ZoC is still a mess

[ETAIPOS]

I may be mistaken, but aren't there tooltips (small castle images) that indicate if you can move to a province or not? They are small and hard to see, so I noticed it only when I was at war with distant enemy and they appeared over FoW when I had a unit selected.

Better on what criteria? I prefer a game where you choice of where to locate your troops matters more often to one where it matters less often. I don't see any reason a different preference is inherently better, and from just what we've discussed so far there's more opportunity for skill variance when unit positioning matters more than less...something putting forts in obvious locations does not replace.

The fact it was possible to win by capturing provinces while enemy was away was just going around the rules, as no sane ruler will send every soldier available abroad. Or he would pull the fortress garrisons and levy what was possible to form an army, rather than sit back and wait as isolated castles fall one by one.

 

[gia257]

If you can play StarCraft 2 at 300 APM professionally you might be able to avoid ever getting caught looking away and therefore not seeing an enemy stack approach ZoC ever.

Even then I have doubts. This game doesn't have that kind of setup to allow rapid map-panning.



Most defenders of the fort rules don't know them as well as they think . You could pay for your forts from 1444-1821 and there are still ways through them. Depending on where they are located, multiple ways.



If you can first explain the screenshot I posted earlier in this thread off-hand by listing all the possible ways I might have been able to legally make that order, we can play ball. Otherwise, pointing a finger at me for not understanding is silly.

But if you could do that, you wouldn't have only mentioned mothballing above.



That is not how pre-1.12 wars between competent players went, so I don't see what leads to this conclusion.

You're telling people who routinely solo'd Oirat with Mongolia or Mamluks with Ethiopia that wars between nations were decided on one battle (they weren't) or that stronger nation always won + carpeted.

Meanwhile, the importance of troop positioning before/during wars declined with the implementation of ZoC. Getting 1/2 your empire assaulted down while you were abroad used to be a legitimate threat. Now a high level contemporary fort with defensiveness can hold out > 1 year in several parts of the game, allowing an army in India to consistently sail halfway across the world to relieve the siege. Holding defensive terrain? Gone, forts give you defensive bonuses regardless.

They didn't only add depth. They pulled some too. Still, TL : DR version is that it's strictly inaccurate to claim that wars were 1 big battle.



You can also still get trapped and lose movement options as a result of taking an enemy fort.



It is disingenuous and intellectually rude to say this without addressing the points made against them in this thread.

If you look at the screenshot I posted and tell me the system "works" I don't know what to say, other than that it's useful to understand what the rules are before defending them, and ZoC map mode won't tell you everything, or even what Reman showed in his video.

the mini map is always on the same location, so technically you can have macros to quickly go anywhere you store, and a button to go back

Also why do you keep replying to people with less than 1 hour into the game, no point, let them figure it out on their own

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I may be mistaken, but aren't there tooltips (small castle images) that indicate if you can move to a province or not? They are small and hard to see, so I noticed it only when I was at war with distant enemy and they appeared over FoW when I had a unit selected.



The fact it was possible to win by capturing provinces while enemy was away was just going around the rules, as no sane ruler will send every soldier available abroad. Or he would pull the fortress garrisons and levy what was possible to form an army, rather than sit back and wait as isolated castles fall one by one.

Regardless, sending troops abroad was intentionally made to carry less risk in EU 4 with ZoC and that is without question a gameplay choice to move the game away from history. I'm not necessarily against that in principle, but I don't like when meaningful choices become less so.

Those tooltips only exist when you select a given unit, and they do nothing to indicate that you can alter your return province via stack merging/switching (favorably or very unfavorably, without warning). It does not show movement possibilities for other nations' units.

1. Fort Zones of control have strict demarcations along hostile borders, but extend their ZoC over neutral ones. Understand that if you attack Hungary as Ottomans, hungarian ZoC will spill over to Serbia and Bosnia.

2. To make sure no enemy can pass your border forts, your strategic depth must be 3 provinces or more.

3. Regarding unit movement, empty border provinces (no ZoC, no fort) are the fastest way to lose your sanity. Make sure that 2-province-deep friendly Zones of Control and forts cover all your borders.

These three rules should if not fix then at least ease the pain of managing most of special movement rules.

1 isn't so strict. There are times its impossible to return to your own borders...unless you unit swap. Then you can. ZoC also goes weird with occupied fort + occupied territory exerting it.

2 isn't true, you can straight up block AI with 1 deep or even immediate border forts depending on situation (not uncommon near West Persia or Iberia-France). A wall of stuff spaced 2 provinces apart that stretches ZoC over the entire passage is consistently effective, excepting pre-order movement exceptions.

3 is more an issue before a player memorizes the hidden nonsense, and will largely only crop up in MP given the cost proposition of forts vs AI. The issue comes in with opposing fort interactions, since the AI does not obey any coherent doctrine when it comes to creating forts.

 

[Lithu]

It takes at max. 3 months to chase down a retreating enemy army if we assume a decently sized nation (think historical European border France or so)

Attrition doesnt matter in that context.

Did you miss the part where I said that your forts should slow down the attacking enemy army, making it all but impossible to catch a french army trying to flee across France ? (Unless you divide your army in several branches to block all paths, but dividing your forces would be risky, and the regular map improvements from paradox adding new provinces help there).

Attrition alone wouldn't work, of course.

And of course, it wouldn't work in small nations without any strategic depth, but the protection for small nations against big ones should be something akin to a "balance of power" mechanism. The AE do it a bit, the great power intervention do it a bit, but neither seems good enough to prevent indiscriminate blobbing (and I say that as someone who loves blobbing as much as possible ; I prefer it being hard because of diplomacy that because of lack of mana).

Maybe the penalties for holding wrong culture/wrong religion territory should be higher too ? It would discourage grabbing anything blindly. This would need a full rework of the OE system however ; replacing short-term general instability by long-term local instability. (Ofc, this would work better with a pop system and the like, but it seems we'll never get it in EU4)

1 % attrition does exactly nothing and increasing it to levels where it would actually matter will only lead to old problems (namely: the AI dying to it)

It would do a lot more if auto-refilling the armies was disabled except in home territory or controlled territory. That the army can auto-refill while hundreds of miles away from home is a baffling stupidity, which may reduce micro but do a lot of bad to the gameplay, as you absolutely need to stackwipe an army instead of having the option to grind it down while it stays in your territory. If it was forced to go home to replenish or to be sent reinforcements, it would make operations deep in enemy territory a lot more risky/less efficient.

You also definitely have a point about the AI having issue managing attrition, but it should be possible to evaluate with an algorithm "I have no chance to catch the enemy army/I have some chance/I am sure to catch it" and use it to decide if risking or not the attrition in the pursuit.

This attrition mechanism would also encourage sieging border provinces instead of going deep.

That is not how pre-1.12 wars between competent players went, so I don't see what leads to this conclusion.

You're telling people who routinely solo'd Oirat with Mongolia or Mamluks with Ethiopia that wars between nations were decided on one battle (they weren't) or that stronger nation always won + carpeted.

Ignorance, mother of confidence ?

Wars in multiplayer lasting several years with numerous battle were a common occurrence, even though there were also "big mega-battles" due to the raw slowness of the battles.

IThe fact it was possible to win by capturing provinces while enemy was away was just going around the rules, as no sane ruler will send every soldier available abroad. Or he would pull the fortress garrisons and levy what was possible to form an army, rather than sit back and wait as isolated castles fall one by one.

Exactly ! Having the other nations threatening you SHOULD dissuade you to send 100% of your force against a specific target. E.g. ; if the Ottomans send 100% of their force in Egypt they SHOULD be punished by being attacked and occupied on other sides. If Spain send 100% of its force fighting in America or Africa, it SHOULD be punished with France carving a piece of it. Etc.

So having the enemy punish you if you DO send every soldier available abroad is not "going around the rules", it should be expected !

Having the forts able to block the enemy a year or more while your troops sail half the world encourage committing a huge part of your troops against specific targets (though this is not the only thing which encourages that, all wars have a tendency to become too easily "total wars").

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Wars in multiplayer lasting several years with numerous battle were a common occurrence, even though there were also "big mega-battles" due to the raw slowness of the battles.

People would manually retreat even back then too...and considering that morale didn't recover when you win back in those days not doing so was suicide (winner retreats instead --> engages before target stack can move --> stack wipe).

Mega battles with morale recovery and rotating in/out of combat were a thing yes. So was camping defensive terrain for chokes, despite the alleged lack of movement controls.

 

[Bibor]

1 isn't so strict. There are times its impossible to return to your own borders...unless you unit swap. Then you can. ZoC also goes weird with occupied fort + occupied territory exerting it.

2 isn't true, you can straight up block AI with 1 deep or even immediate border forts depending on situation (not uncommon near West Persia or Iberia-France). A wall of stuff spaced 2 provinces apart that stretches ZoC over the entire passage is consistently effective, excepting pre-order movement exceptions.

1. I might be mistaken but I think you can always move to or return to a friendly ZoC province, but not so with a friendly province without ZoC. That's why I proposed having zoc/forts along full (relevant) borders.

I tested this as ottomans by integrating all lands around Trebizond (OPM, has level 3 fort). Trebizond is connected to only two provinces owned by me, one to the east, one to the west. The western one is "clear", i.e. No forts or ZoC. The eastern one has a ZoC from an adjacent fort.
I can move a unit ACROSS Trebizond from west to east, but not from east to west. My conclusion is that because the western province doesn't fall under any friendly fort's ZoC.

2. Obviously, yes, you can straight up block passage by dotting forts or using impassable terrain/coasts. My suggestion is basically to avoid salients where possible.

 

[Shadowstrike]

Those suggested rules still do not deal with the problem in the quote.

Edit: Should have probably explained my meaning -- the rules do not serve all use-cases.

Can you expand on that? For instance, can you illustrate some use-cases where these rules don't work?

 

[SolSys]

Can you expand on that? For instance, can you illustrate some use-cases where these rules don't work?

To clarify: I have not read the whole thread before reaching the rules post, so it may very well be that these issues were already discussed/resolved at some point.

For one thing, it was not specified whether the suggested rules require the use of a return province or not -- they seem to indicate that not, but then the way they are phrased turns them into a sort of a "fly trap" and I'm not sure it would be that fun.

* All moves from ZoC to enemy fort provinces are legal.

** but what about the other way around?

The most obvious special case coming to mind involve over-lapping ZoCs and/or adjacent forts. How would they work with the suggested framework?

Sorry I couldn't elaborate more [or explain more clearly], I get too pre-occupied for my liking these past weeks :/

 

[Glen_Runciter]

I almost forgot that retreating is also retarded.

Basically, everything about waging war is shit in this game.

 

[Shadowstrike]

For one thing, it was not specified whether the suggested rules require the use of a return province or not -- they seem to indicate that not, but then the way they are phrased turns them into a sort of a "fly trap" and I'm not sure it would be that fun.

** but what about the other way around?

The most obvious special case coming to mind involve over-lapping ZoCs and/or adjacent forts. How would they work with the suggested framework?

Sorry I couldn't elaborate more [or explain more clearly], I get too pre-occupied for my liking these past weeks :/

The point of the design is to obviate the need for a return province - the goal is to be able to address the question of "what are legal moves" from the current state of the map.

You point out correctly that there would be no way to get back from forts. One rule that would fix that would be that one can always move into ZoC-ed province, as long as they touch one friendly (or friendly occupied) province.

To address your question about overlapping ZoCs, the presence of ZoCs would be a binary state: either a province is under a ZoC, or not under a ZoC. So overlapping ZoCs from multiple forts should be addressed by that. Fort-to-fort movement is specifically prohibited (there's a rule about that).

 

[Glen_Runciter]

The other side is incapable of understanding that all alternatives presented so far have been worse, but the fact that we get regular updates of them trying to implement a new system is a sign of them working on it, telling us they are very aware of ZoC being suboptimal in its current form, which apparently isn't enough so why not call everyone else a stubborn idiot with too much experience in the game (however that's supposed to be an insult is fleeing me) leading to a stalemate and dozens of pages without any progress.

Look, I can randomly insult a whole group of people as well AND use a valid argument at the same time WITHOUT contributing in any constructive way.

What a rare occurrance in ZoC discussions.

How about this: It's not good, but I had to learn how it works because there were failed attempts and I've accepted the fact that it isn't going to change soon.
However, multiple attempts at improving it means they are aware so I can sit back, learn the current one, understand it (including most of its flaws) and play the game until they're finally able to come up with something better.

"Yeah, it's shit, but I'm only here to make people at Paradox cum, so whatever."