Attrition

[ZenFlakes56]

Is it bad that in every war, I always lose the same, if not more men to attrition than actual combat? How can I combat this?

[Marquoz]

Don't use doom stacks. Each army should have a front row of infantry + cavalry equal to your combat width and a back row of nothing but artillery (also equal to your combat width by tech 10 or so). In peacetime, split these armies in half and park them in adjacent provinces so they don't take attrition. In war, move them the same way, one province apart, until you need to combine them for major battles. Or, if they're in a safe area, split them even smaller for carpet sieging.

[Nfb7]

Generally, Yes that would be considered pretty bad.
Google eu4 attrition and you should get a good wiki about it but in general
You are probably walking around with large armies everywhere and sieging forts with an unnecessarily large army.
When you select an army the game should display to you the "weight" of your army and its supply limit. When you move you mouse over another province it should tell you that your army is above/below the supply limit of a given province.
If the weight of the army is higher than the supply limit, then you will take attrition to a varying extent from 0.1% of your total army to 5%. Forts and hostile land will give attrition regardless.
Traditions/Ideas/Policies can increase/decrease attrition
Good planning can minimize attrition a LOT.

[DSShadow]

Its fully normal to loose more in Attrition than combat... but it may depends on how u play - if u raid more castles and do not battle, u allways loose more men with attrition than combat.
As NF said there are a lot of ideas to reduce attrition, or beware of hills and mountains to fight/raid

[ZenFlakes56]

Thanks for the tips! I am now losing less men to attrition but still losing men in general but the number has significantly dropped.

[Octopuses]

Also tip for early game because that's when manpower is the biggest problem: Always siege forts with just above the minimum number of soldiers required. If it's level 1 fort put 4k there, if it's lvl 2 put 7k, if it's lvl 3 put 10k, and so on. This is before the cannon time.

[bri]

Yes and no... As has been mentioned above there are ways to reduce the attrition you take but no way to eliminate it entirely if you want to actually win the war. As long as you aren't taking excessive attrition without a good reason it's all good. Generally you don't really want to waste men fighting battles if you can avoid it. Ideally you win wars with 0 casualties in battle and minimal losses to attrition.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Some attrition is unavoidable as long as your enemy still has provinces to siege down (even regular non-fort provinces still give a bit of attrition until they're occupied). All that really matters is that you don't waste your reserves on needless attrition and end up running out of manpower. Sometimes you may need to stack more troops than necessary on a fort (when you're at war with an equivalent enemy to discourage them from attacking the siege stack), but doing so all the time is going to waste hundreds of thousands of manpower over the years that could be put to better use in other wars.

[Preacher]

idk when im snowballing i get kinda lazy and dont feel like microing, so oftentimes I get pretty bad attrition but my manpower is pretty solid at that point in the game