Why Common Sense lacks, well, common sense!

[01smito01]

Is there any reason why historical regencies (Janos in Hungary, Infante Pedro in Portugal) generally have good stats, and are able to declare war like any other monarch, but outside of these, the player is restricted to 'regency councils' with below average stats and an inability to declare war?

I really don't see why this is the case.

 

[rebelito]

Maybe, it'd have to be something that wouldn't break up the current flow of gameplay, so no overcomplicated logistics officer simulator stuff.

Take a look into Advanced Tactics Gold, supply system is simple yet very functional for the scope of that game. It should not be hard to implement for Clausewitz (perhaps even with the existing morale system)... army is supplied as long as it can trace a path to a source. I will let you play with the details, but should not be hard.

No new DLC for that, though, please... it belongs to Art of War.

 

[Ame]

Agreed with your hostorical stuff, but what does that have to do with anything? I mentioned my bit as you claimed the DotF title was "a purely fantasy concept". I cited an example to disprove your absurd remark. P'Dox are creating a video game, they are not making a carbon copy of real history. DotF exists as something different in EU than reality. Whether DotF works in the games rendition is immaterial in the way that you and I have been discussing.

Except the concept is that all of (fill in religion) will fall under the defense of a noble strong defender of the faith; which is a purely fantasy concept. What it has to do with it is the fact that the ai can't expand into Europe and present the credible threat that western christendom was under due to the same set of defenders of the faith each time; and it's historical justification is even worst.

Besides it is highly immersion breaking; I have managed to westernize as (fill in Asian Power) and have decided to turn against say Spain and Spain's rival France formally declares war on me in defense of the catholic faith?

With protestants it gets even worst; they will go on suicidal wars because of defender of the faith and fail to be the credible threat to the emperor they actually are supposed to be.

 

[Autokrator48]

That, or we'll just keep the current system because realism is not a meaningful argument.

Realism is a meaningful argument as it is the overall structural basis of the game - it is a ''history'' simulator in some sort ; therefore, since EUIV is grounded in history, any arguments whose source is history should be taken into account. Otherwise, if realism is to be not considered as meaningful, why not include giant space robots? These seem fun.

Of course, EUIV is primarily a game, which entails that the first priority ought to be to make it fun to play ; however, afterwards, realism is the second highest priority as the game is about realism within history. In other words, you ought to listen to arguments grounded in realism provided it is also shown that it is fun in the first place, or, more precisely, more fun than what the game already is. (I do not take here into account the costs of suggestions, as I have no knowledge of your business model.)

 

[BFTeixeira]

I can not really speak for other parts of the world, but in the Netherlands a fort did really stop such an army from moving, because going though the fort or the city was the only way to get from A to B.


Unless you wanted to move across a shallow lake, marsh or other bad terrain.


Take for example Groningen, access to the city itself was possible only by a few ways, sealing off each entrance would mean there was no way to get to the city. Sieging it took a long time, longer than what is portrayed in EU4.

Same for Friesland. You could of course land an army on the shore, but that was only an option when having knowledge of the waters and when controlling a nearby port where the ships could dock (needed to unload cannons, horses, supplies and basically all the men). From land Friesland was hard to reach, cause of swamps and lakes.

Holland, when land was flooded, was just insane to conquer, you could take a few cities, but first you would have to get passed so many barriers and other provinces...


A fortress in EU4 being impassable does make sense.

Does it make more sense that all the provinces in the map work as in a few historical cases you described? Or does it make more sense that it works how it worked in almost all the world?

 

[BFTeixeira]

Realism is a meaningful argument as it is the overall structural basis of the game - it is a ''history'' simulator in some sort ; therefore, since EUIV is grounded in history, any arguments whose source is history should be taken into account. Otherwise, if realism is to be not considered as meaningful, why not include giant space robots? These seem fun.

Of course, EUIV is primarily a game, which entails that the first priority ought to be to make it fun to play ; however, afterwards, realism is the second highest priority as the game is about realism within history. In other words, you ought to listen to arguments grounded in realism provided it is also shown that it is fun in the first place, or, more precisely, more fun than what the game already is. (I do not take here into account the costs of suggestions, as I have no knowledge of your business model.)

I think EU4 is going through a identity crisis. It's a historical simulator where realism isn't a meaningful argument to work as a game design basis. WTF? If all it's about is about fun (quite an abstraction because what can be entertaining to one person might not be to another), then why not put modern weaponry in the game? Wouldn't it be fun?

And speaking of fun and realism not being a meaningful argument, in which of this 2 categories current regency mechanics fits?

 

[Bavarian Steve]

Just like most everything else in the game, reinforcements are an abstraction. So depending on the context, they could come from local populations or your own; hiring locals was a pretty popular and effective strategy back then.

"B-But they come from my manpower!" Abstraction.

yes they came from your local populace, but they need to get to your armies, hence the need for supply lines. They had to get to your armies somehow.

 

[BFTeixeira]

yes they came from your local populace, but they need to get to your armies, hence the need for supply lines. They had to get to your armies somehow.

Yeah, specially when you're reinforcing your 20k army in the Philipines and your nearest province is in Italy... But it's an abstraction, and that makes everything make sense. Right?

 

[FrigidSoul]

yes they came from your local populace, but they need to get to your armies, hence the need for supply lines. They had to get to your armies somehow.

Ha, no. They came from THE local populace, OR your own.

 

[BFTeixeira]

Ha, no. They came from THE local populace, OR your own.

Actually, no. What you're stating is what justifies the ability to get mercenaries in provinces you control. But reinforcement mechanics are completely ilogical (i know, it's an "abstraction").

 

[FrigidSoul]

Yeah, specially when you're reinforcing your 20k army in the Philipines and your nearest province is in Italy... But it's an abstraction, and that makes everything make sense. Right?

Certainly makes more sense than tying yourself into a pretzel to craft a system that's three times more complicated but amounts to the same thing in practice. Europeans used local talent to conquer foreign territory. Sometimes they used mostly local talent.

The problem with realism arguments isn't that realism is bad; the problem with them is that reality is so complicated that any offhanded realism argument you could make vis a vis the game is bound to be highly selective. Unless you can craft a convincing proposal for a revamp of overseas reinforcement that's not only more "realistic" in your view, but also an improvement in gameplay terms, you're not really discussing EU4.

Actually, no. What you're stating is what justifies the ability to get mercenaries in provinces you control. But reinforcement mechanics are completely ilogical (i know, it's an "abstraction").

Case in point. How would the game be improved if you had to go out of your way to hire mercs to fight overseas? How does the existence of more-expensive for-hire troops in the game accurately reflect the common practice of hiring native populations for essentially nothing to supplement your own troops? What are you advocating for, exactly, in game play terms?

In fact, the game doesn't allow you to hire mercs in overseas provinces, last i checked. That indicates to me that mercs are there to fill a very specific niche that runs counter to the traditional practice of relying on natives: mercs are designed to be an additional, high-cost resource that you can splurge on in high stakes and/or desperate situations. Whereas your reinforcement rate, which works pretty much everywhere, is a catchall to represent the organic way that armies of the era moved about gathering/shedding bodies.

YMMV, but I think you'd enjoy the game more if you spent less time worrying about what each pixel means in real life terms.

Inappropriate language removed - Seelmeister

 

[Bavarian Steve]

Ha, no. They came from THE local populace, OR your own.

So when England fights the hundred year war on French shores, French peasants joined the English army to fill the ranks as English soldiers died?

 

[Bavarian Steve]

Yeah, specially when you're reinforcing your 20k army in the Philipines and your nearest province is in Italy... But it's an abstraction, and that makes everything make sense. Right?

This reply, combined with the fact that you agreed with my comment you quoted, has me confused as to what you are supporting in this thread.

 

[BFTeixeira]

This reply, combined with the fact that you agreed with my comment you quoted, has me confused as to what you are supporting in this thread.

Irony.

 

[FrigidSoul]

So when England fights the hundred year war on French shores, French peasants joined the English army to fill the ranks as English soldiers died?

What part of "or" don't you understand? And although I have no evidence to suggest that local reinforcements were used specifically in the HYW, it wouldn't shock me either. Hell, large swathes of both countries' populations probably still looked at the English kings as French by that point.

You gotta keep in mind the larger social context: there was for the most part no sense of overarching national identity in the EU4 era, and conditions were generally poor enough that some men would almost always be eager for a chance to take their piece of the pillage pie, even if their own countrymen were to be pillaged. That's before you even get into explicit political machinations (disloyal local nobility and so forth).

But we're getting sidetracked by minutiae, which seems to be a specialty on this forum. In real life, armies in foreign territory wouldn't necessarily have taken meaningful attrition (depending on conditions, of course), but they do in the game, because there has to be a downside for attacking. There are also generally far more battles and sieges in EU4 wars than there were in real life. So there has to be a way to reinforce in foreign territory, regardless of how historically accurate it is, or else you'll give the defender an even larger and ahistorical advantage.

 

[Bavarian Steve]

A remarkably contentious and content-free rebuttal from someone who claims that I'm the one replacing argument with insult. Irony, thy name is ad hominem.

to support BFT's point, you were insulting when you claimed i didn't know what "or" means. It's just that you are using it wrong. The french didn't reinforce england in the HYW (early example of game war), the Indians (India) didn't reinforce the troops of Portugal, England, or any other foreign conquerors while they were conquering them (mid game mechanics), and the Russians were not filling the ranks of Napolean's troops. It was not an OR thing in most wars in most time frames of this game. Occasionally countries would have regiments of local troops, but this mechanic is reflected by the mercenary feature.

Aside from what I posted (this was added in an edit) the rest of your point was well worded and constructive to the discussion. But even though Nationalism wasn't rampant at the start of the game, Feudalism was. Serf's, unless they revolted and supported foreign invaders, also supported their monarch. For them, it was better to support the devil they knew (unless conditions were terrible, which caused revolts) then to take on uncertainty.

 

[Aries666]

to support BFT's point, you were insulting when you claimed i didn't know what "or" means. It's just that you are using it wrong. The french didn't reinforce england in the HYW (early example of game war), the Indians (India) didn't reinforce the troops of Portugal, England, or any other foreign conquerors while they were conquering them (mid game mechanics), and the Russians were not filling the ranks of Napolean's troops. It was not an OR thing in most wars in most time frames of this game. Occasionally countries would have regiments of local troops, but this mechanic is reflected by the mercenary feature.

Aside from what I posted (this was added in an edit) the rest of your point was well worded and constructive to the discussion. But even though Nationalism wasn't rampant at the start of the game, Feudalism was. Serf's, unless they revolted and supported foreign invaders, also supported their monarch. For them, it was better to support the devil they knew (unless conditions were terrible, which caused revolts) then to take on uncertainty.

Indians absolutely did get conscripted into fighting for the British, indeed toward the late 18th century the vast majority of the lower ranked troops in India were Indians whilst the majority of officers were European.

 

[FrigidSoul]

to support BFT's point, you were insulting when you claimed i didn't know what "or" means. It's just that you are using it wrong. The french didn't reinforce england in the HYW (early example of game war), the Indians (India) didn't reinforce the troops of Portugal, England, or any other foreign conquerors while they were conquering them (mid game mechanics), and the Russians were not filling the ranks of Napolean's troops. It was not an OR thing in most wars in most time frames of this game. Occasionally countries would have regiments of local troops, but this mechanic is reflected by the mercenary feature.

Mea culpa.

The English didn't use Indians? That's news. How bout the Spanish in mesoamerica? The Iberians in Morocco? Napoleon got wrecked, but he was at the end of the timeline and he was going through extreme winter in scorched earth conditions: his example is the exception that proves the rule, with respect to the relative unimportance of supply lines in the EU4 era.

Already addressed the merc thing. The game explicitly disallows merc recruitment on foreign continents, and they're way too expensive to simulate the kind of organic low-cost overseas recruitment that actually happened in history.

The point is that yes, you can make realism arguments all over the place, but the reality was so complex that there's a solid chance you'll make things less historical in the final analysis if you fixate on any one facet of warfare in the EU4 era. Forcing people to hire mercs in Europe to transport over to South America instead of letting them reinforce naturally overseas is a perfect example of a potential fix that sounds right on its face, but would be utterly pointless and arguably deleterious in practice, because it would ignore all of the ways that that real Europeans not only reinforced, but grew in fighting strength as they went through the New World.

Then there's all the stuff I just wrote, and you just glossed over, about the realistic toll of attrition and combat versus the toll of both in EU4. Then there's the fact that this entire discussion started in reference to supply lines, but somewhere along the way you two fixated on reinforcement by itself. But you can't divorce those two issues: reinforcements would have been generally less important in foreign territory than they are in EU4 precisely because supply lines weren't important, and thus the only real way you were gonna lose significant amounts of troops (barring extreme conditions) is through battle. And as I pointed out, there were fewer battles per war in history than there are in EU4.

All of this stuff is interrelated. And like it or not, the current abstracted system does a pretty decent job.

EDIT: moderated my tone. Saw your edit, Steve. Fair enough and no worries.

 

[Bavarian Steve]

Indians absolutely did get conscripted into fighting for the British, indeed toward the late 18th century the vast majority of the lower ranked troops in India were Indians whilst the majority of officers were European.

In relation to the topic of discussion, would those troops actually be better reflected by mercenaries in game, or reinforcements? This whole thread has kind of gotten off topic. I was originally supporting the position that even in the early years of this game that supply lines were important and the importance of developing the supply line is reflected in an acceptable way by the new fort system.

 

[BFTeixeira]

Indians absolutely did get conscripted into fighting for the British, indeed toward the late 18th century the vast majority of the lower ranked troops in India were Indians whilst the majority of officers were European.

They got conscripted to fight for the power that controlled their region. Although they weren't british they were locals to the provinces controlled by the british. In game terms they would be part of the british manpower pool.