How to Military

[Mr. Needful]

A few questions on how to be an effective warmonger. Apologies in advance if anything here is covered in the in-game tutorial, there's some glitch that prevents me from advancing more than halfway through the third one.

1) How does military score work? I have 90 brigades raised and am receiving a rousing 0.1 points of military score from them; I've noticed a few other AIs players this is happening to as well.

2) What does reliability do? I haven't encountered any traitorous or lackluster generals, so I really don't know what I'm relying on them to do.

3) Is there anything that effects the dice rolls, or is it pure RNG?

4) When are depleted units removed from the game? I've had a few instances where a brigade hit zero soldiers but wasn't immediately removed; at what point does the computer eliminate it?

5) Twice now I've had an ally ask me for help in a war, only for the request to quickly vanish; is this due to a game error or an actual twist of diplomacy?

6) At what point does a war "go well enough" to add wargoals? I've fought wars where I couldn't add anything at 27% and wars where I could at 2%.

7) Is there any reliable way to increase jingoism? So far it's only been through the "see the war through to the end" event and getting the Jingoism election issue.

8) What is the purpose of increased manouever and recon?

[AN]

manouver lets you flank, i.e. attack the edges of the enemy lines with the high maneuver units on the close outer edges of your wider line that has no one directly in front of them

recon percentage of the army helps determine how fast you siege down territory

I don't think units automatically disband, except when an entire army is destroyed at once

[Lembley42]

1. Just based off your soldier / officer count + heavy ships I think.
Not very important anyway, it's a very unreliable source of strength.

If you want to really compare strength, check your brigades count and tech. You can check other nation's count & tech by rightclicking on their land (-> goes to Diplomacy), select the tab "Show Wars" and look to the right info panel. If you hover over their brigade counter, it'll also display the amount of military techs they have.


2. Reliability affects the soldier POP's (they are always based in an actual POP) militancy. So a general leading an army makes all those soldier POPs the brigades less likely to join rebel factions and thus less of your army switches sides on rebellions.

Generally, ignore all stats except Offense / Defense stats.


3. It's RNG. Don't forget to make your daily sacrifices to the RNG God.


4. They don't disband, unless wiped. Units are wiped if they are beaten, but all immediate neighboring provinces have enemy units (even if it's just 1 soldier standing around, or they are in battle). Even though retreating units otherwise can "magically pass" through enemies, in this case they'll delete.


5. No, the request vanishes after a few weeks. If you want to keep it (or just not want to decline because of the prestige hit), you can click on it and move the "Accept / Decline" box to the side - it will never vanish and you will never officially decline (thus never breaking the alliance).
It will go away once the war is over.


6. Good question. You need some warscore, but it depends on who you have it. If you fight Austria & France, and make huge gains vs Austria but nothing versus France, your specific warscore to France is 0. So you can't add things.


7. No. It's a ♥♥♥♥ modifier, with no real reason to be around. It's the only thing I'd advise you to simply mod out. It prolong wars without any need, as other mechanics (which make more sense) already take care of you not warmongering around.

If you want to change it, go to your gamefiles, -> common/defines.lua and search with Ctrl+F for
WARGOAL_JINGOISM_REQUIREMENT
and set its value to 0.00, (mind the commata)
to remove Jingoism as a requirement for adding wargoals.


8. Recon helps with sieges, but mostly helps with lowering the enemy dig-in bonus. This happens if your dice roll is higher than theirs, then it removes by the highest recon value of the units in your armies (or something like that).

For maneuver, take a look at a battle. You can click on it and see the left setup.
Units are placed in battle lines. The "combat width" (how wide the combat line is) is determined by terrain and tech.
Infantry and Artillery can mostly attack those units "in front of of them". That means that if you overstretch the enemy army, you don't really have more units in actual combat, just more "around".
Maneuver means that the unit can also attack diagonally. Maneuver 1 makes it possible to attack 1 square diagonal, etc.

So, especially early on, as then the combat width is the highest, against smaller-medium enemy armies which cannot fully occupy the entire combat width, its useful as you can effectively bring more people into the fight. This means higher casaulties for the enemy, which trickles back to lower damage onto your guys and spirals down.

Later on it's fairly irrelevant. Tech narrow the width down and armies becomes simulanteously much larger, so overstretching becomes a rarity.



You haven't asked but some more information:
1.)
The best composition is 4 Infantry, 1 Husar, 5 Artillery. Why?

Infantry is mainly a "damage tank". They are your meatshield.
The Husar is adding the recon to your army.
Artillery is the damage dealer. It can fire from 2nd rank but dies in first. So you want to have enough (4+1) combat width covered for the first rank.

Lategame, just double those numbers to 8/2/10

2.)
If you check your army & mobilisation, with some early techs you'll notice that the mobilisation size is ~ equal to your army size mostly.
Mobilized units are always pure infantry.

So we can use this, by having our standing army mostly invested into 1 Husar / 5 Artillery "Support" Stacks. Have them around, 1 on province each.

If you go to war, mobilize and have a rally point somewhere (select a province, very bottom left right, tiny brown button). Your units will flock there and you will take 4 Infantry, send them to a waiting Support stack, merge, and off they go.

There are some advantages:
- It DOUBLES your effective army size (pure Infantry is nigh useless)
- Your meatshield units are now based in farmers / laborers with virually infinite reinforcement base.
- Your precious actual soldiers are exactly in those units that should not get dealt much damage to anyway.

3.)
When units are broken / in bad shape, give them a rest. This also is true for badly damaged ones. Move them to home territory for increased recovery and pick them up 2-3 months later).

4.)
Only Offense / Defense really count of Generals. In an offense battle, the offense value is taken (and vice versa).
But here's the stupid thing. If you are in an offense battle with two armies, one having a general with +4 Offense and +0 Defense, and the other general being +1 Offense and +4 Defense, the latter will be in command.
It's always highest (Offense+Defense) instead of "what's actually useful here?".

Best is to really have a grip on generals.

[Mr. Needful]

Good chunk of info, thanks! Especially on army composition, I come from a Total War strategy background so I never would have thought of equal amounts of infantry and artillery.

Quick clarifier, I'm talking about increased recon/mobolity unit stats; i.e., some cavalry will have 1 recon, some 2, but the army recon stat only checks how many recon units you have so I'm not sure why some units have more points of recon than others.

As for military score, I'm mostly concerned for nation ranking. I'm barely a great power in my current game and an extra 100 points of military score could make a huge difference.

And for the alliance notification thing, it straight up vanished after less than a second on screen. I think it might've been because I was involved in a crisis war at the time? Could have also been some weird checksum thing, I started off that session playing as another nation and the issue hasn't come back yet.

[AN]

I'm almost certain military tech contributes to military score

You can massively inflate your military score by building a ton of capital ships. They will lose all value after you tech up to the next level of capital ship, though: Man O War->Ironclad->Battleship->Dreadnaught

[WhatWillTheNextDowndateBring?]

Hey there! So 90 brigades and 0.1 military score from them? That honestly doesn't sound believ-able to be to be frank, I'd like to see some screenshots to prove it, though I guess it could technic -ally possible if playing as a wide nation with low density like Russia under certain circumstances. First things first right, the number of brigades you have recruited doesn't actually effect military score on it's on, trust me, it doesn't. The only two ways it kinda does is one based on the number of generals you have, you get 1 military score for every general you have, provided you have at least as many brigades recruited. This is to say that if you have 20 generals and only 10 brigades, well, you can only ever use 10 generals at onces and therefore only get 10 score from generals. The other way is you need at least 25% of your possible brigades recruited to get your possible max military score, otherwise you only get the military score for a nation with a brigade cap four times as high as your current number of recruited brigades, that's right, it's based on brigade cap. Your example suggests you have 90 brigades, yet don't have a single provence with the 1,000 soldiers required for even 1 brigade cap, except maybe one if perhaps Pacifist military policy? Afterall, that 0.1 has to come from something, though it should be 0.8 if Jingoism military policy, possibly 0.8 was for Pro Military. Either way, I remember one of those 2 giving 0.8 military score per brigade cap, provided of course you had the at least a quarter of said brigade cap recruited.

Hypocrite42 covered your 2nd and 3rd questions fine, so onto 4th. Hypocrite42 is right that if a brigade in an army gets wiped, it doesn't get removed provided the whole army doesn't get wiped. It's surprising however he didn't meantion how they do get removed, which is if they run out of soldier pops, soldier pops being what determines the brigade cap. If you're legit about having 90 brigades and only 0.1 military score from them, it sounds like your whole army is on the verge of being removed if you don't immediately start using your NFs to encourage soldiers.

You are also totally right about the call to arms vanishing sometimes pretty much immediately, though I sadly do not know exactly why, all the more a shame then that someone as seemingly experianced at this game as Hypocrite42 not only also doesn't know, but denies it's existance. Anyway, what's probably causing it is the ally calling to arms loses leadership of the war, right? For the war leader isn't necessarily the nation who started (or on the other side) got declared on and infact often isn't, this is important as only warleaders can call allies into wars, this is why you may want to make sure to call big allies in last to make sure your smaller allies don't get left out.

Hypocrite42 does an okay job with #6, though it should be noted how the warscore for the war is only the warleader's warscore, so if you're just an ally in a war, your alliance maybe winning, though you personnally may have negative warscore even from just enemy blockaides.

Now, recon, what does the recon on the unit mean compared to the army's recon efficiency? Actually, you didn't ask for that comparison, but you're getting it anyway! The recon stat on the unit is simply put how good it is at recon, have a sole brigade of Hussar and Dragoon start seiging down separate provences at the same time, the Hussar will always finish first due to it's superior recon stat, you know, unless there's another factor like a fort in the Hussar's provence and not in the Dragoon's. The efficiency is of that recon stat, so say we have two equal sized armies where one has 1 recon at 100% efficiency and the other has 2 at 40%, since then the 2 recon army is only at 40% efficiency, it effectively only has 0.8 recon, worse than the other army, to get max recon efficiency, you need 10% of your army to be recon units. Another thing to note is how recon doesn't stack, if you have multable recon units, the recon efficiency is based on just the highest recon unit, so you can get away with just one Hussar and the rest being superior at combat Dragoons or way cheaper to upkeep (standard) cavalry. I also think Hypocrite42 is backward on the seige verse countering dig-in bonus as a sole recon brigade on it's own will seige much faster than an army several times it's size with no recon, that's saying something as bigger armies generally means faster seiges in this game unlike with EU IV where carpet seiging is king.

[Lembley42]

Just to reply to richy, since you took the effort to specify me:

True, I simply forgot to mention that with Soldier POPs. Thanks for pointing that out richy, although as always I have reservations about your *eherm* style ;)

Random vanishes are news to me, except if the war has already concluded. But happy to learn.

Sieges are definetly faster, I more meant "the removing of dig-in" is the more "necessary" part. But this might again be a bit wrong of me as I am more used to longer-drawn out wars where you frontlines are harder. This ofcourse leads to siege time just not being as much of a priority as winning the battles. So, yeah, good point in any case.