence is the most time efficient. With high costs for big sieges, it normally beats option 1 silly on a cost/benefit basis. It is relatively low on micro hell and much faster than option 2. It can be quicker than option 3.
If you take either option 3 or 4, you basically beat the AI's main army once or twice to win the war, and then you do a lot of silly things to convince the AI that it actually has lost. Because of the silly things you need to do, period casualty rates make the game highly tedious if the enemy stacks survives like it did historically.
If you want to make casualties historical, then you need to start by making peace mechanisms and then war strategy historical. As long as the game makes big sieges so much more costly than anything else, you will create a huge incentive to stack wipe -> carpet siege. If, however, the AI would offer up decent peaces (e.g. territory or vassalization) for just a siege or two and a majority stack vs stack victory or two, then war wouldn't mostly necessitate stack wiping. But right now the AI won't surrender without a stack wipe - or something more costly - and things like siege attrition and the imbalance between defender/aggressor attrition push every war to stack wipe first, then dick around to get WS later. Ping ponging is an inevitable result if you can't wipe the enemy stack (and even less historical than stack wiping).
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