why go to war?

[A Little Rat Boy]

Im struggling understanding how often you should be expanding via conquest. In eu4 there is are very obvious benefits and cost to expansion, you get the buildings and the tax and a future place to build more buildings at the cost of monarch points and time (separatist, coring time).

You have to look at the place you want, see if the innate resources (trade resource, land type, development) are worth the cost of the war (manpower, time, points, gold). If you decide its worth it, you take it and then you can easily see how it currently dose or doesn't benefit you through the green and red numbers.

It feels like in Vic 3 this whole process is completely opaque to me. Something similar must be there because its equivalents are in hoi4, stellaris, eu4, ck3 but i can't tell at all.

Lets say your new Granada, it looks like to me you should be going for maybe Ecuador really early but it feels a bit pointless to do. Why would you start wars before building your country up, you have workforce and all the land around you is basically the same. You start with coal and iron so it's not like you need to conquer for resources right now.

Feels like you conquer somewhere and if you can't incorporate then build on it right away its useless, you just get a bunch of low SoL pops with subsistence jobs that bring basically nothing but more mouths to feed.

There must be a reason im missing to do all this with the age of colidus and its army government buffs, events around conflict and the political history of the area at the time. It feels like its actually best to just ignore all the signs the game is giving you and build up a peaceful economy in south america then by the time your running out of pops and have a reason to expand the country specific journal entries related to conflict are gone. Feels like im missing somthing.

[A Little Rat Boy]

TLDR
It feels like the only reason to expand with war is to make your formable. I know this cant be the case, please tell me why. Im not new to these types of games, iv managed to pick up literately every other one yet this one i cant make sense of.

[Don_Salvatore]

You do war for resources and pop.
If you're missing coal or iron early game you will need to find some.

Later you will need lead, rubber and tea. Opium was quite important but it seems much less so after recent updates.

It's not a war game. Indeed if you tried the war system at release it was atrocious. It's ok now although still very basic.

[A Little Rat Boy]

Origineel geplaatst door Don_Salvatore:

You do war for resources and pop.
If you're missing coal or iron early game you will need to find some.

Later you will need lead, rubber and tea. Opium was quite important but it seems much less so after recent updates.

It's not a war game. Indeed if you tried the war system at release it was atrocious. It's ok now although still very basic.

So i'm right in thinking I should only be going to war if I cant develop the lands i already have? In all other paradox games it's a net positive to have more land no matter what pretty much, It always gives you more of something ticking in.

[Don_Salvatore]

Origineel geplaatst door Map Enjoyer:

So i'm right in thinking I should only be going to war if I cant develop the lands i already have? In all other paradox games it's a net positive to have more land no matter what pretty much, It always gives you more of something ticking in.

I would say so yeah but you play the game however you want.

It's a game about the industrialisation and fall of the ancien régime.
It's about modernising, liberalising and industrialising.

[tetsu_maru]

I go to war for a myriad of reasons. Flesh out borders, secure important areas (Suez / Panama), subjugation, expanding bloc members, resources, to get obligations or war reps, the list goes on and on. Wars are somewhat more complex than just a map painter even though the military and combat systems are more simplified than previous Pardox titles.

[Razorblade]

Credit. The more GDP your country has, the more Credit you receive, which means the more Debt you can take on, leading to faster growth. When you eat another country, that's often a large GDP, and therefore Credit boost. It's a great way to effectively wipe away Debt if you go a bit overboard and can't rebalance your economy yourself.

You are correct, however, that it's not always beneficial to go to war at all times. Victoria 3 is a game about socioeconomics, and the socieconomic reality is that war is often wasteful and unnecessary.

[A Little Rat Boy]

Origineel geplaatst door Razorblade:

Credit. The more GDP your country has, the more Credit you receive, which means the more Debt you can take on, leading to faster growth. When you eat another country, that's often a large GDP, and therefore Credit boost. It's a great way to effectively wipe away Debt if you go a bit overboard and can't rebalance your economy yourself.

You are correct, however, that it's not always beneficial to go to war at all times. Victoria 3 is a game about socioeconomics, and the socieconomic reality is that war is often wasteful and unnecessary.

Thank you, this is what i was looking for.

[A Little Rat Boy]

Origineel geplaatst door tetsu_maru:

I go to war for a myriad of reasons. Flesh out borders, secure important areas (Suez / Panama), subjugation, expanding bloc members, resources, to get obligations or war reps, the list goes on and on. Wars are somewhat more complex than just a map painter even though the military and combat systems are more simplified than previous Pardox titles.

are there strategic areas in this game? As ships and troops just seem to teleport across the map to wherever you want (Chinese operation sea lion, naval supremacy just not being a thing) it seems like none of that really matters, warfare is just your production vs there production but on the map right? There's like 0 depth to it? Your just spending your guns against there's to see who runs out first.

[endymionologist]

Origineel geplaatst door Map Enjoyer:

Origineel geplaatst door tetsu_maru:

I go to war for a myriad of reasons. Flesh out borders, secure important areas (Suez / Panama), subjugation, expanding bloc members, resources, to get obligations or war reps, the list goes on and on. Wars are somewhat more complex than just a map painter even though the military and combat systems are more simplified than previous Pardox titles.

are there strategic areas in this game? As ships and troops just seem to teleport across the map to wherever you want (Chinese operation sea lion, naval supremacy just not being a thing) it seems like none of that really matters, warfare is just your production vs there production but on the map right? There's like 0 depth to it? Your just spending your guns against there's to see who runs out first.

No, there is still plenty of military maneuvering; this isn't a tactically sophisticated RTS but there are Armies and Navies with variable composition and they have contests with each other over time in different locations based on player direction. People tend to misinterpret the Naval Invasion mechanic: it wasn't possible between the invention of rail logistics and the invention of paratroopers to perform a mass amphibious assault on a defended coast except in support of an ongoing land battlefront, but players react to having feature options that don't accomplish anything as if they are bugs instead of something you are intended to have to use carefully.
Teleportation of troops only occurs as a failsafe when occupation changes outstrip troop movements too much for the game to handle, this is rare and usually only happens when a player fails to anticipate a collapsing Front multiple times in rapid succession. The rest of the time, military units are moving across the map to designated Fronts and places; the Armies even use up convoy capacity for this.
In general, having so much advantage in a Diplomatic Play that the target just gives up without fighting is what you'd always want, but not common. Is that what happened that made you think it was just a comparison of stats? And when you say there isn't naval supremacy, are you just saying that because it is impossible to block a moving Army with a Navy that Navies don't do anything?

[A Little Rat Boy]

Origineel geplaatst door endymionologist:

Origineel geplaatst door Map Enjoyer:

are there strategic areas in this game? As ships and troops just seem to teleport across the map to wherever you want (Chinese operation sea lion, naval supremacy just not being a thing) it seems like none of that really matters, warfare is just your production vs there production but on the map right? There's like 0 depth to it? Your just spending your guns against there's to see who runs out first.

No, there is still plenty of military maneuvering; this isn't a tactically sophisticated RTS but there are Armies and Navies with variable composition and they have contests with each other over time in different locations based on player direction. People tend to misinterpret the Naval Invasion mechanic: it wasn't possible between the invention of rail logistics and the invention of paratroopers to perform a mass amphibious assault on a defended coast except in support of an ongoing land battlefront, but players react to having feature options that don't accomplish anything as if they are bugs instead of something you are intended to have to use carefully.
Teleportation of troops only occurs as a failsafe when occupation changes outstrip troop movements too much for the game to handle, this is rare and usually only happens when a player fails to anticipate a collapsing Front multiple times in rapid succession. The rest of the time, military units are moving across the map to designated Fronts and places; the Armies even use up convoy capacity for this.
In general, having so much advantage in a Diplomatic Play that the target just gives up without fighting is what you'd always want, but not common. Is that what happened that made you think it was just a comparison of stats? And when you say there isn't naval supremacy, are you just saying that because it is impossible to block a moving Army with a Navy that Navies don't do anything?

No, there is an animation for the fighting and the colours change over time to show territory occupied, its like hoi4 with less control. Its just production vs production that determines the winner so much so that the small bonuses generals give are worth so much the meta for this is to just cycle them out till you get the best one. Like the only military buildings you build just make troops and there's 3 to choose from but again you actually need them all and there is a correct composition so this essentially means you build one thing one way and compete against others who built the same thing the same way except for more and if you don't have more you lose.

You actually don't have any impact on the war, its a cutseen that goes on in the background. You can tell them to attack, stop attacking and what to attack. Its not an issue but that seems to be just what it is, there is no actual game to the warfare, its decided before it begins, its not like you can adopt a wartime economy or defend a fort line or use the terrain to your advantage in anyway. It just happens.

My understanding is with naval its much the same, looks to me the only point of building navy is to convoy raid since you can't actaully stop beachheads so again your navy only exist in the same way bombing works in hoi4. To destroy the other teams economy.

And the teleport thing isnt just referring to that, it shouldn't be possible for me to navaly invade the united kingdom as china but things like this are part of almost every guide for this game.

Let me tell you it was such a pain in the ass trying to learn this game, not because its complicated but because every guide out there relies on some wierd borderline exploit/forgotten about mechanic. Like i don't want to learn the game through exploits, i want to learn the game.

This isn't a criticism because clearly its not the main focus of the game but It just looks like your really not supposed to be engaging with it too much at all because its just not fleshed out at all compared to the rest of the game/games like it.

[Vellsi]

I'd say the reasons to conquer are those:

- Access to more resources. Iron and coal are necessary to scale industry and not everyone has access to them in sufficient quantities. Sulfur and a bit of lead don't hurt either.

Go select the iron or coal resource via the market and use the filters at the top to see where most potentials for extraction are. It's clear that some nations will want to expand to actually build anything later on. Conquest is also great to get important colonial or Asian resources (opium, dye) or late game resources like oil and rubber by securing states in which those appear early. It's always easier to defend than to attack, so doing it while technology and military industry of larger nations scales towards total war is advisable. Mostly interesting for smaller nations but gold mines were also great to steal from weak nations early - they have been nerfed quite a bit though, so that might not be the case anymore.


- More population. If you can not attract people via open borders or because of discrimination, which can be quite the issue to work around in backwards nations with awful economy and highly entrenched landowners, it's important to conquer states to get more workers for your industry. In the mid game population becomes the limiting factor to growth.
If you ever started in Ethiopia or Uganda it's a very observable concept, to the point you can not even sustain much of a military, as they have low population counts and a single stat annexation doubles it.


- Strategic access to land warfare. Naval invasion gives huge penalties (especially without the late/mid game technology to remove hard landings) and requires a navy that can beat the opponent, so having a neighboring province to walk in by foot is very important if you want to counter someone strategically.


- Treaty ports. There are always nations with markets you can synergize highly with, which they might not like, so you could force market access without tariffs via a treaty port. Not paying tariffs makes trading very efficient. You can drain someone of an important resource to help your economy scale or you can flood them with something you produce in abundance. If you subsidize industries you can even ruin their ability to build up a certain industry, as the prices would be quickly too low to employ anyone.

As of 1.7.4 treaty ports need to be adjacent to an incorporated state of the enemy nation by the way, so make sure it's not a remote port that won't get you market access.

In case you need an example of an application: An easily observable example here are the Opium Wars. Qing buys opium like mad in insane quantities at enormous prices but can ban it with a journal entry, which they generally do, to remove a major penalty their nation gets. That's why Britain declares war to get a treaty port (Hong Kong) right at the start of the game. It's an easy 10-20k income early on, so not doing it means 10-20k of compounding growth are lost, which is huge.


As others have pointed out there are also paydays to be had if you conquer industrialized states and get all those buildings for free. You need to keep in mind that each building has a cost associated with it (resource cost per construction point times construction points to build it) and that's not exactly a low amount. A 800 point factory costs 432k base price. If someone else spends their time and income to build it, and you can just snag the result, that'll lead to a lot of free income. Your return is even higher if you privatize the building at some point. Conquest is a wonderful method of economic growth.


By the way, to conquer you generally incur Infamy, which acts like a resource but in counter-intuitive ways. Infamy has a decay rate of 5 points a year, with an optional bonus of 25% on top (if you have not spent your influence, which is generally a bad idea). This means you should aim to always have some infamy decay active. It's not a resource you can store, so not using the decay and not conquering does not give you the option to conquer more later.

The game in fact penalizes you the later you conquer, as you have to incur larger infamy hits. Infamy scales with population and many nations roughly quadruple their population between start and end of the game. Early conquest is therefore wonderful while it's very dangerous later on.

Reaching over 100 infamy unlocks the "cut down to size" war goal. If that war goal gets enforced the loser has to release all conquered subjects and states gained in the last 10 years. That's a huge penalty, so conquering states with a lot of population or subjugating nations later on is far more punishing than early on.

But of course the game can also be played by sitting in cushy alliances and just going after economic or population targets. That's why there are game starts related to that specifically. How one wants to play really depends on what one enjoys most.

[John Hadley]

Conquering states costs more infamy if they have more GDP or more population. The longer you wait the more expensive it is in military spending and in infamy cost to attack them.

[A Little Rat Boy]

Origineel geplaatst door Vellsi:

I'd say the reasons to conquer are those:

- Access to more resources. Iron and coal are necessary to scale industry and not everyone has access to them in sufficient quantities. Sulfur and a bit of lead don't hurt either.

Go select the iron or coal resource via the market and use the filters at the top to see where most potentials for extraction are. It's clear that some nations will want to expand to actually build anything later on. Conquest is also great to get important colonial or Asian resources (opium, dye) or late game resources like oil and rubber by securing states in which those appear early. It's always easier to defend than to attack, so doing it while technology and military industry of larger nations scales towards total war is advisable. Mostly interesting for smaller nations but gold mines were also great to steal from weak nations early - they have been nerfed quite a bit though, so that might not be the case anymore.


- More population. If you can not attract people via open borders or because of discrimination, which can be quite the issue to work around in backwards nations with awful economy and highly entrenched landowners, it's important to conquer states to get more workers for your industry. In the mid game population becomes the limiting factor to growth.
If you ever started in Ethiopia or Uganda it's a very observable concept, to the point you can not even sustain much of a military, as they have low population counts and a single stat annexation doubles it.


- Strategic access to land warfare. Naval invasion gives huge penalties (especially without the late/mid game technology to remove hard landings) and requires a navy that can beat the opponent, so having a neighboring province to walk in by foot is very important if you want to counter someone strategically.


- Treaty ports. There are always nations with markets you can synergize highly with, which they might not like, so you could force market access without tariffs via a treaty port. Not paying tariffs makes trading very efficient. You can drain someone of an important resource to help your economy scale or you can flood them with something you produce in abundance. If you subsidize industries you can even ruin their ability to build up a certain industry, as the prices would be quickly too low to employ anyone.

As of 1.7.4 treaty ports need to be adjacent to an incorporated state of the enemy nation by the way, so make sure it's not a remote port that won't get you market access.

In case you need an example of an application: An easily observable example here are the Opium Wars. Qing buys opium like mad in insane quantities at enormous prices but can ban it with a journal entry, which they generally do, to remove a major penalty their nation gets. That's why Britain declares war to get a treaty port (Hong Kong) right at the start of the game. It's an easy 10-20k income early on, so not doing it means 10-20k of compounding growth are lost, which is huge.


As others have pointed out there are also paydays to be had if you conquer industrialized states and get all those buildings for free. You need to keep in mind that each building has a cost associated with it (resource cost per construction point times construction points to build it) and that's not exactly a low amount. A 800 point factory costs 432k base price. If someone else spends their time and income to build it, and you can just snag the result, that'll lead to a lot of free income. Your return is even higher if you privatize the building at some point. Conquest is a wonderful method of economic growth.


By the way, to conquer you generally incur Infamy, which acts like a resource but in counter-intuitive ways. Infamy has a decay rate of 5 points a year, with an optional bonus of 25% on top (if you have not spent your influence, which is generally a bad idea). This means you should aim to always have some infamy decay active. It's not a resource you can store, so not using the decay and not conquering does not give you the option to conquer more later.

The game in fact penalizes you the later you conquer, as you have to incur larger infamy hits. Infamy scales with population and many nations roughly quadruple their population between start and end of the game. Early conquest is therefore wonderful while it's very dangerous later on.

Reaching over 100 infamy unlocks the "cut down to size" war goal. If that war goal gets enforced the loser has to release all conquered subjects and states gained in the last 10 years. That's a huge penalty, so conquering states with a lot of population or subjugating nations later on is far more punishing than early on.

But of course the game can also be played by sitting in cushy alliances and just going after economic or population targets. That's why there are game starts related to that specifically. How one wants to play really depends on what one enjoys most.

Thanks, this helped a lot. I guess i lack the historical knowledge of the time period to properly envision what the game mechanics are supposed to be abstracting. I'll probably reference this when playing to find my feet.

[Meerkat Commando]

You're nervous about war, that's understandable. It's costly in blood and treasure but absolutely necessary.

Do you know that our enemies mock you in the foreign capital? Our fair-weather allies doubt your will and commitment to the stability of Europe. Should we allow our foes to fill the power vacuum left by the weak and decadent Turks? Who better than us reap the benefits of empire? Can you name a power more just and civilized than we are?

Why should we be content with your unjust peace? I hold in my possession a letter signed by the four-fifths of the general staff demanding that you break off negotiations and immediately resume hostilities with our ancient foes. Our loyal veterans will not permit their sacrifices to be in vain. Furthermore, your palace bodyguard has been replaced by army troops loyal to the field marshal of the east.

Hopefully you can see the wisdom of a just war and the folly of an intolerable peace.

[SIX]

Late game is always about shortage of ressources so you want to conquer as much as you can to be able to devlope all those ressources yourself and export surplus later.