How do you know what unit is best to produce?!!?!?!?

[Eldrin]

I started at 1444 as a province in japan the shimazu.

So i got Chinese tech and at the very start 3 units to choose from.

East Asian spearmen +1 shock defence and + 1 morale offence
Asian longbow +1 offencive shock and +1 morale defence
Asian long spear infantry +1 shock defence and +1 morale defence

The first general i got also has 4 shock, 1 maneuver and 2 siege

So how do you decide on what you want?! None of them seem to be better then the other, how do you choose?!?! Going into war with only archers seems kinda silly but in this game somehow looks legit....

[glegle]

Depends on your choice.
EA Spearmen are good for quick defending and have high morale at attack
Asian longbows are good for quick attack but have high morale at defending too
Asian long spears are for defence only

[equinox1911]

I usually just choose the first in the list (literally).
The differences are just silly to me because it is nearly impossible to play defensive or offensive since war and taking a fight is based around opportunity not planning.
To make it short, this decision is pretty much a fake one since you do not have the means to correlate it.

[Eldrin]

Originally posted by 曹昂 －自修:

Depends on your choice.
EA Spearmen are good for quick defending and have high morale at attack
Asian longbows are good for quick attack but have high morale at defending too
Asian long spears are for defence only

What do you mean attacking and defending?!

Do you mean if i sit in a province and someone attacks me the defence values are counted for my army?!

And if i attack someone the the offence values are counted?

[glegle]

Originally posted by SwiftXShadow:

Originally posted by 曹昂 －自修:

Depends on your choice.
EA Spearmen are good for quick defending and have high morale at attack
Asian longbows are good for quick attack but have high morale at defending too
Asian long spears are for defence only

What do you mean attacking and defending?!

Do you mean if i sit in a province and someone attacks me the defence values are counted for my army?!

And if i attack someone the the offence values are counted?

Yup.

[equinox1911]

Swift plz listen, you have started to learn this game and you have a long way ahead of you but just ignore this 'choice'. It will not make a difference and trying to min-max here is kinda impossible, trust me i tried.
And the chinese character guy is just plain wrong. The 'pips' for offence and defence are accounted weather you attack or are atttacked. Either increasing or mitagating damage.

http://www.eu4wiki.com/Land_warfare#Pips

The whole article covers battles pretty well.

[Viper]

Morale is the important factor in any battle. In this game morale is like your Hit points. As a unit does damage to another unit that unit loses morale. As soon as its morale hits zero it will retreat and you will have no control of it till it retreats to wherever its going to go.
A unit with low morale could be twice as big as a unit it is attacking. But if that unit has high morale. The larger unit could be totally annhilated.

[Kelldath]

Originally posted by 曹昂 －自修:

Yup.

Except it's actually not yup at all.
Defense points are substracted from the enemy dice roll in calculating their damage, while offensive points are added to your own dice roll when calculating your damage.
On average, 1 offensive point or one defensive point have the exact same effect.
However, you can still design specific strategies around them, especially later in the game.

Prioritizing defensive units will make battles last longer, as you will kill enemies slower, but will also take less casualties yourself.
This allows both sides to potentially send reinforcements and turn the tide of battle. The nation being on home soil is the most likely to benefit from this, but it is not always the case.
This also combines very well with defensive military ideas that increase your morale, making you more likely to win long drawn-out fights.

Prioritizing offensive units makes battles shorter, as both armies will suffer more casualties. This makes it harder to reinforce, and is great when combined with discipline from offensive military ideas, as it will further increase your damage output. Such an army is meant not to lose battles in the first place, which is great when invading nations.

Apart from that, the choice between shock points and fire points will combine with your commanding general stats, and is thus situational.

[AllGrainGamer]

The choices are kind of a false dilemma, but there are a few points to note on which to choose.

1) Base fire and shock power. In the military tab you will see stats for fire and shock for your armies and navies no matter the troops. These are your base power in these phases scaled mostly by tech and national ideas (NI). In the beginning of the game Infantry has something like 0.2 Fire and 0.5 Shock on infantry (not exact numbers). So the shock phase is more powerful, thus if you have to choose one or the other the troop type with more shock would be better, but a pip in both Fire and Shock may also be comparable.

Likewise, Calvary has something like 0.1 Fire and 1.0 Shock. Obviously shock will be the main decider for cavalry.

2) Morale. This is separate from above because it depends HOW you want to fight nations. Morale is important because it is when the army breaks, and the more morale you have the more morale damage you do to the enemy. The difference more relies on the question of manpower. Do you want to break armies quickly so they run away while you make gains or do you want battles to last long so that there are more casualties that need to be replaced? Think of Prussia vs Russia. Prussia wipes armies quick requiring enemies to rebuild their forces making Prussia very effective against tightly packed nations, but in a drawn out war those numbers can get dangerously low if total victory isn't swiftly attained.

Russia on the other hand just throws bodies at the problem. When facing tougher foes, long battles play to Russia's hand as eventually the quantity effect will pay off.


Now, these just cover picking units based on which of the three categories you prefer (fire, shock, morale), but I honestly do not the finer points of attack vs defense. I just always go with offense because you have limited control in where the enemy goes without specifically baiting.

Finally, the decision is again superficial.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

the main issue is that you can't see what troops the enemy is using, just their class. (if they have very few options, like the ottomans, you can sort of plan around them)

If you could see their actual troop types, that would give more strategy for which troop class to use since you could swap your troops around to be better then the enemies while coving your weak points.

But since you can't, you're usually better off going with a good mix of offense and defense pips, depending on where your strengths lie. If you're much stronger then your opponent you can also go all in on offensive troops and win that way, but in a closer battle a good mix of pips will usually work a little better.

[AllGrainGamer]

Originally posted by kaiyl_kariashi:

the main issue is that you can't see what troops the enemy is using, just their class. (if they have very few options, like the ottomans, you can sort of plan around them)

If you could see their actual troop types, that would give more strategy for which troop class to use since you could swap your troops around to be better then the enemies while coving your weak points.

But since you can't, you're usually better off going with a good mix of offense and defense pips, depending on where your strengths lie. If you're much stronger then your opponent you can also go all in on offensive troops and win that way, but in a closer battle a good mix of pips will usually work a little better.

You can hover over the units during a battle to see what type of unit they are and their pips. You can also do the same for boats in naval battle, though the only difference there is the tech level.

[👅 f r e a k y c y r u s 👅]

It depends. There are a few factors to come into play:
What unit are we talking about? A cavalry with a shock bonus will do more damage than one with a morale bonus. Morale is also almost useless late game, where discipline rules. This is because discipline will make you lose a lot less men in those 200k battles, while early game the battle will usually end before you can wipe the opposing stack.

What are you going to do? Are you going to try and force the enemy to attack a weaker stack and then reinforce it at the last second, putting them into a dangerous terrian or river crossing? Are you going to focus on attacking the enemy? If you're Prussia for example with godlike units, it would be wiser to attack than it would defend, whereas if you are Nepal and are stuck in two wars, (true story) you can sit on a mountain with defensive units and still win the battle, winning both wars.

[equinox1911]

He is trying to learn the game ~ 8 hrs or so.
And cmon guys have you even looked at the differences in pips relative to a same unit type - same tech lvl?
Go ahead and tell me your decision lost or won you a single war.
I recon a single change in dice roll +/- 1 is more important in a fight than what freaking troops you got.

[kaiyl_kariashi]

A pip is the same as a +1 to that dice roll, so yes troop types can matter if you have zero defense in a stat and your enemy has multiple pips in that stat especially bad if they have both a defense and offense pip and you only have 1 offensive, even if they roll worse then you they'll still do a lot better then you will.

And as with most things in EU4, the dice love the ai, so the player needs as many bonuses as they can stack to mitigate the random chance.

That's part of why the ottomans wreck so much early on and the Indians are unexpectedly tough until you manage to get 3-4 mil tech ahead, they get fire pips before anyone else does which lets them cause extra damage in a phase that doesn't become more important normally until mid to late game.

Especially early on when shock is king, you can cripple an army before they even get to the shock phase and even then you'll generally do quite well against them in that phase too since most non-westerners have 1 more pip then western nations do until later.

[IndirectHero]

Okay I will explain in simple terms:

Offensive pips in Fire or Shock means: You do more casualty damage on your enemies

Defensive pips in Fire or Shock means: You recieve less casualty damage from your enemies

Offensive pips in Morale means: You scare the enemies to retreat quicker (Useful if you can catch them duirng the retreat for a chance to stack wipe them)

Defensive pips in Morale means: You last longer in a fight (If really high, can fight till death)

For my choice, I always go for the pips that has more in Fire and Shock because I like to score a higher casualty count for the enemies

[equinox1911]

This is only relevant if the total number of pips is higher or lower. Which it is not on the same mil tech and tech group. Keep in mind though, that westernizing does not change troop types any more.