How to maximise attrition on enemies

[conn77]

Playing as Russia and stupidly focused on expanding to the east and not keeping a check on the commonwealth as I normally would.
They declared war on me and their army is roughly twice the size of mine, so my plan is for nature to take it's course and let Russian weather kill them off before I counter-attack.

Is there any way I can maximise the amount of attrition they suffer? I'm assuming that building and upgrading forts is the only way? Have hundreds of hours in the game but for some reason haven't tried this tactic before :P

[AllGrainGamer]

You can scorch the earth in your own provinces using one of your units and hitting the button that looks like a torch. That adds a bonus to the attrition the enemy will take, but comes at a heavy cost for the province.

[HipHobbes]

The enemy also takes increased attrition if you maximize defensive ideas.

[Winterspawn]

Idea groups that help are Defensive and Quantity. Try building forts in provinces with low supply limit, horrible winters and terrain that improves defense, then scorch earth on the provinces with forts when they're close and are going to siege.

[conn77]

Cheers, actually managed to decimate the commonwealths armies pretty badly, down from 70k to 20k (with 0 manpower) but they had occupiedd about 70% of my territories, I was fighting them back and was close to steamrolling my territories back and getting some of theirs but Sweden, Crimea and Venice decided to declare war on my weakened state!

Unfortunately was ironman so decided to start a new muscovy campaign seeing that I was bankrupt too :P

[Michaelus]

pretty much forget it, attrition is laughable as of current patch

[kaiyl_kariashi]

Just keep in mind...they nerfed the crap out of terrain attrition. It's capped at 5% now where as before you could easily get 50+% attrition from scorching the earth during a heavy winter in a poor province. Also in the past you had to siege every single province the same as forts do now so the enemy was more likely to take several months worth of attrition ticks per province.

(I do think that certain provinces should have higher terrain attrition caps though, I don't mind farmland being capped at 5% but it should go up from there with Mountains, harsh deserts or the Arctic having like 20-30% caps). Russia historically has only survived entirely due to natural attrition from the enviroment but in the current game the Russian winter is just air conditioning).

That said, the 1% from seiging, and any ideas or policies that increase attrition can stack on top of that 5%, but you'll be lucky to break 10% maximum in the current game.

Also keep in mind...things that reduce land attrition only apply to the terrain attrition, not other bonuses.