A Multiplayer Guide on the Art of Player vs Player Warfare

This is an extensive multiplayer guide that will talk about tips, tricks and all the important details and knowledge players need in order to be successful at player vs player warfare in the world of Europa Universalis 4.

Introduction

Needless to say, combat in multiplayer is a completely different ball game to combat in single player. While luring the AI into mountain provinces with small stacks and following in with your main army stack may work wonders in single player, humans aren't that gullible. Optimizing ideas, policies, dealing with attrition, making use of terrain and tactical retreats are not that essential in single player; the AI almost never puts up a real challenge. They are vital in multiplayer.

This guide will give you a detailed overview of all the aspects of PvP (player versus player) and will help beginners and people who are new to multiplayer get a good grasp on the key concepts of multiplayer warfare. You'll find that I focus a lot more on land warfare as it is much more complex and deeper than naval warfare. I will continue to improve this guide with pictures and updates as the game evolves. While this guide was written for version 1.6, almost every aspect of it still applies as of the last edit. Major changes are coming to the game soon, particularly to the way how wars are fought with the new fort system. I will update this guide post 1.12.

Take note that this guide does not intend to go over the basic mechanics of warfare and assumes that the reader has a decent understanding of the game. You will also see me refer to the term 'stack' or 'stacks'. A 'stack' is what the EU4 community calls a single army or navy. Multiple stacks can be stationed in a province and more than one stack can be involved in a battle.

Micromanagement

It's a term you hear in so many competitive strategy games. In a nutshell, it refers to the minor, detailed game elements and how good/fast the player is at managing these elements. In EU4 PvP, micromanaging your armies and navies includes moving them around, avoiding attrition, using hotkeys, waypoints and so forth. While these things may seem unimportant or very basic to you, they are often the very difference between winning and losing a war in PvP.

Needless to say, the best way to improve your micromanagement (or micro for short) is to simply play more. The more you play, the more comfortable you are reading the map and the quicker your reaction and the better your timing. The more you play, the more familiar you become with fighting in different regions of the map (like the Alps or the Russian mainland) and you become a lot quicker when making decisions on which province to move to. However there are some things that I feel every player should get used to as soon as possible in order to up their game. One of these things is the use of hotkeys.

Hotkeys are incredibly important in any competitive strategy game simply due to the fact that they speed up your micro so much and let you do more things in a shorter amount of time. Now while EU4 is no Starcraft, it is still imperative that you have a high number of actions per minute during wars; big wars in particular that span more than one continent. I highly encourage everyone who doesn't make use of hotkeys to begin using them from now on, whether it's in single player or in multiplayer. Clicking on the interface to do everything will waste so much time in a tight war - and time is everything.

Here are a list of the important hotkeys that you should use in EU4. It is important to make sure you don't have your caps lock on as all the hotkeys are lowercase letters.

a - Pressing 'a' will attach/detach land units to any transports that are currently docked in the same province.

s - Pressing 's' will split the selected army or navy in half. The game will try to maintain the same ratio of infantry:cavalry:artillery or heavy ships:light ships:galleys:transports.

d - Pressing 'd' with a sieging army selected will detach enough units to continue the siege and give you the freedom of moving away from the siege with the remainder of your army. You will find that so many times it is important to quickly move your sieging army to intercept an enemy stack. Moving the entire army will obviously break the siege and remove any progress you've made and that's something you don't want to do. This hotkey works for blockading navies as well. Just keep in mind that you never want to leave a tiny siege stack isolated as it becomes an easy target for a larger enemy stack to wipe.

f - Pressing 'f' will bring up the 'Find Province' interface which allows you to quickly locate a province on the map.

g - Dragging a box with your mouse over two or more units in the same province or sea zone will select all the units. If you press 'g' it will group all those units into one army or navy.

z - Pressing 'z' will detach all infantry units or all heavy ships from the selected army or navy.

x - Detaches all cavalry units or all light ships from the selected army or navy.

c - Detaches all artillery units or all the galleys in the selected army or navy.

v - Detaches transports

m - The shortcut for forced march. This is a very, very handy hotkey. Just keep in mind that any unit that has forced march enabled will NOT regenerate morale at the beginning of every month.

Shift - Holding shift down with an army or navy selected will allow you to give waypoints to that army or navy. Simply click on each province or sea zone you want them to go to in the order you like. This is incredibly useful as it allows you to manually adjust the path a unit takes to get to the desired province or sea zone whilst avoiding provinces on the way that would give it nasty attrition for instance.

Last but not least Q W E R T Y. These are the hotkeys for the primary mapmodes that you have selected. We'll talk about the importance of map modes in warfare later on.

Organizing your armies and navies and making it easy and quick to select them can make all the difference in the world. That is why the outliner is your best friend. The outliner is the box right under the date in the top right corner and you can adjust it so that it shows all kinds of useful information. During a war it is often very useful to remove all the 'fluff' from the outliner like merchants, colonies, missionaries and stuff not directly useful during the war. Leaving the outliner to show only 'Armies', 'Navies', 'Land Combat' and 'Naval Combat' makes it a lot easier to access your different armies and navies on the fly as well as making it harder to miss a battle that is happening outside of your screen.


Notice how the outliner shows only the relevant information while I'm at war. This makes it easy for me to access my armies, navies and to quickly zoom to battles around the map by clicking on 'Land Combat' when a battle is in progress.

Another extremely useful way to speed up your micromanagement during a war is to bind your armies to number keys. If you select an army or navy and press down on the 'CTRL' button and then hit any of the numbers on the keyboard from 1 - 9, you can bind that army or navy to that number. Everytime you push that number, the army or navy gets selected. If you double tap on that number, the camera will automatically move to center on them even if they are off screen on a distant continent.

Last but not least, getting used to playing the game from a more zoomed out distance is highly recommended. It may be very appealing to zoom in really close during a battle to see the little animation of the two soldiers poking each other with their pikes - but that's not going to help you spot enemy troop movements or battles happening somewhere else on the screen. It is obviously important sometimes to zoom in to be able to click on the right province but you should get used to being zoomed out enough to see the majority of the front.

The bottom line is that micromanaging your armies and navies efficiently is one of the most important aspects of multiplayer PvP. The slower you are selecting units and moving them, the more time you waste. Ordering an army one or two seconds too late to reinforce a battle can be the difference between a victory and a stack wipe in the enemy's favor.

Reconnaissance and Planning

The value of military intelligence in a real world setting speaks for itself; almost every country in the world makes use of some sort of agency or branch of its military to collect data and develop knowledge about the enemy. It cannot be stressed how crucial it is to mirror this reconnaissance in strategy games like EU4 where every decision you make can have a big impact on the outcome of a war. In order to make the right decisions, you need to be well informed.

Over the course of a game, nations are constantly changing. They are teching up, adopting new ideas, expanding their armies, going to war etc. In order to conduct a successful war it is imperative that you do your homework beforehand. Gathering information about the enemy is the first step you must take before deciding to even start a war. Here are a list of things you need to keep track of throughout a game and should pay special attention to particularly when making the decision to go to war:

- Military Technology: Before declaring war on someone, you should open the technology map mode and check their military tech. If it is higher than yours, you may want to delay fighting them unless if the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. On the flip side, if you are ahead, it may be the perfect window to push your advantage and earn the upper hand by declaring war before they catch up. Keeping up with military tech ensures that your units and fire/shock modifiers are modern and on par with everyone else. As a consequence, it is mandatory that you never fall behind in military technology or diplomatic technology if you are playing a naval power. Every seasoned player will recognize the importance of keeping up with technology and you will rarely find someone falling too behind in military tech as it is always a top priority for the investment of military monarch points.

- Manpower: Before declaring war, compare your manpower reserves with that of your enemy. This can be done by opening the ledger, however keep in mind that many campaigns play with a locked ledger and determining how much manpower a player has becomes a matter of estimation. If your foe has just come out of a long and bloody war, the chances are that their manpower reserves are dreadfully low and it may be the time to fight them while your reserves are still fresh. Manpower is an incredibly valuable resources in the game. Technology and quality may win battles, but it is the ability to sustain more casualties than the enemy and continue fighting that usually decides who is forced to the peace table first.

- Ideas: Certain military idea groups like 'Quality' and 'Offensive' give distinct advantages to the nation that adopts them. Quality boosts the combat ability modifier of your military and navy as well as giving a handsome boost to discipline, while Offensive gives better leaders, discipline and the ability to use 'Force March'. Comparing your military ideas with your enemy's will give you a good idea about the capability of both of your armies. More on ideas later.

- Economy: Money is the sinews of war they say. Conducting warfare in multiplayer can be a very costly endeavour; one that may be very taxing on your economy. Before declaring war you need to determine your economic potential and calculate how long you can fight and support your military before going into debt. Debt and loans ofcourse, are not overly crippling but can certainly make life more difficult. Reinforcing your army after it takes losses in battle is typically very expensive, especially if you are using mercenaries which are an extremely valuable asset to any nation. Consider your income and compare it to your enemy's (again, the ledger is your best friend) as money is a very important factor in war. A war that destroys your economy is a war you want to avoid as it will generally set you back considerably.

- Military Size: Quality is certainly important in multiplayer but one must not forget the value of numbers. It is important to consider the overall number of regiments/ships that you have in comparison to your enemy. An opponent that has a fleet of heavy ships twice your size is more than likely to pummel you unless if you are vastly superior in terms of technology and quality.

- Morale: At the end of the day the army or navy that runs out of morale first in battle is going to lose. Many things affect morale including military/diplomatic technology, prestige, army/naval tradition, ideas and even power projection. High morale is always a desirable thing and it is important to determine the difference between your morale and that of your enemy. More on this later.

- Generals and Admirals: I've dedicated a section to the topic of leaders as they are so important in combat. Knowing the stats of your enemy's leaders is an incredibly useful piece of information as leaders are more often than not the deciding factor in an otherwise even battle. When your enemy has a 6 fire and 6 shock general and your best general is only 3 fire and 2 shock, you really don't want to mess with them.

- Diplomacy: Keeping track of alliances and politics is an important aspect of EU4 multiplayer. It is vital that you know the consequences of declaring war on an enemy. You don't want to declare war without knowing who might potentially support your enemy or even attack you in a separate war while you are busy. Keep your game awareness up and always look to better your position with diplomacy before making your move.


The ledger is the most useful tool for gathering information about other players. Learn to use it frequently.

Gathering information and planning ahead before declaring war is the mark of a good player. As mentioned earlier, the ledger is an extremely useful tool that can give you so much insight into a nation's capacity to wage war. However, more and more games are being played with a locked ledger and as a result, more effort and resources need to be allocated in order to get good intel. The Espionage idea group becomes a lot more attractive with a locked ledger. Especially with the buffed up rebels in patch 1.6.

Communication and Coordination

Multiplayer PvP wars are frequently large and 1 v 1's are not exactly that common. A successful player will recognize the importance of coordinating their movements with their allies once the big wars start rolling. Just like any competitive multiplayer game, the best way to communicate with your allies is through voice chat. Unfortunately the game doesn't support voice chat and so the best way to communicate is through a VOIP software program like Teamspeak or Mumble. Typing simply takes way too long and the chances are that in an intense fight, you won't even read anything that people type to you. It is vital that you coordinate your attacks and movements and in order to do so you need to have good communication.

Wars that consist of more than 1 human player on each side typically result in a series of 'dog pile' battles where everybody converges all their armies or navies into one or two major battles at a time. Armies are typically spread out across a number of provinces at any point during a large war usually to avoid attrition or deny certain areas to the enemy. As a result, it becomes very important to time your attacks (or indeed your defensive stands) with your allies so that your stacks converge on the province where the battle is being fought roughly around the same day. If there is a long delay between you and your allies and they are late to a decisive large battle, it will often cost you dearly. The best way to coordinate a converging attack is to call it out before you actually go through with it. When you plan on attacking an enemy stack, make sure you make it very loud and clear what province or sea zone you are moving into. This gives your allies game awarness on what's going on, which helps them act accordingly by reinforcing you in a timely fashion for instance.

You'll realize that I keep mentioning the term 'game awareness'. The reason I keep referring to this term is because knowing what's happening around you and not only directly in front of you is extremely important. When you are in a war with one or more players, a lot of stacks are usually involved and the frontline can typically become very chaotic. It becomes difficult to keep track of everything that is happening on the screen. Therefore, you should get into the habit of constantly calling out important things you see happening on the map. Pointing out relevant enemy troop movements, the stats/placement of enemy generals and the location of important battles are useful pieces of information to your allies. Even if they've already made note that for instance a 30 k Austrian stack has popped out of the fog of war, it's still a very good idea to tell your friends about it out loud on Teamspeak. Keeping everyone's game awareness up helps everyone make important decisions (and clicks) a lot faster and will defintely give you the upper hand.

Communication is key.

Optimizing Military Spending

It is no surprise that the more you invest in your army and navy in terms of money (buildings and recruitment) and monarch points, the more effective and powerful your war machine is. In order to get the upper hand in a PvP war, you need every advantage you can get over the enemy. Optimizing your spending of money and monarch points is one sure way to get that upper hand.

I don't intend to go over the very basic mechanics of the game in this guide. Having said that, it is important for you to learn when and how to efficiently spend your monarch points. As mentioned earlier, military technology (and diplomatic technology for naval powers) should always be the top priority for the spending of your precious monarch points. Falling behind in technology even by 1 tech, can have huge implications. As you tech up, you increase your army and navy morale as well as unlocking new units and improved modifiers for your infantry, cavalry and artillery. The player who has the most modern units with the best modifiers to shock and fire will have a huge advantage over a player who is still using the last generation of troop type. Keep this in mind and prioritize military technology over any other spending to ensure that you are always fielding a modern army.

Once you are 'ahead of time' in a military or diplomatic technology, you generally don't want to unlock the next technology as there is a penalty involved that will make it much more costly to unlock. The more 'ahead of time' you are, the more expensive the technology. There are exceptions to this rule ofcourse. In multiplayer, it can actually be a very good investment to unlock a military technology that is 'ahead of time' even if it is say 20 % more expensive. If you're playing Austria and both you and France are at military technology 11, it may be very worthwhile to unlock military tech 12 a few years ahead of time as it gives you a whole new tier of military units. If you then immediately declare war on France, who is still at military technology 11, the odds will be greatly in your favor. To be able to make use of this trick you often need to have a good amount of monarch points saved up, so get in the habit of holding onto your monarch points and spending them when you absolutely have to not just because you can. Buying military technology ahead of time works wonders when you pull it off properly; just make sure you're not TOO far ahead in time as the penalty is a lot larger the more ahead of time you are.

Ideas are next on your list of priorities for monarch point spending. I won't go into too much detail about ideas in this section as I will be talking about them more extensively later on in this guide. Certain idea groups give your nation a significant boost to it's fighting capacity. Increased forcelimits, manpower and discipline are just examples of extremely useful perks you get from different idea groups. Choosing the right idea group is really a skill you will learn from playing more and more. Once you have determined your political agenda and the direction you want to steer your nation, choosing the right idea group becomes much more easier. One must not forget that there are idea groups that you pick and unlock, as well as national ideas that are pre-determined. Certain national ideas are superb and are actually worth gunning for. France's second national idea 'Show Elan!' gives them a hefty 20 % army morale boost in the early game: a killer national idea. To unlock that, the player needs to buy 6 ideas from one or more of his chosen idea groups as each 3 ideas you buy, will unlock a national idea. The point I'm trying to make is that sometimes it is important to prioritize spending your monarch points on ideas in order to unlock an important national idea that will give you a huge boost. Much more on ideas later.

Last but not least on your list of priorities for monarch point spending is infrastructure (buildings). Infrastructure is not as important as technology but the player who neglects their infrastructure over the course of a game will pay for that negligence in the mid game and late game. Building military infrastructure increases your manpower, reduces recruitment time and increases your forcelimits if you decide to build military specialization buildings in a province. Naval infrastructure allows you to build cheaper ships faster as well as significantly boosting your naval forcelimits. These little things make a huge difference in a war and they certainly add up over the course of a game; I cannot stress how important it is to avoid neglecting your infrastructure. Always try to sneak in an important building or two when you have the money and an abundance of monarch points. Ofcourse the best time to invest in infrastructure is when you are ahead of time in technology and don't see yourself fighting a war in the immediate future. Always prioritize your high base tax provinces when building military infrastructure as they will generally have more manpower and will net you bigger boosts by building infrastructure in them. Keep in mind that provinces that are overseas have a huge penalty to manpower and so building military buildings outside of your home continent is generally not recommended. Naval infrastructure on the other hand is useful everywhere as you mainly build it to increase your naval forcelimits.

Learning how to optimize your monarch point spending is only one side of the coin. Money is the other huge factor in EU4. Recruiting and maintaining an army and navy is an expensive ordeal and so it is important for players to have a strong economic foundation before investing heavily in their military and navy. Building up your tax and production buildings and optimizing trade will help ensure that you stay in the green as you build up your armed forces and reach your maximum forcelimits. One very important tip is to reduce your army maintenance slider in the military screen to cut down on spending when you are not at war. Bringing the slider down to the half-way mark will give you a lot of breathing room at times of peace; at the expense of reduced morale and slower reinforcement time. However, should the need arise to mobilize your army and bring spending back to full again, it could take a few months before your stacks regenerate morale to the max. As of patch 1.6, money in the early and mid game is harder to come by and going over your forcelimits is now twice as expensive. It has never been more important to properly manage your economy and military spending.

Military Organization

Organizing your army and navy stacks and putting in the right ratios of infantry:cavalry:artillery is something that changes over the course of the game. The organization of your armies and navies plays an integral part in warfare and learning how to organize your stacks according to the time period (technology), is something that every new player tends to struggle with. As the game progresses, things like combat width, military tactics, overall morale and fire/shock modifiers will always be increasing. A good player will know when to change up their setup based on the change in technology. I'm going to be focusing mainly on land warfare as it is the most relevant to this section; the ratios in a fleet never really change. Generally speaking, the more heavy ships you have the better.

A campaign that starts in 1444 and ends in 1821 can be roughly divided into an early game, mid game and late game. The early game is the time period before the true pike and shot formations start appearing in Europe (tercios). It is a period where melee combat (shock) is the main deciding factor of battles. The time period between military technology 3 and 12 can be described as the early game. In the early game, the shock phase of combat is where most of the damage is done and generals with high shock ability are extremely valuable during this part of the game. Artillery, which becomes available at Military Tech 7 is still not very effective in battle and infantry and cavalry don't have the pips or fire modifiers to do significant damage in the fire phase.

Cavalry is the main killer in the early game as it has the highest shock modifier and the most shock pips. You should aim to have as much cavalry as possible without triggering the insufficient support penalty in a battle. If you have more cavalry than infantry at any point during a battle, you will get a nasty 25 % penalty to your 'military tactics' value which results in you taking a lot more casualties; this is known as the 'insufficient support penalty'. Since cavalry is generally placed on the flanks during a battle, it tends to get hit less often. As a result, cavalry usually dies slower than the infantry which always gets stuck in the center of a battle line causing it to take the heaviest beating. Therefore, the best army setup in the early game is a ratio of 2:1 infantry:cavalry with one or two artillery pieces just to help with sieging. Remember, artillery only starts becoming lethal once the fire multiplier goes up later on in the game. At this point of the game, the amount of damage they will do for you in battle is not worth the very expensive maintenance of artillery. You are better off using that money (which is scarce early on) on fielding more units or building up your infrastructure.

At any point of the game whether it be early or late, the overall size of your stack should be roughly equal to the average supply limit of your provinces. If the average supply limit is around 20, then you should aim to have stacks of 20k troops; this is to make it easier for your stacks to march around the map without taking attrition.

The mid game can be thought of as the time period between the Spanish Square and the advent of Line Infantry; that is, the time period between military technology 12 and 21. During this part of the game, the fire modifiers on infantry and artillery begin to increase steadily, making the fire phase more and more important the later you you are in the game. At this point of the game, if you've been managing your country effectively then you should easily be able to support a decent amount of artillrey in your armies. The artillery fire modifier goes up to 1.4 at military tech 13 and increases yet again to 2.4 at military tech 16. Once you reach military tech 16, it becomes well worth your money to try and fit in as many artillery pieces into a stack as your combat width will allow (and your economy obviously). It is at this point of the game, around the turn of the 17th century, that artillery begins its ascension as to becoming the most important weapon on the battlefield.

The ideal stack composition in the mid game is your combat width in artillery and then 1.5 times that number in infantry. The reason you want more infantry is because artillery can fire from the backline in a battle but takes double the damage if it is forced onto the frontline due to a lack of infantry or cavalry. Aim to maintain the ratio of infantry to cavalry as 2:1 just like in the early game. So at military technology 16 for instance, the perfect stack would consist of 30 k artillery pieces (as that is your combat width at that technology level), 45 k infantry and 22 k cavalry. Before patch 1.6 was released, cavalry was a lot less useful in the midgame and lategame. However, with the rebalancing of unit pips, it is now effective throughout the game and deals some insane amount of damage in the shock phase of mid game and late game battles. If you do the math, this adds up to a grand total of 97k in one stack. However, marching around with that many troops in one stack in the year 1600 would probably decimate your manpower reserves due to attrition. Remember, the overall size of any single stack should be roughly equal to the average supply limit of your provinces. The ratios I have given here are for the 'perfect' army and maximum firepower; but at this stage it would be highly unpractical to have stacks that big. Use it as a framework for your army composition and you should be good.

The late game can be thought of as the time when line infantry are introduced in Europe onwards; military technology 21 - 32. In this part of the game the fire phase becomes the most important phase in any battle as the fire modifiers on both infantry and especially artillery become more and more lethal. The artillery fire modifier jumps from 2.4 at Military tech 21 to 4.4 at military tech 22. It goes up to 6.4 at military tech 26 and finally a whopping 8.4 at the very end of the game at miltiary tech 32. This is the age where artillery is the main weapon on the battlefield and often the army that fields more artillery in the late game will dish out the most casualties. As the supply limit of provinces goes up later in the game, it becomes a little more feasible to field those 'perfect firepower' stacks that I mentioned earlier. Always aim for maximum firepower in the mid and late game.

To recap on this section, my recommendation for patch 1.6 is to keep armies at a ratio of 2:1 infantry:cavalry in the early game and maybe sneak in a few artillery pieces to aid with sieging. As artillery becomes more efficient (with higher fire modifiers) in the mid game and late game, you should begin to add in as much artillery as you can support economically until you have a full backline of artillery. Try to maintain a ratio of 1.5 infantry : artillery in order to ensure that artillery does not get placed on the frontline where it takes double the amount of casualties.

Ideas, Morale, Discipline and Advisors - A Game of Modifiers

It is no mystery that battles win wars and that wars shape the map and the course of the game. To win wars in multiplayer, it is vital that you get all the boosts that you can get your hands on. Choosing the right idea groups at the right time will provide you with those boosts that will give you the edge over your rivals. There are plenty of decent idea groups in the game and as a matter of fact you could probably make a decent argument for choosing any of them. While some are situational, there are some idea groups that are an absolute neccessity in multiplayer.

If you plan on playing a naval power, there is no questioning the fact that you will need Naval ideas. The earlier you pick them up the better. The ideas, events and policies that are linked to naval ideas are absolutely vital for achieving naval supremacy. Naval warfare is a lot simpler than land warfare in the sense that naval conflicts usually come down to one major battle. When two battle fleets collide, if you have a larger fleet with more heavy ships than the enemy, then the odds will be in your favor. Ofcourse leaders play a huge roll and so does the average speed of the fleet and positioning. Naval ideas give you a massive 50 % boost to your naval forcelimits, a gain in yearly naval tradition, better admirals and an extremely important 25 % boost to morale. There isn't much to explain here. Take them if you ever plan on being a naval power in multiplayer.

Discipline and morale are two of the three main factors that decide land battles (the third being generals and admirals) between two nations with equal tech and numbers. Discipline is an extremely important parameter that gives a boost to your army's ability to inflict casualties. Navies do not make use of discipline. The base value for discipline is 100 % and the higher your discipline the more casualties you inflict. Morale on the other hand, determines how long your army can stay in battle. The army that loses all its morale first will break and lose a battle. High discipline inflicts high casualties and high casualties will sink morale a lot quicker. Therefore, discipline is seen as the more important component of the two and ideas that increase discipline either directly or through policies should always be sought after.

Before patch 1.6, the Defensive idea group was widely viewed as a mandatory group to pick up early as it used to give a 25 % morale boost to armies. In the early game, that 25 % morale boost meant everything. In 1.6 however, they nerfed that 25 % boost and made it 15 % instead and gave us a new way to boost morale - power projection. Maxing out your power projection will give you an extra 10 % morale to your armies and navies and so this nerf to Defensive essentially negated the absolute need to take this idea group in order to remain competitive early. While Defensive remains a very attractive idea group for the army tradition, cheaper maintenance and ofcourse the morale boost, it is now widley accepted that Offensive ideas are superior to Defensive ideas. Offensive ideas give you forcelimits, better leaders, more manpower and most importantly a boost to discipline and the ability to use 'force march' making it the top military idea. People may disagree with this but the importance of discipline especially in patch 1.6 cannot be overlooked; you need to get as much discipline as you can get your hands on.

Quality is the other vital idea group that you need to pick up as early as possible to dominate land warfare. The discipline boost it gives you along with the increase in combat ability of all your different types of units will make your armies formidable in battle and stacks very nicely with Offensive ideas. If you unlock and fully max out the Offensive and Quality idea groups early, I assure you it will be extremely difficult for someone who hasn't done the same to win battles against you.

On the topic of stacking idea boosts, it is useful to consider your own set of national ideas which is unique to your nation before choosing idea groups. It can be very useful to base your strategy around these national ideas and augment them with idea groups that have the same effect for an even bigger boost. Austria's third national idea 'Military Frontier' gives the player a 20 % bonus to fort defence. This stacks with the 33 % bonus to fort defence that you would get from Defensive ideas; couple these two ideas with a military engineer advisor and high prestige and you're looking at forts that will take an eternity to siege.

You need to think very carefully about the idea groups that you choose in multiplayer. Any combination of 2 completed idea groups will unlock policies for you. Policies are basically decisions that you enact which cost 1 monarch point in maintenance each month in exchange for a modest boost. As mentioned earlier, discipline is always the most important thing in PvP land wars and so any combination of idea groups that give you a discipline policy should be chosen if possible. In the current game meta, fully completing Economic ideas and Offensive ideas will give you access to a policy called 'Weapon Quality Standards' which gives you an extra 5 % discipline at a cost of 1 admin point a month. Fully unlocking Offensive ideas and Quality ideas will give you a policy called the 'Militia Act' which will give you another 5 % discipline for the cost of 1 military point a month. These two policies and their associated idea groups combined will give you an extra 22.5 % discipline to your armies. That is essentially stack wipes all day against players who have 100 % discipline. Ofcourse there are a bunch of different idea group combinations that open up policies which give you morale boosts but as I already mentioned, morale is a lot easier to come by than discipline.

Advisors are another great way to enhance your military and navy at any point of the game. When you are at war, it is always a good idea to try and pick up advisors that boost morale or discipline. The naval reformer and army reformer both give an extra 10 % morale to your navies and armies respecitvely. The commandant is a military advisor that gives a nice 5 % boost to discipline. If you are fighting a very defensive war where your aim is to hold out as long as possible rather than win battles, it may be a good idea to pick up the military engineer which gives a 25 % boost to fort defence making it take longer for the enemy to siege down your forts. In times of peace, you may want to pick up a grand captain for -10 % maintenance cost of your armies or perhaps a master recruiter for 10 % more manpower which basically helps you recover manpower faster and allows you to build up an extra reserve. Whatever advisor you decide to pick up, just keep in mind that different advisors are useful in different situations and that the boosts they give you stack with the boosts from ideas.

PvP warfare often boils down to the overall quality of your army or navy. The more discipline and morale you have, the better your odds of winning a battle that is even in numbers. While technology, terrain, numbers, leaders and even dice rolls certainly play a big part in deciding battles, maxing out these little discipline and morale boosts here and there often tip the balance in your favor. Keep this in mind and you will be surprised at how much of a difference these things make in tight PvP wars.

The Importance of Good Leadership

In the previous section we mentioned how the three main factors that decide battles are morale, disipline and the stats of your generals and admirals. Having one or two brilliant generals or admirals in your army or navy will have a huge impact on the outcome of the wars you fight; they can be downright game changers. In fact, having better leaders than your opponents is so important that players will often spend hundreds of monarch points rolling generals and admirals until they get one with good stats.

Generals and admirals are rated between 0 and 6 in four categories: Fire, Shock, Maneuver and Siege (admirals don't get allocated a value for siege). The difference in Fire and Shock ability between your leader and the enemy leader is added to the dice roll in that specific phase of a battle. So for example If you have a 6 fire general and the enemy has a 3 fire general, the difference between their fire stats is 3 and so that number is added to your dice roll in the fire phase. The same applies for the difference in Shock ability. The general's maneuver affects the movement speed of the army on the map, while an admiral's maneuver ability affects fleet positioning for naval battles. When a fleet is assigned to protect trade in a trade node, each point of manuever ability an admiral has adds a 5% tradepower bonus to the light ships in the fleet he is commanding. Maneuver also reduces the attrition for land and naval units by 1% per point. A general with good maneuver skill is important for combat in potentially rough terrain. A defending general with a good maneuver skill will have a better chance at fighting the battle on terrain with a higher defensive bonus, while an attacking general with a good maneuver skill will have a better chance at fighting on terrain with a poor defensive bonus. When leading a siege, a general's siege skill is added to all dice rolls, making sieges go faster.

To maximize the chance of you recruiting a general or admiral with high stats there are a few things that you can do. The most obvious thing is to keep your army and navy traditon up. You gain army tradition by winning battles (particularly stack wipes) as well as successfully sieging provinces. Each province you siege and occupy in a war will give you 1 army tradition. You can gain naval tradition by winning naval battles and by sending light ships to protect trade. It will serve you well to keep your army and navy tradition up as it not only helps ensure that you roll good generals and admirals; it also gives you a boost to the morale of your armies and navies.

The Defensive idea group and the Naval idea group both give you 1 point of army tradition and navy tradition respectively per year. However, tradition normally decays at a rate of 5 % of your current value per year and unless if you are constantly at war your tradition will usually sink pretty fast. This makes the Innovative idea group very, very attractive in multiplayer as it reduces this yearly decay from 5 % to 3 % which helps you keep that tradition up. Building the war college and admirality will give 0.5 army and naval tradition a year respectively.

The other thing that will help ensure you roll good leaders is the selection of various idea groups. The Aristocratic idea group and Offensive idea group both add +1 shock to any general that you recruit. Offensive ideas also give +1 fire while Defensive ideas will give +1 maneuver to any generals that you recruit. So as you can see, combining high army and navy tradition with certain idea groups will almost guarantee that you recruit high quality generals and admirals.

As the game progresses, new military technology will unlock new military units for you to choose from. At military tech 15 for example, if you are playing a western tech nation you get to choose between Maurician infantry and Charge infantry. Maurician infantry has 2 offensive FIRE pips and 2 offensive SHOCK pips while Charge infantry has 1 offensive FIRE pip and 3 offensive SHOCK pips; their defensive pips are otherwise identical. The former is better in the fire phase while the latter is better at doing damage in the shock phase. So which one do you use? Well if I had Aristocracy and Offensive ideas opened up and had a bunch of level 6 shock generals, then I'm probably going to go with the units that specialize in shock damage. If I have better fire generals, I'm probably going to go with Maurician infantry which deals more fire damage. Generally speaking, high shock generals are extremely valuable in the early game (when most of the kills happen in the shock phase) while high fire generals are a lot more useful in the late game when the fire modifier on artillery and infantry gets really high.

Due to the nature of attrition in EU4, players are often forced to divide their military up into a number of stacks that are spread across a number of provinces. As a result, you will often find that you have more stacks than available generals to lead them and this can be very problematic in a PvP war. A leader-less stack is the prime target for an enemy army that is led by a general.
Armies that have no leader will get decimated by a well led enemy stack if they are not reinforced quickly by another one of your own stacks that is actually led by a general. It is crucial that you never allow one of your armies or navies to engage an enemy without it being led by a general or admiral. There is a cap on the number of leaders you can have at any time (there are various ways you can increase this cap such as being the curia controller or having power projection over 25) and going over this cap will cost you 1 military point per month per extra leader over the cap. Having said that, sometimes it is better to go over the cap and ensure that all your armies are well led, rather than risking a war where you have a lack of generals and admirals.

As you can see, generals and admirals have a great effect on how battles play out. Often you will roll generals that are amazing at one category and not so hot in other categories. You can either specialize your army according to your leader stats or you can continue to roll generals (at the expense of 50 military monarch points per general) until you get one with favorable stats. Either way it is important to realize that a superior enemy general or admiral will wreck havoc to your armies and navies if they are not led by an equally capable leader. Pay special attention to this aspect of warfare when making your calculations and plans.

Terrain and Mapmodes

Terrain is often the driving force behind movements on the battlefield. Siezing good defensive terrain and denying it from the enemy is often a top priority in any fight and you should strive to do so yourself. You never, ever, ever want to be attacking an enemy stack that is sitting in a province with an 80 % chance of mountains. Mountains and hills are the two main defensive types of terrain that will give a nasty penalty to the attacker's dice roll and favor the defender. As such, you must aim to deny your enemy such provinces if possible or avoid them altogether.

Earlier on in this guide I mentioned the importance of map modes when fighting PvP wars. Pressing Q,W,E,R,T and Y on the keyboard will select the primary mapmode that you have binded to those keys. I currently have my own setup as the following:

Q: Terrain mapmode. This is probably the most useful mapmode during wars. With this mapmode selected, scrolling over any province will give you a list of percentages of how likely each terrain type will be the one you fight in should you engage in combat in that province.

W: The good 'ole political mapmode. Nice and easy on the eyes and is generally the mapmode most people play in when not at war.

E: The trade mapmode. Helps me quickly identify high trade power provinces (important centers of trade and river estuaries) which I will prioritize taking in a war to choke the enemy's trade.

R: The supply mapmode. This mapmode is the other main mapmode you need to be using during war to avoid attrition. With an army stack selected, if I hit 'R' on the keyboard, the map will highlight each province that cannot support the current army in red. If the province is highlighted in green, then the province has enough supply limit to support the selected army. Yellow indicates a provicne that can just barely support your army. This is VERY useful and every player should get used to using this mapmode during fights. It helps you decide what route to take (by using waypoints) to get to a destination without taking nasty attrition from low supply provinces on the way.

T: The diplomatic mapmode. Very useful when conducting diplomacy to see who has deals with who. You should use this mapmode when you are making plans to go to war.

Y: The Winter mapmode. This mapmode will shade all provinces either black (no winters), gray (mild winters), dark gray (normal winters) or white (severe winters). Mild winters will give an enemy army 1 attrition as long as it's in that province while severe winters will give an enemy army a devastating 5 extra attrition per month. Attack the Russian mainland in January at your own peril.

Getting used to switching between the different mapmodes on the fly is part of having good micro and you should practice using the terrain mapmode and supply mapmode as much as possible to avoid attacking armies in nasty terrain and to avoid taking attrition.


This is what the map looks like in the supply mapmode. Notice how I've given waypoints to go around Suzdal which would otherwise give me attrition if I marched through it. When applicable, your army is hit by attrition as soon as it enters a province and also at the beginning of every month.

The Front

By now you've read pretty much everything you need to know about preparing and organizing before going to war. Fighting PvP wars takes patience and requires the player to pay a good amount of attention to what the enemy is doing. Players will always be jockeying around with their stacks trying to get into the best position possible on the map. It is therefore essential that you react to everything your enemy does in a timely fashion if you dont want to be outmaneuvered; efficient micromanagement is very important. Always try to keep all your stacks relatively close to each other so that they can support each other. Leaving your stacks isolated is just asking for the enemy to outnumber them and wipe them out.

The essence of fighting PvP wars is knowing when to attack and when to defend. The concept is really simple and applies to the majority of strategy games and war in general. Where you are strong and the enemy is weak, attack with all your might as quickly as possible before the enemy has a chance to reinforce and react. Where you are weak, avoid the enemy and do not give battle at all costs.

Let's consider some examples. Let's say I'm playing Austria and I am in a 1 v 1 war with France. Ater looking around and sizing up the French army, I know that they have superior generals and much more troops. Attacking them and fighting them in an even battle on plains would surely spell out disaster. In this case I would want to hold the key defensive positions on the map that consist of mountains (the Alps in Northern Italy come to mind) and hills and try to hold them for as long as possible and give the enemy no option but to attack me in terrain that favors the defender. It is quite difficult to explain precisely how to move your troops on the map to do so, but you should keep this concept in mind and try to maneuver in such a way where you never give a superior army an even battle. Make them pay for every fight they engage in by holding defensive terrain. You may eventually be forced to surrender when they occupy a lot of your provinces and drive your war exhaustion up, but at least you'll save your army and manpower.

Now let's say you're playing the Ottomans in the early game and you are fighting Poland. You have superior units, leaders and manpower in comparison to your enemy. This is when you need to push your advantage and take the initiative. The number one way to end wars is to annihilate the enemy armies and when you are clearly superior you really shouldn't waste any time trying to siege down provicnes if you can defeat and wipe enemy stacks. Go on the offensive and hunt down your enemy's armies attacking them in any terrain other than mountains and hills and force them to the peace table early.

When two armies are engaged in battle they each have an opportunity to break and run before their morale has reached zero after the tenth day of battle. This is known as the tactical retreat and it can be a valuable maneuver when the enemy has caught you in an unfavorable position where you are either fighting in bad terrain or you are outnumbered. With your fighting army selected, click on any province you wish them to retreat to and they will break the engagement and retreat to that province. Keep in mind that when an army is retreating nobody can engage that army. Also keep in mind that if your morale reaches a dangerously low level, a tactical retreat will turn into a shattered retreat and your army will not obey your order to retreat to the desired province. Instead, it will retreat up to ten provicnes away as far away as possible from enemy troops. The best provinces to tactically retreat to are obviously provinces that have good defensive terrain as the enemy will be reluctant to attack you in such terrain e.g. mountains.

Morale always regenerates at the beginning of every month. If you can deny your enemy that morale regeneration you can effectively keep their morale from ever regenerating and stack wipe them with a much smaller force once it reaches zero. To do this, you can employ a tactic called 'stack swapping'. As mentioned earlier, battles in multiplayer often turn into big dog piles where multiple stacks converge on one province and fight a massive battle. If you can keep the enemy in battle at the beginning of each month, they will not regenerate morale. Stack swapping refers to the tactic where a player selects a specific stack from a number of stacks that are already fighting in a battle and tactically retreats it to a nearby province so that it can regenerate morale while the battle rages on. If you have a fresh stack nearby you can then move it into the battle to take your recovering stack's place. To manually select a specific stack from a dogpile battle, drag a box over the battle and then select the name of the army from the list of stacks that shows up above the battle screen. You can then order that stack to retreat to any province you like without ending the battle as long as you have other armies fighting in that battle. By employing this tactic you can ensure that your army will never run out of morale and that will guarantee you victory. Ofcourse a skilled player will be using this against you as well or will simply retreat with everything if he feels like you have the advantage. Make it your top priority to deny the enemy that monthly morale regeneration by keeping them in battle before the 1st day of each month.

Another useful trick that you can employ in PvP wars is the use of 'fake attacks'. Often times the frontline on the map can turn into a stalemate where neither side is willing to commit to an attack out of fear of negative modifiers for the attacker like river crossings or defensive terrain. In such circumstances it can be very useful to pretend like you are going to attack by ordering one or more of your stacks into a province with an enemy army. The enemy will likely react and try to reinforce that province. The trick is to cancel the movement order on the very last day before your army is due to arrive so that you don't actually go through with the attack. If your opponent is not fast enough in cancelling his own movement orders, the chances are that he'll order a bunch of stacks into a province that cannot supply them all, inflicting massive amounts of attrition on the enemy.

Last but not least, a good player will make use of the fog of war. Your line of sight consists of all the provinces that border one of your own provinces or one of your allies. Any army you have in enemy territory will also be able to see one province around it in every direction. Use this to your advantage to conceal your troop movements and army composition. Nothing can be more devastating than a surprise attack that pops out of the fog of war in a part of the front where the enemy least expects you. Keep your enemy guessing by using the fog of war to your advantage.

Attrition and Manpower

After battles, attrition is the main drain on a player's manpower during a war. Manpower is a very precious resource that regenerates very slowly in EU4 and so conserving as much manpower as possible is vital if you are to outlast your enemy in a long war. Avoiding low supply provinces and provinces with nasty winters is a skill you need to master to efficiently conserve manpower. Keep in mind that an enemy army that is sieging an enemy province will also take an extra 1 attrition and any army that is in a province belonging to an enemy that has fully completed the Defensive idea tree will take another 1 point of attrition. So if you are sieging a Russian province that is experiencing a severe winter and Russia has Defensive ideas maxed out, you're going to be taking 7 % attrition per month and that's IF the province has enough supply limit for your army. 7 % attrition per month can obliterate your manpower pool especially if you're sieging with a large stack.

One of the best ways to conserve your manpower pool is to employ mercenaries in your military. While they are much more expensive than regular troops, mercenaries will often allow you to fight on for much longer should the need to drag out a war arise. Unless if you're playing a manpower heavy nation like Russia, France or the Ottomans, mercenaries are really going to be your best friends in multiplayer. Not only do they conserve manpower, they also don't gain you any war exhaustion by getting killed in battle (unlike regular troops). This makes them the ideal branch of your army to use for sieging provinces as you wont care about the inevitable attrition they take eating into your manpower reserves. I personally like to employ lots of infantry mercenaries in my army and keep artillery and cavalry as regular troops. The main reason behind this is because infantry are generally the units that take the biggest beating in a battle due to the fact that they usually make up the center of your frontline in a battle. I cannot stress how much of an edge mercenaries give you in a tight PvP war... Integrate them into your armies, don't just use them as emergency reinforcements when you run out of manpower and they will serve you nicely.

On the topic of manpower and attrition it is important to realize that regiments that are not at full strength will do less damage to the enemy and in fact take more damage themselves. It is always a good idea to click on the 'consolidate regiments' button to merge all the depleted units into fully manned regiments before you go into an important and decisive battle. You will probably lose regiments in the process but it's better than having your army fighting at a sub par level and losing you even more manpower.

Strangling the Enemy Economy

The title of this section really speaks for itself: if you can weaken the enemy's economy during a long war by disrupting their trade or occupying their richest provinces, you will really put a dent on their ability and indeed their will to continue fighting. Often times if you force the enemy's income to plummet, they will feel very uncomfortable continuing a fight out of fear of having to take multiple loans. Loans bring inflation and inflation is annoying as hell. The earlier in a war you can do this the better.

The key way to strangle your enemy's economy is to recognize what their main source of income is and then prioritize that when going on the offensive. If you are fighting a nation like the Netherlands or Venice where the majority of their monthly income is going to be coming from trade, it makes a lot of sense to try and eliminate their trade fleets. On the flipside, if trade income is your biggest source of income, make sure that your trade fleets are well protected by heavy ships at times of war. If you don't have sufficient protection for your trade fleets, it is probably better to send them to port during times of war rather than risk losing them to a superior navy. Keep in mind that any enemy province that you occupy will give you it's provincial trade power in that node during the war. This makes going after provicnes that have the 'important center of trade' and 'river estuary' bonuses a top priority. If the enemy loses control of these provinces during a war, it can seriously hurt their trade power and hence their ability to retain their trade in a specific node. Many countries rely more on tax and production income than trade and so the best way to hurt their economy is to occupy their high base tax provinces and the provinces that make them a lot of income from production.

Peace

Signing peace to conclude a war is not something that is always very straightforward. Often times there is no clear victor in a war and this causes many wars in multiplayer to drag on and on hurting both of the involved parties. In some situations these unnecessarily dragged out wars will pull in other players turning it into a lame and undesired world war. Knowing when to seek peace and understanding the consequences of a peace deal is an art in itself and it is certainly one that every player needs to understand very well.

An important thing to consider while you are at war is the fact that peace treaties require diplomatic points. The more clauses there are to a peace treaty, the more diplomatic points it will cost. It is therefore recommended that you always leave some diplomatic monarch points in reserve when you are at war to make sure that you have enough of them to get the peace deal you want.

Whenever a player decides to go to war it is important for them to have a clear picture in mind on what it is they want from that war. Whether the aim of your war is to take territory or trade power from your enemy, warscore generally has little to no meaning in multiplayer. You can easily trick the AI into peacing out early if you have positive warscore on them in singleplayer. However humans will more often than not choose to continue fighting if they feel like they still have a chance of winning. Learning how to recognize when you have lost a war is a skill that will save you a lot of trouble in multiplayer. There is absolutely no reason why you should drag on a war when you have lost all your stacks and have no chance in recovering or if it is absolutely crystal clear that there is no way you can achieve victory. It is always better to peace out early from a war you are clearly losing and save yourself the damage to your economy and nation from war exhaustion and occupation.

When you're actually winning a war it is important to consider what you ask for when you offer peace terms. Players can be very stubborn in multiplayer and they'll be especially reluctant to peace out if your peace offer is 100 % warscore. Be modest when you win wars; taking 100 % warscore will always leave a bitter taste in people's mouths and you can be certain that they'll repay the favor when you lose a war to them in the future. It is always better to make smaller gains from wars steadily as taking massive amounts of territory (high warscore) will always draw attention to you. Just because you've crushed your rival in a war doesn't mean that you should aim to cripple them as much as possible as more often than not people will see you as a huge agressor and will form coalitions against you.

In many cases you will find that a war is really going nowhere and it is only hurting the parties involved with no gain. When you recognize that nobody is going to make a breakthrough or if you feel like you are very vulnerable to an opportunistic attack from someone who is not at war with you, it may be a good idea to try and negotiate peace. The game lasts from 1444 until 1821 and I can assure you there is never a shortage of wars in that time period in multiplayer; don't ruin yourself because of greed or arrogance in one war. There is always time for more wars in the future.

Conclusion

Player versus player warfare in EU4 is incredibly deep and complex compared to warfare in single player. Skilled players will often be very evenly matched and optimizing your army and navy so that it gets all the help you can give it, will help give you the edge. The best way to get better at fighting humans is to play more multiplayer. A great way to get some PvP experience is to play with a friend when you're not in a serious campaign and choose two land powers like France and Austria. The more you go head to head with humans, the faster and more experienced you become at maneuvering and reading the field.

If you're actually still reading this guide by this point I really hope you've found it useful and enjoyable and I would highly appreciate it if you could give it a thumbs up. Be sure to check out my guide on multiplayer diplomacy if you haven't already. Keep practicing and good luck on the battlefield!

[fuke]

I remember in the first 1-2 years of the game coming out, unregulated pub games were a lot of fun for the first half-century when little countries are backstabbing and slaughtering each other, people ragequitting right and left. The fun doesn't last though. Eventually you get a few dominant players left and they make major alliances and draw boundaries, it just becomes as hugbox with everyone watching each other grow. Also it was great before Paradox added the black flag "exiled" units thing. You used to be able to put your army in the same province as someone using military access and then declare war on them to do a surprise attack. I used this method to gain supremacy in the cage match known as HRE a couple times.

[Ville Valste]

Is it possible to get a 7 pip general with the bonus pips from the ideas?

[=))TITANS((=Beowolf]

Thanks very much! The best one I've ever read about EU4. Just came to reread and 've seen you're goingupdate it for 1.12 - well done, keep it up!

[Chocolatnave]

Looks nice overall. I learned more about army composition and fire/shock and how they matter, which you wouldn't learn about in single player.

I would suggest emphasizing more upon Quantity as a idea group and a topic overall. Discipline and Morale don't mean as much when you are down in numbers.

[Alvino C]

Once again, another great guide for the multiplayer game. Thank you very much for dedicating time to write such an informative guide!

[GingerReaper]

This is a great guide, I'll definately be using a lot of these tactics in multiplayer games(most likely the terrain usage/attrition in wars against superior enemies, usually happens to me.) Only differences I could note in the patches since 1.6 is units in different tech qroups are more balanced against each other, rebellions are more of an issue when they occur and provinces are a bit cheaper in warscore to take if the autonomy on the province is high(nerfed a bit in 1.9, to stop players eating all of ming in 1 war). Also when a coalition war ends(win or lose), all the nations with a truce against you will be forced out of the coalition.

[basil664]

Holy crap the most useful and op guide. I FEEL EMPOWERED NOW.

[Epicurus]

Excellent and well-written guide. A very instructive read even for people playing single player or cooperatively. Very nice work!

[Csedr4k]

good job keep up :)

[matthew]

Great guide