Why is EUIV so lopsided in the battle department?

[Phrog]

I attacked group of 131k Finnish Soldiers with my 240k Russian soldiers and I lost with only 99k against their 70k. I am playing the extended timeline 58-2014 mod and I'm in 2026, so I have everything unlocked and I have all my bonuses toward military morale and discipline. I had three generals commanding them. I looked at the battle stats and I had 9 dice, but deducted 1 for terrain and 1 for weather, against their 5. So it was a 7-5 battle and I still lost.

Anybody know why?

[Kagemin]

I don't know if and how the mod changes combat, so I'm just assuming that the base mechanics are still the same.

There are alternating phases of Fire and Shock, alternating every 3 days. For each phase one die is rolle diy both side, which is then modified by your generals' respective skills (only the highest ranking general counts), unit pips, and terrain.
You getting a penalty to those dicerolls from terrain is already a huge thing.

Then the numbers. Again, I don't know how high combad width can get with the mod, but in the base game those numbers are far above the normal combat widths, meaning that the numerical superiority doesn't really matter.

This site explains the combat mechanics in much more detail:
www.eu4wiki.com/Land_warfare

If you want help here the best way is to post screenshots both from during a battle (battle screen) and after the abttle (result screen). The combat mechanics are very complex, so much that it's very hard to generalize from the bits of information usually given by a written description. Those two screens usually contain all the information to quickly find an answer though.

I'm sorry if the mod changes combat so much that nothing of this applies, just ignore it then.

[Stormfox]

I have the same impression as the OP. Combat is ridiculously favourable for the AI, always, under any circumstances. Player losses are massively higher, AI armies routinely win or almost win with HALF as many troops when both empires are at similar tech levels, my army has a better general and no other major modifiers diverge enough to explain that. They even do it while your guys are on the defensive, which could give you a terrain bonus.

This makes fighting the AI unfair, unrewarding and downright futile in many cases because of two things will happen:
- you cannot win against opponents that have roughly equal standing army size and merge them to one big stack, since you rarely win combats where you do not significantly outnumber them.
- Even if you can catch their smaller stacks with your big army, you have ridiculous combat attrition which in turn means your manpower depletes after 1-2 battles and they get fresh army after fresh army to throw at you. Since your losses are always much higher then theirs even in combats that they lose, they outwear you.

Basically, you can only win wars if they act extremely stupid, are much weaker than you, or both.

[Bandit17]

You can win wars with smart army composition, similar military tech level, strong generals (high army tradition!), fighting in favorable or neutral terrain, stacking morale and discipline bonuses (power projection, advisors & policies!), picking your battles (don't gamble; if you're not sure you can win it's usually better to wait or bait) and strong Military Ideas (Defensive-Offensive-Quality are my 3 favs).

Here I am outnumbered but have a stronger army composition, river crossing, higher discipline, morale and better general on my side:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=267314286

Here I completely stack wipe an enemy army as again everything (as I stated above) is stacked in my favor:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=267222324

Here I am again outnumbered but have a better general and higher discipline:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=267227648

[Phrog]

Well, I've won battles like that, but only when the enemy has really low morale.

I was just playing as Francia against Lombardie and I was able to meticulously corner people, but I never get chances to do that in massive world wars. I remember March of the Eagles having a much better combat system than EUIV, especially with the fact that there are more than 3 generals you're entitled to.

[Kagemin]

İlk olarak Imperator Zebulon tarafından gönderildi:

I remember March of the Eagles having a much better combat system than EUIV, especially with the fact that there are more than 3 generals you're entitled to.

You can have as many generals as you want in EU4 too? There are only so many you can have at once without paying upkeep, but there's no real limit other than that.
And AI plays by the same rules as the player in combat (only the lucky nations get a bit of a boost). It just has a perfect understanding of the combat mechanics and invests a lot into wars.

[Stormfox]

- Building army tradion means I have to actually win battles beforehand.
- Anectodal evidence does not counter the overall feel of the rest (90%) of battles. Of course I had some battles roughly go as expected (usually sea battles - they seem to be more fair), but that does not change the overall point that as a player, I lose at least double the guys as the smaller ai army with a worse general no matter wether using the offensive or defensive units, with the same units and tech. This in turn leads to losing almost all battles that are somewhat even AND always losing much more manpower, which will cost you the war in the long run.

Anectodal counter-evidence: in my current game as korea, I have had advisors and ideas and even an ongoing event that all raise my morale and discipline, a stronger general, and outnumber my oirat opponent 2:1 and I still barely win those battles on the defense while having almost double his losses. This is repeatable not only by reloading, but has been that way in every single battle against those guys besides the one battle I reloaded about 10 times until my dice roles won it for me because otherwise the game would have been more or less over back then. No information that I can see suggests why that is so, and even if it was, it would be stupid.

- Buying more generals does not help the issue. Their strength is roughly tied to the tradition value when you get them, and since you can at most have 1-2 armies or your smaller stacks will be crushed, you do not need more than 1 or two active generals and perhaps 1 admiral.

- Sidenote that came to me while writing the above: The AI can always move faster, even when I have a land maneuver event going on and my leader (currently my king) has 4 maneuver pips. The AI simply sees where you want to go, waits until one milisecond before you would go there, then redirects its own troops and is suddenly going somewhere else than initially shown. It takes ages of running around to finally catch them or not get caught, and usually a dozen reloads. Very fun....

I really want to love this, its exactly my type of game, but the unfair AI combat cheats are even worse than they are in similar games like the tw ones or civ. That is killing all the joy and makes it an exercise in frustration.

PS: I know the developer quote that claims they do not cheat. All developers of all 4x games always claim that, and so far, all lied.

[Kagemin]

You often gain more tradition from losing a battle than from wining a battle.

Anectodal evidence doesn't work either way, for me it seems to be the opposite from you.

If you are fighting a horde as Korea in the early game you have weaker units and a lower military tech level. Pretty hard to overcome that at all.

You can reroll generals until you get better ones, since there is still an element of chance involved. The AI tends to do that a lot if neccessary.

Are you playing on higher speeds or don't pause the game during wars? Never heard of what you are describing before. The AI reacts immedeately, but so can you.

And again, the only combat "cheat" for the AI is the bonus for Lucky Nations. If you can't overcome it the problem lies with you. Either beat them at what they are doing and invest as much as the AI does, or use the advantage of being human.

Pretty much all strategy games I know of have a list of boni the AI gets at different difficulty levels. Often it's just a bonus to ressources etc, sometimes it's more direct advantages.
Here's the complete list for EU4:
http://www.eu4wiki.com/Artificial_intelligence#Cheats

The only one that regularly comes into effect and is somewhat annoying is the missing naval attrition. If they are involved in a war they will send thier navy there, regardless of how far away it is.

[Blackjacktrial]

The other thing a lot of people forget is regiment strength. If you have your units at half strength and his are full, and both of you have filled out your combat width (as will happen in the pile-on battles), the opposition will fight above his weight every time. And every unit of yours that retreats depleted faster than his will deplete your morale faster.


tldr: If you have half strength troops in a battle that exceeds combat width, you'll fight badly. They have twice the guns firing, even though you put more troops nominally in the province.

[ShoutsWillEcho]

Something is different about the combat when using this mod. I'm not sure what it is but all the battles seem very prolonged which means that you can fuel troops to the skirmish almost indefinitely.
The amount of troops also seem to matter alot less, I attacked a stack of 30k with a stack of 8k and won because I reinforced it with 2 other 8k stacks. Both the AI and I had the same Military Tech.
I started playing at year 2 and are now at year 168 with Military Tech 8 and the battles still seem very different compared to Vanilla in that they last very long. You can pretty much grab a stack and join a battle 10 provinces away.

[Tayip]

İlk olarak Stormfox tarafından gönderildi:

I have the same impression as the OP. Combat is ridiculously favourable for the AI, always, under any circumstances. Player losses are massively higher, AI armies routinely win or almost win with HALF as many troops when both empires are at similar tech levels, my army has a better general and no other major modifiers diverge enough to explain that. They even do it while your guys are on the defensive, which could give you a terrain bonus.

This makes fighting the AI unfair, unrewarding and downright futile in many cases because of two things will happen:
- you cannot win against opponents that have roughly equal standing army size and merge them to one big stack, since you rarely win combats where you do not significantly outnumber them.
- Even if you can catch their smaller stacks with your big army, you have ridiculous combat attrition which in turn means your manpower depletes after 1-2 battles and they get fresh army after fresh army to throw at you. Since your losses are always much higher then theirs even in combats that they lose, they outwear you.

Basically, you can only win wars if they act extremely stupid, are much weaker than you, or both.

or you could git gud. you should learn by reading kageryuu's posts and the wiki