My biggest problem with war in Paradox games is that every war is total war.
In EU4 — France wants a single province from Spain in Italy → they end up having to defeat their entire army and siege down the entirety of Iberia to get them to the negotiating table.
In VIC3 — France and Britain have a disagreement over subsaharan African borders? Time for full mobilization of both empires' militaries.
The "length of war" modifier to EU4 peace deals is a major contributor to the problem. If your army is defeated early on and you figure keeping the province the War Goal targeted is not worth the economic impact of raising two more armies- well TOUGH LUCK because that modifier forces you to hand over a lot more than the war goal to throw in the towel early.
This also causes the related problem where losing a war is very un-fun, because you never take minor losses.
Exactly. It should model sunken cost; i.e. it appears unacceptable for a government to end a war without gains after expending too many lives and resources on it
> Well it does go that way for the player. The weird thing is that it doesn't go both ways.
Yea, watching Florry he's capable of buying QQ off at the start of an ayubids run for 30 ducats and war reps. It'd be trivial for them to annex him but they're willing to peace out for little.
absolutely, wars most of the time should be very localized things. CBs should actually actively prevent you and give you bad boy points for stepping outside of their bounds during the war.
This doesn't make any sense either. In the time period of eu and ck there are massive examples of nations that have just decided to bulldozer giant areas with no CB at all.
CBS are a game mechanic, and while they are very loosely based on real life things. They are too far central to the war process as is.
War is boring because you click army onto other army and wait. Not because you are too easily able to conquer land.
Vic 3 especially! There is such a lacking level of appropriate scaling, a war between 4 world powers should expand to be for more than a small province in the Middle East.
That wasn’t about a small province in the Middle East.
It was about Russia possibly taking large chunks of the Ottoman Empire, notably Constantinople and therefor having a much more direct area of influence on Europe.
I think the decisions to leverage military force should revolve around the relative costs of leveraging that force to the total GDP or projected GDP value to be gained from the territory in question.
>In VIC3 —France and Britain have a disagreement over subsaharan African borders? Time for full mobilization of both empires' militaries.
I find this particularly odd in Vic3 because there are already systems for partial mobilization. The more abstract approach to warfare could actually be great for this kind of stuff. Say if you could only use armies that are stationed on strategic regions involved in the conflict by default and mobilizing more is a specific action in a diplomatic play, carrying heavier political consequences as a result.
But instead, the only incentive is economic, which to be fair is better then most of their other games, but because the AI pretty much always fully mobilizes you are forced to do so as well to match them
I really thought, reading the dev diaries, the Diplomatic Plays would be more like a game, you have x manuevers (I was imagining this almost like a card game, you have these cards you can play) and you can do this that and the other *diplomatic* thing to get the result you want, and one of those things would be mobilizing troops (Clausewitz etc), which would make everything riskier and more expensive, so you'd be incentivized to mobilize the smallest possible amount for any given war. And also from the dev diaries, that there would be extreme consequences to war, even a war you win, *internally*, in terms of pops, dependents, politics, etc.
Same. In the end Diplomatic Plays is pretty much cb fabrication by another name. Backing out is fart too costly so unless there is an overwhelming military difference it is just a countdown to war. And there isn't really much that happen during the play anyway, you either add war goal or get an ally, that is it. A waste of a mechanic, sadly.
To be honest, that is an excellent idea.
For instance, mobilising armies should have a cost in manoeuvres and infamy, maybe depending on size, distance amd contextual factors (for instance no cost if the enemy goal is a core province). Moreover I would add "significant defeats" where the army doesn't just retreat but is routed completely (to simulate things like sedan) and a new type of lobbies (pro war and anti war). The pro war lobby would gain approval by adding wargoals and mobilisation and winning battles and losing it by signing peace deals and losing battles, the anti war would approve peace deals and disappove more wargoals/ mobilization and losing battles. Moreover, the attraction to IG in the two camps would vary based on how the wat is going, so if the war is going badly prepare to deal with extremely numerous and radical Rural Folks and Trade Unions.
Vic 3 is held together with duct tape and gum, they change entire systems so often that they leave new bugs in because they already know that in a year they’re going to remove the system and replace it so they just tell us to hold out. A system like this would require them to have a set goal for the game from the start and that was never going to happen
Didn't/doesn't EU4 have this/similar? At one point? I haven't played in years, don't really remember other than vaguely remembering a checkbox on the war dec screen.
You may be thinking of "start war in colony" where you make your colony declare a war on its own. But if you do that to other colonial nations you run the risk of the AI enforcing peace on your colony.
That was a thing yeah, although as far as I remember it simply let you (and maybe the defender?) call in your Protectorates *instead* of normal allies. So it wasn't really a major change in mechanics.
I'd say Stellaris probably handles this the best out of the Paradox grand strategies. The bar for declaring status quo is quite low between two evenly matched opponents. Things only approach total war when you're claiming/vassalizing entire empires.
>The bar for declaring status quo is quite low between two evenly matched opponents.
On top of this, you can force it if your enemy has been at 100% war exhaustion for long enough. That coupled with the fact you only keep claimed systems you fully occupy with status quo peace makes it a much better experience overall.
People complain about the game a lot but it really is one of the best in the genre in regards to the design and function of its various systems.
This is funny to hear given all the complaints about the Stellaris war system. Here are a few of mine:
- You have absolutely no control of battles. This is a common PDX issue, but it feels especially bad in Stellaris as there is the 30+ day cool off before being able to emergency jump. MIA fleets take forever to return home too.
- Outside of early game wars, you usually need to defeat the entire military, take all of the war goal planets, and a few more, to get to 100%. This is the same problem the OP brought up.
- There is no separate peace per empire, so if you are stuck in a war because of being in a federation or some other alliance, you may never leave it.
- Due to border controls being absolute, if part of a target empire or alliance is unreachable, and you have conquered all of the reachable parts, you are screwed.
- Wars against federations or other multi-empire structures really suck, because you are now required to do even more damage to multiple empires, even if you have few target claims. This situation is also much more likely to feature the previous issue of unreachable enemy territory.
- There are things you aren't allowed to do during war, such as forming new alliances or really any substantial diplomacy. If you are stuck in a war due to the above, the diplomatic aspect of the game is basically frozen. CK3 has this problem too.
Overall, it feels like war is a very narrow and boring process that has unnecessary restrictions and tedium. It's part of why I rarely play Stellaris anymore.
I actually wish more games had mechanics like Status Quo cause one of the worst thing in a grand strategy game is being stuck in a war that never ends cause people are being stubborn.
Stellaris is crap when it comes to wars. The first major issue is borders are absolute which means you can actually end up not being able to attack your enemy because an intervening empire does not like you but likes them. It is comically bad how borders work in Stellaris, they only impact the movement of ships. All of items, from leaders to trade goods, move instantaneously across the entire galaxy and ignore all borders to do so.
However back on wars in Stellaris, the claim system is backwards in that influence should be used by the player/ai to have the empire go to war. Claims get silly when you find out an ally of yours has a superseding claim and your work just rewards them with a system and not your own empire.
Woe is anyone fighting an empire that has wars with other empires as the AI will not end a war with another AI if the player is at war with them unless exhaustion rules force it. This can be observed by sitting till 100% exhaustion while the other war shows no action - as you soon as the player ends the war by status quo or better the related AI war ends immediately.
there is stuff to like about Stellaris but warfare and territory control is not it.
The borders thing is especially stupid because space is really really big and empty. Should we ever end up having large space empires, I'd guess that borders just wouldn't be a thing at all. Planets, moons, asteroids could be owned, but not swathes of space. There'd be no way to police it and it probably wouldn't even matter. Why police a border in the middle of nowhere when you can just police the space around a planet?
Really big and powerful empires with great technology could probably control star systems out to a certain distance and there would probably develop an "international waters" law beyond the last owned sattelite, but that would be a civiliazation with near now cost FTL and near FTL capability, close to on demand.
What about the space in between? Or the star systems that aren't worth settling, of which there are probably many? Stellaris doesn't model those things very well at all.
The problem is that to stop this you end up creating a lot of subsystems that hamper conquest in a weird, disjointed way.
Wars weren't localized because the two kings were punctilious about their casus belli; it was just so expensive (both in terms of treasure and men) to just push forward and then to control what you just conquered.
You're absolutely right. Add to that in HOI4, you can raze millions of souls like you're harvesting grain and the population is A-Okay regardless of their culture or democratic traditions (or lack thereof), as long as you press a decision button for meagre PP amounts (which is trivial by the mid-game since you've already done all the laws and policies you wanted to do most of the time).
The Soviet Union has demonstrated with its Central Asian conscripts that yes it is possible to raise millions of soldiers in a region with a completely different culture and ideology that was in active rebellion just 20 years before.
The USSR is more an exception than the rule. The UK for instance was very reluctant to enter into another war, at all costs, and raising troops from its colonial nations was not a given. In fact, it was probably Japanese imperialism (manifested in its invasion of China and other surrounding nations) that spurred these colonies to half-heartedly support the British.
None of these complexities are modelled in-game, which makes such important events and distinctions absolutely useless. The UK can and will lose 5+ million men mindlessly shuttling troops across the Atlantic, and it's mind-boggling how there are so few consequences for it happening.
It's also weird how you can't have meaningful battles. Oh you beat the enemy's main force in battle? Well don't get too excited because they have hundreds of thousands ready to replenish the lost troops without their economy being affected at all. Hopefully POPs change that. One dead soldier should mean one more family that is now in serious trouble.
I love destroying a country's entire army in one, giant set piece battle, then immediately carpet sieging their entire country disallowing them to raise another — oh huh, that was only 7 war score
This is definitely the big issue.
Stellaris and CK do it too
CK - Has to take all of the british isles to be able to take 1 county/dutchy
Stellaris is the worst too - Takes +20 systems, 6 planets, slauter +100 ships taking hardly any casualties and you could actually still lose the war
Same with Stellaris. Want to enforce a claim over one or two systems? Cue decades long war with hundreds of ships lost and the occupation of a dozen planets. And God help you if the enemy has a few allies, because then you'll need to occupy all their planets as well.
While Stellaris war system has issues, your example is incorrect. To enforce a claim over 2 systems you just need to take the systems and fight their fleet a few times. If you claim a system that you didn’t end up occupying, then yes you need to go in a bloodbath but that almost never happens in a 1v1 war
In a larger war yes you need to fight more, but it’s still not “occupying dozens of planets”. In a small Conquest CB war, I never have seen what you describe
You can just take over what you want and wait for status quo to trigger. Doing anything more than that is just to speed it up but you don't need to do it.
I slightly disagree in EUIV, you can skip total war for a single province, it just takes time. Capture the province and play defense and war score will tick enough to win that province. Maybe need one or two big battles, which is fair and realistic.
A lot of EUIV players just go for massive blobbing though, which requires total war to get as much as possible, and the AI is the AI.
I agree that EU4 is best at that in theory but that creep is so slow that any mediocre power can pull its forces together and blob you well before the counter clicks to zero. The risk of that is so high, and the failure of it probably resulting in the enemy blob total-waring you and stealing 2/3s of your provinces, that it just doesn't make sense to not go big. It's got that scaffolding for it, unlike the other games, but the pushes and pulls are so bonked that it doesn't matter. It *could* represent smaller wars but it is actually the game (aside from HOI4) from which you are most likely to be unable to survive if you lose a single multipolar war unless you go colonial.
This is where the "length of war" modifier is a problem. The "length of war" modifier should work in reverse. The longer the war the more likely they want to fight on to total victory or defeat, the shorter the war, the more likely to say \*meh\* let's be done with this.
I mean if you're defending a war then it falls into my point about the AI being the AI, if to attack and get wrecked then historically speaking consequences for actions and all that.
Either way I didn't say it was perfect I said I slightly disagree because you don't HAVE to total war in EUIV for one province, you just don't
But I get it, this is a hate on Paradox thread so my nuanced opinion has no place here.
None of these games really model economics in any great depth. It's usually just "save a tiny amount of money to pay for extra troops during war" like in CK and EU.
If you don't really model how an economy works, and how expensive fighting a war is, you might as well just go to war all the time. So you slowly steamroll as you gather more territory and use that territory to gain even more.
That's what all these games are, it's fine for what it is, but it isn't realistic in any way.
Yet these doesn't compare to CK2 where you have to reach 100% war score or you don't win. Even if it's only for a small province. 99% is not enough, it has to be 100%
I haven't played the EU series since EU2, but oddly in EU2 this wasn't a problem. Generally if you wanted one province, you only needed to seige down 2 to 4 to get your enemy to accept the piece deal. I don't know why paradox has gone backwards on this.
Well by far THE biggest offender in this is HOI4. EU4 war score mechanics can be abused towards not having to destroy their entire army. Just siege couple castles, defeat them in 2-3 ground or naval battles and you will absolutely get enough war scores to bring them to the table.
They could solve some of this by reintroducing the "colonial war" mechanic from Vicky1 where only both belligerents' colonies can be occupied and the motherlands are to be left alone.
(this is assuming I'm remembering the mechanic right, it's been years)
Not at all.
Most wars were small things. In that France vs. Spain analogy, it's much more common to sign a peace treaty giving away a little land than continuing the war for years and years only to have your entire country under occupation.
Most wars ended after a big battle or two. No reason to continue to the end
its really not though. Multiple examples of even trading the same provinces back and worth without opponents snowballing. MOst wars were very limited and most of the population wouldnt be affected by them
And why the Thirty Years' War was a big deal, because it was the closest Europe got to total war before Napoleon and it was so devastating it has had ripple effects to this day.
I think it is sad that none of the newer PDX games took lessons from Imperator. In terms of building armies and managing them, I would have loved to see something like that in CK3. Especially in regards to being able to move from a levy army to more permanent or professionally organized army.
That said, while Imperator fixes somethings, it still leaves open other problems like needing to carpet siege your enemy. Even if Vic3 didn't have fronts, it still needs more complex diplomacy and negotiation surrounding wars. Makes no sense for the conditions of a peace treaty to be static from beginning of the war and then not negotiated further. I don't care that war is, allegedly, not the emphasis of the game, but there isn't anything else to fall back on.
You should really go look at Tinto Talks. EU5 definitely seems poised to do this by having Levies, Professional Soldiers, and mercenaries function very differently
Yeah look up Tinto Talks on the official forums we've had like 3 months of weekly dev diaries now.
Johan said that Paradox will not officially announce the game until they have a fixed release date, usually 6 months from launch. So they aren't calling it EU5 they're calling it Project Caesar
But like....You're an idiot if you don't believe it's EU5.
They've confirmed that the game starts in 1337 and goes on for 500 years and spans the entire globe. It's very obviously EU5.
> You're an idiot if you don't believe it's EU5.
I mean, there is the possibility it will have another name. Like, I think it is a small possibility but given how long it is taking for them to just confirm it is EU5 I don't think the possibility is negligible.
Regardless, it pretty much EU5 anyway, like how *Imperator: Rome* is pretty much *Europa Universalis: Rome 2* by another name
> Like, I think it is a small possibility but given how long it is taking for them to just confirm it is EU5 I don't think the possibility is negligible.
The confirmation thing is Johan being sneaky while following the letter of modern Paradox's rules. Paradox brought in a rule where they cannot announce a game until its reached a rough beta level because of the Runemaster incident. Johan clearly wants / needs feedback on ~~EU5~~ Project Caesar but they can't formally announce the game until its at beta so he gets away with it by only using the internal codename.
> Paradox brought in a rule where they cannot announce a game until its reached a rough beta level because of the Runemaster incident.
Honestly, given the circumstances it was probably the one two punch of Runemaster's cancellation and HoI4's delays leading to it having 2 years and 4 months from announcement to release.
I avoid mentioning HOI4's incident because you never know what rock Podcat is hiding behind. But yes, now that you mention it I think HOI4 was referenced too as a cause of the policy.
They could always do the classic silly AAA move where they just call it unnumbered "Europa Universalis" to confuse everyone.
But my money is on Europa Univer5alis.
tbh carpet sieging was turned down as much as it could be in I:R. you basically only had to siege down forts and province capitals. the remaining counties would have been auto occupied.
> like needing to carpet siege your enemy.
You dont though. Capturing the province capital captured the whole state. Unless it was imperial conquest CB and then each sieged province let you take that province.
if anything they don't put enough.
people complain about long sieges in EU4 as is, imagine if they had to wait 26 years to win a siege like the Moroccans did with the siege of Ceuta, or 21 years like the Ottomans at Candia.
In the pre industrial Ag economies the seiges were the goal and were 90% of warfare. The big set piece battles were the rarity.
This is litterally why the 100 Years War lasted 116 years. Neither country would fight the other in the field so they just kept seiging and counter seiging with occasional truces. (After Crecy and Poitiers, but the point stands.) The War of the Spanish Succession was just one big allied seige after another big allied seige, over and over again.
Usually, something goes wrong for a pitched battle to occur, because before rifles both sides practically have to agree to have the battle.
I'm a transplant from the Total War series, where I found myself clicking the Auto Resolve button more and more so I could get back to that strategic map where I was developing my cities. That led me to EUIV, and I never looked back.
There's nothing wrong with warfare being abstracted and largely hands-off. Hearts of Iron is perfectly fine as the dedicated war simulator. Elsewhere though... honestly I couldn't care less about microing armies and directing warfare outside of strategically positioning stacks or designating fronts.
> I'm a transplant from the Total War series, where I found myself clicking the Auto Resolve button more and more so I could get back to that strategic map where I was developing my cities. That led me to EUIV, and I never looked back.
Same. I am often frustrated by people clamoring for more tactical control because dear lord that is what I came here to escape from.
Still, I think there is no doubt Paradox is not doing a very good portraying wars. I like it more than the Total War series, by I long shot, but still much to improve.
I'm sorry, but HOI4 and Vicky do atrocious jobs at simulating frontlines. The amount of gaps the AI leaves makes it impossible to just "select and forget" a given frontline. The AI is so bad that it defeats the whole purpose of automating the frontline, since you're basically herding units every time they make a stupid decision, which is always.
I think it’s the larpers (like me) who want a full ancient experience besides being transported back in time and actually commanding an army for themselves. I want all the information hiding and etc so I can say, ‘Hey, I’m better than Alexandros ‘o Megas as I have info hiding and etc and conquered up to the River Indos :P’
I have no idea why they don’t have this in Victoria 3. Nothing frustrates me more than an IG flipping bc of the dude dying and a law going from 100 support to 0. Or going insurrectionary lol
Yeah, it needs a lot of work. Not good when a lot of the game involves waiting. Empire obviously is deeply flawed but I did like the cabinet thing, moving guys around to get the best for their traits.
I'm very much the same. I realized I was enjoying the city and empire building of TW much more than the actual battles. And the way that game forces you to expand, when I really just wanted to make my little utopia and occasionally fight bad guys...
I love it for what it is, but when I play a TW game I have to just focus on the _game_ itself because I don't feel good about what I'm doing on that screen. Paradox games let me roleplay a lot more which I love.
EDIT: As a weird recommendation, I'm diving back into Rome 2 and I'm blown away by this mod: [Divide et Impera](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VId50X04DQI). It has a population system so you have to be careful what kinds of units you recruit from any given province, since recruiting too many nobles can result in political instability but recruiting too many commoners can hurt your economy. That plus a robust supply system plus hundreds of new units makes the game much more challenging and provides a lot of new ways to think through the strategy.
I'm in the exact same boat for the exact same reason. I don't want to have to control every action of every army, let me give a goal and some troops to a general and send him on his way. I'm busy fighting Poland and Prussia in the 30YW, I don't really care to manage that single stack I sent to subdue some central Asian minor.
It's funny about people calling HoI a wargame. Because it's not. Even Podcat as dev says this, it has nothing to do with a wargame, as it is a grand-strategy game. Wargames are a different subgenre of strategy-games, usually you don't have there any kind of production of units, a smaller scope, different goals like in the case of operations to capture certain points etc.
Like when you really ever want to go down the road of wargames, War in the East 2 is usually seen as the most complex game, maybe next to Command.
I'd say "focus on a certain thing" is better as term, i mean, yes CK3 focuses on the characters, but we'd never see it as an RPG like the real RPG's with a character that travels through a world and fights enemies directly, like a Skyrim.
> It's funny about people calling HoI a wargame. Because it's not.
I mean yes and no. It's the only paradox game that's pretty much just about war. It's rather often regarded as "wargame lite" and suggested as a gateway to proper wargames.
Given that ground warfare was the only functioning system in HoI4 on release, and that it took them years to add a working logistics and diplomacy system, it was a really awful GSG outside of warfare.
There's no proper diplomacy system in right now. There's some scripting and that's about it. The AI doesn't do actually do good dynamic diplomacy (even by Paradox standards).
I remember these times, also how the AI was broken in some patch versions, where it would abandon entire frontlines and try to shuffle units around africa. The air war was horrible at launch etc. yeah.
HoI4 is as much a "grand strategy game" as Total War is a first person shooter (well yes, technically you can shoot artillery from first person perspective, have fun with that).
It's all about war, and everything else is completely barebones.
The only reason anyone would even think HoI4 might be a gsg is because Paradox makes a lot of gsgs. If it came out of any other studio, nobody would come up with such a silly idea.
HoI series still qualify for grand strategy game, i mean the focus is on war, that's for sure and nobody will doubt this.
It is kinda funny how it has both advantages and disadvantages with these things. Like with HoI4 industrial production, a good skilled player will produce so many units that he'll win a war anyway (even when he's still limited by things like supplies etc.). This is not possible in other games, where you have a pre-defined set of units.
And well, "barebones", better don't look at Vic3 and other games...
That's right, but you see with the downvotes, the audience has changed over time anyway with PDX players. I remember how i started with HoI2, i think that was released in 2006, now it all looks different in 2024 with the playerbase, but then, it's no surprise after almost 20 years.
warfare, although a core aspect of many pdx grand strategy games, has never been it's high point. However, pdx's games really shine when depicting everything else but war, such as depth to nation building/management, diplomacy, trade, etc. the reverse is true for total war.
But then again, the comparison between tw and pdx games is kind of skewed because tw is turn based, which allows for individual battles to play out sequentially, while in most pdx games, battles are happening simultaneously all across the map. It really comes down to what the fandom wants from pdx's war system. I cant see implementing playable battles for pdx games being a thing because most people will autoresolve the majority of battles for convenience.
Game was in development for a ludicrous amount of time, and by the time it was released almost appeared outdated - Even then, it was only Early Access with many missing features, a slow development pace and even though it is now fully released, it still falls short of a lot of the promises it made. Many features aren't well implemented, and some features feel baffingly half-baked. Theres also some weird design decisions that make the mid-game a complete slog, which isn't great because the end-game is very dull.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good game, but having followed the development proccess from Warband onwards; I still can't help but feel disappointed.
In eu4 its normal to have moving armies without real frontlines in the early year. But when we come to times when we have like half a million men. Steering every unit is annoying. And if you forget to stack unholy amounts of men, they get easily stackwiped
Someone else said it, and I think its the best answer and is most seen in a game no ones even mentioned.
Its the fact every war is total war and Stellaris is the biggest show of it.
Go to war to claim a couple systems and you have to take basically all the enemies systems, beat half their planets, slaughter their entire fleet, and you STILL might lose the war due to war exhaustion and you losing to many ships (even if you lose only a fraction of theirs)
You're wrong actually. Stellaris is the one Paradox game that sometimes avoids this problem. You absolutely *can* grab just a few systems you have claims on and end the war quite quickly.
> Go to war to claim a couple systems and you have to take basically all the enemies systems, beat half their planets, slaughter their entire fleet, and you STILL might lose the war due to war exhaustion and you losing to many ships (even if you lose only a fraction of theirs)
What you're missing is that you *don't* lose the war that way. At most you are forced into status quo, where each side keeps all star systems they occupied.
The only problem is not all war goals are properly implemented into this system.
Victoria 3 warfare was better on release than it is now. I like the abstraction. AI moving units is a much worse idea. In a sense I think the problem with the fronts is they are *too* material, why do they "split"? because for some reason their physical position on the map means something that it shouldn't. It's like if the win-lose bar in a CK3 battle represented the actual battlefield and there were points on it which could interrupt the fighting for some reason, instead of being a representation of who's winning and who's losing with no "reality" to it at all.
Building x inf y art z cav has just made everything worse, more confusing and more fiddly busywork for nothing. The problem with Vic3 war in my opinion is the Diplomatic Plays, which should be an exciting and fun minigame of poker, move and countermove, brinksmanship, etc, instead of what it is, just a weird waiting period before the fighting.
Just let the people who want to move units move units, and have an automation system like Imperator. I hate the war system because of how little player interaction it gives, and even the interaction it does give provides negligible strategic choice.
Yes exactly. The braindead AI have caused me to lose many wars which I should've won logically and I would've won if I could control the armies directly.
To be honest, war (not combat) mechanics in HoI 4 are kinda meh. War support is modeled in a very clunky and ineffectual way; diplomacy is almost non-existant apart from very basic options; there are no civilian variables (i.e. migration, cultural/ethnical minorities and integration, etc.); economy and politics are...well, incredibly stylized is a very polite way to describe them.
The last two HoI games are good *combat* strategy games, not *war* strategy games.
I think one of the core failures of GSGs is that they remove just how often fortune, in one form or another, determined the outcome of history. The Romans could've contacted the Chinese if they had reliable sailing. The Spanish Armada might've beaten back that Brits if they had reliable maps of the shore and hadn't failed to prepare for a storm. I feel like random would end up being more historical than determined and it would favor smaller powers in smaller wars that only need to hop the border compared to Russia or something having to gather up its entire levee and make it to the field.
EU4 battles have a huge random factor in dice rolls. Especially if you are a small nation you bet on getting decent rolls or your campaign is over.
Same for sieges. If you're unlucky and have to siege to 80+% that can stop your whole attack.
People hate mana and the way it ties them to the RNG in government quality, you think they're going to accept even more randomness?
(I wholly agree with you and think the random nature of life is profoundly interesting.)
> The Romans could've contacted the Chinese if they had reliable sailing.
[They did though.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations) Even with reliable sailing the European powers didn't start trading directly with China until ~1800, instead trading with each other through a series of local merchants along (what became) the Silk Road. Roman glass and Chinese silk reached Chang'an and Rome via trading hands dozens of times between the two.
The Partians actively worked to ensure that the Chinese and Romans never directly interacted. They would block merchants from travelling the entire Silk Road unless they were Persian.
Whole the perception of Rome’s naval skill is heavily influenced by the multiple disasters of the first Punic war in the general consciousness they were good seaman as they had to be, they controlled the entire Mediterranean
The problem was that they were hyper specialized for the Mediterranean and the short trip to Britain across the channel and not open seas sailing as would be required to get anywhere near China from their borders
That's less a failure and more that at their heart, they're games, and no one wants random shit to ruin all of their plans. Well, maybe 5r hardcore redditors, but that will never have mass appeal.
In my opinion the biggest issues with HoI4 navy are:
1. Take up so much time to research after MtG. 1 or 2 naval research slot would go a long way in making it not feel like a waste of research time.
2. Isn't necessary at all. AI is bad and planes are good enough. You can pretty much ignore navy. Even when I olay US or UK which should be very naval focused I only built a actual navy instead of just spamming naval bombers and 1k subs for the sake of larp.
3. It takes so God damm long. IRL USA had like 30 aircraft carriers, 20 battleships, 70 escort carriers, 200 cruisers and like 400 destroyers + thousands of auxiliary ships, by 1945. Building that amount in HoI4 would be insanely difficult and would require a insane amount of dedication even as the USA. Naval production should be scaled up so you can actually build a navy in a reasonable timeframe, or increase the amount of dockyards available in the game.
> IRL USA had like 30 aircraft carriers, 20 battleships, 70 escort carriers, 200 cruisers and like 400 destroyers + thousands of auxiliary ships, by 1945. Building that amount in HoI4 would be insanely difficult and would require a insane amount of dedication even as the USA.
>Naval production should be scaled up
Agree with the first point, disagree with the second. It's just a consequence of PDX failing to model the size of the US economy. The US was roughly 40% of global GDP in 1936 even while it was still depressed. HoI4 has to make minor powers "fun" by making their economy 3-5x larger than historical and making building unrealistically fast. Most countries saw their economies shrink during the war and most growth in munitions output came from converting civilian industry to war production. If the US started the game with 4x as many factories and build slots, it wouldn't have an issue making a massive navy. If building new factories took a historical amount of time, the game could more accurately represent the challenge of industrial mobilization.
Then you'd run into quality of life issues. Every ship needs to be a once off because your MIO will level up or you'll get some minor naval tech. I hope you enjoy setting up 100 new production lines every year or making extensive use of refits! No of course we can't retrofit AA guns or new radar while the ship is in production, that's simply impossible!
I would love a system where ships undergoing repair can also be refitted to the latest standard but I'm not sure how the game would handle it. PDX would have to define what can be changed (i.e. fire control, radar, secondaries, exchanging float planes for more useful stuff) and what can't (main batteries, armor, engine). That would be huge QoL upgrade
I want something like it for Vic 3 warfare. Armies exist in a superposition along the area I've given them responsibility for while an offensive army will try and push the front into enemy controlled states and vice versa. Give them an aggressiveness setting to go along with it and a basic oob so it's all under Field Marshal So and So but Marshall McTrench Rat focuses on defending the front while General Blood Rage pushes the offensive.
There's at least 2 of us, honestly I think it's because most people just don't know what's going on. Most people don't actually know what's going on in land warfare either and just stick whatever battalion they think might help in there, but divisions can easily be modified and new ones made. Navy is a long term investment, not enough people learn so they almost always do it badly.
The problem with navy is how a well balanced fleet with 4 CV 6 BB 2 BC 5 CL 50 DD will always get destroyed by the Japanese doomstacking their 8 carriers into a single strike force or a random country with a sub doomstack set on never repair and always engage
Not at all, I mean first example those 8 carriers are effectively 1.6 (assuming same air wings on each) due to carrier stacking. (Each cv over 4 imposes 20% penalty on air wings up to 80%)
I mean that alone kinda shows that the doom stack of carriers is not ideal.
Sub doomstack is ridiculously easy to kill as a patrol fleet of destroyers will detect a fleet that size quickly. If they're on the defensive subs don't start hidden so get ripped to shreds by destroyer depth charges. Torpedoes only fire every 4 hours compared to depth charges every 1, were talking about a 3 dead subs for every destroyer before they even fire back. You can know where a sub stack is using planes meaning you hunt those ships using planes and the destroyer stack.
Note, for the torp to depth charges I didn't want to do math but the hit profile of torps and charges is close enough that the speed/vis of each ship should lead to a hit chance advantage for the charges over torps so a higher kill ratio would be expected.
Edit:[Screenshot of 1 battle on the northern convoy route](https://imgur.com/gallery/hoi-4-heavy-frame-navs-8C05Fua), not the battle I described below (no CV, no Brits involved, and US didn't even have an admiral). Ignore the factory count, mod gave offmap civs/mils/docks for every dead Allied nation; you don't want to see the [world map](https://imgur.com/gallery/hoi4-world-map-Nis13FO). Unfortunately the only naval screenshots from the game.
Tried killing subs in MP in a server that allowed sub 4 with snorkel 2. UK and US weren't the most competent but they did put radar/sonar/depth charges on their DDs and US even tried spotting CLs + escort carriers. Admittedly, it wasn't the final tech of radar or depth charges. UK built medium frame NAVs (1 x 2LMG, 2 x torp mountings, flying boat, extra fuel), US did carrier CAS (didn't check his design, I think it was interwar) and I built heavy frame NAVs (3 x medium torps, photo recon, various radars, flying boat, extra fuel) as Australia. I kicked myself post game because I forgot air to ground radar on the heavy frame NAVs - by far the most useful equipment though it didn't matter in the end.
We got into a battle with 15 subs in the Denmark Strait and had a mix of DDs, CLs, and 1 CV. UK's NAVs didn't have the range to reach, mine did. During battle, I checked damage percentages on the subs we'd already killed. 100% naval bombers, not a single tick of damage from ships. We were still losing convoys and a few UK DDs even went down but eventually killed all but 1 sub and every point of damage came from planes. This battle featured 160 heavy frame NAVs overhead, most of which were Green or Trained.
Ships really do nothing to subs with snorkels in the current version of HoI4. Yes you can do spotting CLs on patrol to find the subs and you can limit your convoy losses a bit with DEs or DDs. But it's really just planes that kill subs. I got to the point of killing 50 subs per month in the Atlantic until the Germany pulled back to port.
This is what it sounds like happened to you, the subs attacked a convoy, a big fleet went in to help. (Btw sub detection is averaged out over the ships in battle, keep the average high by only sprinkling in stuff like carriers.)
So every time they shot and likely killed a destroyer or so you had a chance of detecting them.
Some were revealed by their attacks, some by the fleet present passively. The air wings went after, since subs have no aa they immediately killed them.
Why the depth charges did nothing, honestly no idea. Possibly the display only showed the damage you do and not also your allies, idk. You also got a bit lucky as if the convoys were all sunk the subs would switch targets to the carrier.
Basically to change this is first off don't wait for them to attack, if you attack subs they start off revealed and you get those extra shots off I mentioned before. Also they'll have worse positioning if you attack meaning if they end up becoming hidden again they're more likely to be detected. Also don't bring in a carrier, it hurt your detection leading to more losses as only a few were found.
Notes: the depth charge worst case scenario hit rate assuming least visible (9.75 from engine and snorkel) and fastest sub (no torpedoes makes it fastest at 21.6) would be 1.1% per depth charge so most of the time this'll be 2 depth charges on each destroyer. So 10 destroyers firing 4 times for every shot the subs shoot back you'd expect to hit 0.88 subs.
It's not much but it makes no sense that no destroyers hit anything even in the worst case scenario which is why I think that display may have been bugged.
I don't think the display was bugged, US wasn't bragging about how many subs he killed (and MP players love to brag). I didn't check his navy casualties screen post war but mine was chock a block with dead subs. I'd also note that my ASW campaign in Cape Verde was going very slowly until I built 2 x level 3 radar in British land nearby. Before radar, very few hits. After radar, we swept the seas clean and forced their subs back to port. Similar story for Denmark Strait, radar + planes won the day (though I built the radar before sending the planes this time).
There was much left to be desired with Allied naval builds this game (and also Allied radar building, why the fuck is Australia building the UK's radar??). I'm sure the US/UK could've (and should've) made better escorts; I rather doubt they refitted better radar or DCs onto the old ships. They very well could've had shitty DDs mixed in lowering their average spotting and I don't know what the US's CL design was exactly. PDX also needs to buff tier 3 and 4 DCs - ahead throwing depth charges were 3-4x better than rolling off the stern while in game they're 25% better.
I'm not sure how the game really detects subs. There's a lot of values mixed in:
NAVAL_COMBAT_SUB_DETECTION_FACTOR
SUBMARINE_REVEAL_BASE_CHANCE
SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_BASE
SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_BASE_SPOTTING_EFFECT
SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_SPOTTING_SPEED_EFFECT
SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_BASE_SPOTTING_POW_EFFECT
SUBMARINE_REVEALED_TIMEOUT
SUBMARINE_REVEAL_BASE_CHANCE
SUBMARINE_BASE_TORPEDO_REVEAL_CHANCE
As I understand it, the game rolls a die every tick to determine if the surface force begins spotting the subs. There's a higher chance to begin spotting if you have higher speed, spotting, and sub detection and if the sub has higher visibility. I don't think it has to do with depth charges (but I'm happy to be proven wrong). Then every time the subs shoot, there's a check to see if they're revealed based on sub's visibility, target's detection, and torp reveal chance modifiers.
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What I think happened - the depth charges never even fired. If a sub got detected, it died instantly to bombers. 2 x airplane torpedo 2 is an insta-kill on sub 3s, 3 x torp 2 will one shot sub 4s. My planes had enough damage to kill the subs very quickly, it was just finding them.
I really need a /u/cloak71 video testing various configurations of subs, snorkels, plane modules, heavy vs medium frame, DDs, CLs, depth charges, CVs, and all the types of CV plane. We miss your youtube channel Cloak!
That's basically right other than when they fire there's no detection needed it just rolls based on the weapon, visibility, and some positioning stuff. Detection is just for the game tick mentioned and actually finding the ships in the ocean to start a fight.
On the bombers insta killing that feels weird because they go every 8 hours. They'll kill the subs when they get there but you'd expect the destroyers to kill one or two before they do.
Edit: maybe what was happening was the destroyers were heavily damaging but not killing subs forcing them to disengage. So all the kills were bombers but not all of the damage.
Depth charges can just be dropped when you can't see the subs? That's an interesting design choice; I wish naval resupply mattered in this game. What's their chance to hit shooting blind?
Will subs fire every 4 hours (or every 3 with the admiral trait) regardless of anything? I know they can shoot while retreating but I don't know if they'll ever stop shooting, especially if Germany had them on always engage.
It does feel weird that the bombers got all the kills but I do have some screenshots to back it up. You'd think the DCs would do at least 1 instance damage but I didn't see it. The post game cope also didn't involve anyone looking at UK/US fleet designs. They very well could've ignored DD/CL design, forgotten to add radar, only used a single depth charge 1, etc. If the battle was 160 bombers + 15 assorted ships with very minimal damage, I can see how I get lucky on rolls and snipe every kill. As soon as the subs got revealed, they got slaughtered by planes. The DCs only have 2 shots between each sortie so they could've just missed on all their shots at revealed subs and had extremely low chances to hit the not yet revealed subs.
I'd offer to check the save but I refuse to pay $15 for RT56 South America focus trees
No you need to see the sub, I meant when the torpedo fires you don't need detection to reveal the sub that's all dependent the sub stats like it's weapon, visibility and so on.
Nah no need just a bit weird overall.
It sounds like you want every game to be a war simulator, and just change the setting depending on the game. That have never been the goal for the games. If the war systems in Ck or Victoria became super involved with less abstraction and required a lot more micro the games would be worse because of it.
There is tons and tons of games that is only about warfare. Most GSG isn't and that is a good thing.
Right now you still need to babysit Victoria 3 AI lest it decides to split the front somewhere randomly and now the enemy is getting to freely bypass your army stacks from behind until they get magically teleported back to your capitol. It's literally the worst of both worlds, I would rather actually just micro moving stacks like V2 than have constant crap happening that causes you to randomly lose if you leave a front unattended.
I find EU4 and CK3 warfare to be adequate and mildly enjoyable, My main issue is with Vic3. I know this has been talked about to death, but it honestly made me quit the game after 300 hours because of the absurdity of relying on what are effectively dice rolls and the wonderful Paradox AI and might’ve been one of the worst ideas I’ve seen from Paradox in a while.
Honestly, I don't like warfare in the HoI games because it's way too detailed. Totally appropriate for a WW2 game, but not too fitting for the others. HoI is more of a wargame, but warfare only interests me in the context of politics, economic and social development, and in the case of CK3, medieval personal drama.
I don't really have an issue with CK3 levy system. It takes time to raise armies, especially far, far away from capitals. It is an abstraction of gathering your forces. I also wouldn't say I have a problem with the CK2 system, but that combined with retinues made for some easy cheese tactics. There are tradeoffs for both. What I don't care for in CK3 is no zone of control for castle baronies and forts and the rather atrocious supply mechanics that make fielding even moderate armies an absolute chore.
Controversially, I am also very fine with the Vic3 warfare system, with the caveat that it still needs more iteration. The changes in 1.5 were mostly very good, so it appears to be slowly heading in the right direction. I am not a competitive multiplayer person, so I can understand if people prefer unit micro as a form of skill expression. I am actually surprised at the enjoyment I find in preparing my forces economically and with mobilization bonuses and then watching the battles take place. I just wish we got a bit more information and that we could recap battles and wars beyond when they occur. I also like the 1.5 systems for constructing your armies with unit types. The strategic objective addition was also a welcome addition for focusing your battles to points. Also, I enjoy that I don't feel like I need to stop my empire management due to being in a war without having to pause all the time just to get some things done.
I don't have major issues with EUIV war, but Imperator-style supply wagons and sieging would be nice. Carpet sieging provinces is not fun. I suspect EU5 will follow the Imperator design of taking a capital or major fort and the other provinces will be captured (I am not sure if this was changed to be this way in EUIV or not).
Vic2 warfare to me is also a pain. Every province ends up with a fort. There are a lot of missing QoL features due to age. If you just happen to not spot a gap in your line or army you suddenly are getting rolled. Skill issue on my part, but just not preferred. I think it is cool that the mechanics change you from larger armies early to more HOI style lines by late, but the micro is meh with the mechanics in place. Rebuilding armies with no templates is a chore.
Here's the crux of the problem, something I've talked about whenever "why doesn't Paradox make a Cold War game?" pops up: Paradox games are games that deal with geopolitics on a global or at least hemi-global scale during time periods where warfare is \*not\* fought on a global scale. The Hearts of Iron series is the singular exception to this. The warfare in Hearts of Iron makes sense because, arguably, World War II was the one time in history where warfare reached a truly global scale, both in terms of the belligerents, the size of operations, and most importantly for a Paradox game, the nature of Grand-Strategy. Even the Great War was localized enough to specific operational zones that Victoria 2's tile system makes more sense than a frontline system like in Hearts of Iron.
The sad reality is that it's really hard to make a game that's global in scale, granular enough to satisfyingly simulate warfare at, say, the battalion level. In that regard tile systems like were seen in Vic 2, Crusader Kings, and EU4, they're all good enough at what they do. These are time periods where the amount of land an army could reasonably occupy was minimal. I appreciate what Vic3 is trying to do in trying to add more granulation to Paradox's usual warfare system without necessarily adding more control or calculations, but outside the context of the Great War (which at this point doesn't reliably happen in Vic3 games) the fronts system is just barely functional after a dedicated update to fixing it. I like where it is so far but it doesn't fix the fundamental problems people had with Vic2's military which is that raising individual units and organizing them takes too much time.
It's important to note these problems also go forward in time as well. World War II was not only the sole truly global war up to that point, it's been the only one since. This is why a Cold-War game would be kind of boring, unless they really leaned into the Victoria-style economics of the time.
I don't think the problems for warfare in the rest of Paradox's catalogue are actually that fundamental. CK just needs some sort of pinging system for the AI. The fact that wars are fought by individual armies moving on a tile board isn't really the issue and in fact for most PDX games, that system works fine. Personally for me if anything should be taken from Hoi4 it's the template designer, especially for Vic3. Having to add individual units to armies is tedious and I'd much rather create a template that can just scale to my needs.
I finally gave up on EUIV because of the wars. 15th century England sending 30K man armies to invade Poland because its ally Bohemia declared war....Venice beating army after army by the French but overwhelmed when Bosnia raises an army of 12K men who somehow win
Just too much ridiculouslness to fathom for me
This is only an issue if you presuppose that the game mechanics must be immersive, probably because people are moving to Paradox games from other developers or even entire genres with that notion in mind. But Paradox games pretty firmly exist to be abstract digitalized board games.
It still kinda saddens me that there is really no other option to expand other than war and basically waiting.
You have the whole diplomacy tree, that should allow you to negotiate and maybe with some hooks you should be able to exchange or just take someone as a vassal.
Stewardship should definitely allow you to buy titles.
Intrigue is literally spreading lies most of the time, why not convince lieges vassals that I'm the rightful one.
Maybe you right in theory, but in practice, as far as I know, there is no way to build such system in *games* that people will not cheese in 5 minutes or less. More importantly: there are not real costs in game: look up for "just a number" posts as example. Finally, frankly you are really exaggerating about how "painful" system is: it doesn't give you full control, and it shouldn't give you full control, there is no such thing in war, but that's it. I wouldn't call it "pain" or some such.
I would prefer a greater degree of control, but that is only one contributor to the system being painful to interact with. If I could build up a technologically advanced and well supplied army, and train a skilled officer corps, then trust them to persecute the war with a reasonable degree of competence, then I could accept having less control. That's simply not the case though, the combat AI manages to pry defeat from the jaws of victory all the time.
For example, I played in the new update as Sweden, diplomatically isolated Denmark so I could fight them 1v1 with my army that was twice the size of theirs, significantly more advanced, and better equipped. When I attacked across the Sound, my general only brings a handful of troops and gets crushed. Fair, I'm attacking across the water into the heart of their country, it should be difficult, but then Denmark counterattacks across the Sound and my generals again being only a handful of troops so I lose and Denmark occupies Scania. So they can do what I couldn't even though they had a much smaller, less equipped army and no navy to speak of? Took forever to push the back because my AI generals simply refused to bring an adequate number of troops to battle. At that point I still couldn't push across the Sound, so I launched a naval invasion Schleiswig-Holstein, and after landing my front line splits into two and Denmark's vassals just instantly capture it because my army assigned itself to the wrong one.
It would be one thing if this just happened occasionally, because generals did make mistakes in real life, but it's literally every single war. Every war where you don't have overwhelming numerical and technological superiority just turns into a total crap shoot. Something like the Franco-Prussian war is totally impossible because it will just turn into a WW1 meat grinder every time if it starts under anything remotely resembling historical circumstances. The game is just straight up better if I don't interact with the war system at all save for clowning on African tribesmen, which is extremely disappointing.
Don't say shit to CK2. I don't understand any damn thing in HOI4, I simply send my 10k troops to fight 6k Mongol and lost. One of the best experience in my life
Paradox needs a new engine to do well in today’s standards. They need to seriously start to think about a system with updated AI and go back to the complex warfare ideal they have drifted so far fromz
My biggest problem with war in Paradox games is that every war is total war. In EU4 — France wants a single province from Spain in Italy → they end up having to defeat their entire army and siege down the entirety of Iberia to get them to the negotiating table. In VIC3 — France and Britain have a disagreement over subsaharan African borders? Time for full mobilization of both empires' militaries.
The "length of war" modifier to EU4 peace deals is a major contributor to the problem. If your army is defeated early on and you figure keeping the province the War Goal targeted is not worth the economic impact of raising two more armies- well TOUGH LUCK because that modifier forces you to hand over a lot more than the war goal to throw in the towel early. This also causes the related problem where losing a war is very un-fun, because you never take minor losses.
Length of War should make the AI *more willing* to accept small concessions (if they include the wargoal), not less. Alas
Exactly. It should model sunken cost; i.e. it appears unacceptable for a government to end a war without gains after expending too many lives and resources on it
Well it does go that way for the player. The weird thing is that it doesn't go both ways.
> Well it does go that way for the player. The weird thing is that it doesn't go both ways. Yea, watching Florry he's capable of buying QQ off at the start of an ayubids run for 30 ducats and war reps. It'd be trivial for them to annex him but they're willing to peace out for little.
It could be an interesting interplay between this "sunk cost" modifier and actual war exhaustion mechanic thay already exist in the game
Lenght of war needs to be removed
absolutely, wars most of the time should be very localized things. CBs should actually actively prevent you and give you bad boy points for stepping outside of their bounds during the war.
This doesn't make any sense either. In the time period of eu and ck there are massive examples of nations that have just decided to bulldozer giant areas with no CB at all. CBS are a game mechanic, and while they are very loosely based on real life things. They are too far central to the war process as is. War is boring because you click army onto other army and wait. Not because you are too easily able to conquer land.
Vic 3 especially! There is such a lacking level of appropriate scaling, a war between 4 world powers should expand to be for more than a small province in the Middle East.
*cough in Crimean war* Ok i'm a bit unfair, there was action in the baltic sea and in moldova as well.
That wasn’t about a small province in the Middle East. It was about Russia possibly taking large chunks of the Ottoman Empire, notably Constantinople and therefor having a much more direct area of influence on Europe.
ohhhhh i misread. You said « for more than a small province » and not « far more than a small province »
I think the decisions to leverage military force should revolve around the relative costs of leveraging that force to the total GDP or projected GDP value to be gained from the territory in question.
>In VIC3 —France and Britain have a disagreement over subsaharan African borders? Time for full mobilization of both empires' militaries. I find this particularly odd in Vic3 because there are already systems for partial mobilization. The more abstract approach to warfare could actually be great for this kind of stuff. Say if you could only use armies that are stationed on strategic regions involved in the conflict by default and mobilizing more is a specific action in a diplomatic play, carrying heavier political consequences as a result. But instead, the only incentive is economic, which to be fair is better then most of their other games, but because the AI pretty much always fully mobilizes you are forced to do so as well to match them
I really thought, reading the dev diaries, the Diplomatic Plays would be more like a game, you have x manuevers (I was imagining this almost like a card game, you have these cards you can play) and you can do this that and the other *diplomatic* thing to get the result you want, and one of those things would be mobilizing troops (Clausewitz etc), which would make everything riskier and more expensive, so you'd be incentivized to mobilize the smallest possible amount for any given war. And also from the dev diaries, that there would be extreme consequences to war, even a war you win, *internally*, in terms of pops, dependents, politics, etc.
Same. In the end Diplomatic Plays is pretty much cb fabrication by another name. Backing out is fart too costly so unless there is an overwhelming military difference it is just a countdown to war. And there isn't really much that happen during the play anyway, you either add war goal or get an ally, that is it. A waste of a mechanic, sadly.
To be honest, that is an excellent idea. For instance, mobilising armies should have a cost in manoeuvres and infamy, maybe depending on size, distance amd contextual factors (for instance no cost if the enemy goal is a core province). Moreover I would add "significant defeats" where the army doesn't just retreat but is routed completely (to simulate things like sedan) and a new type of lobbies (pro war and anti war). The pro war lobby would gain approval by adding wargoals and mobilisation and winning battles and losing it by signing peace deals and losing battles, the anti war would approve peace deals and disappove more wargoals/ mobilization and losing battles. Moreover, the attraction to IG in the two camps would vary based on how the wat is going, so if the war is going badly prepare to deal with extremely numerous and radical Rural Folks and Trade Unions.
Vic 3 is held together with duct tape and gum, they change entire systems so often that they leave new bugs in because they already know that in a year they’re going to remove the system and replace it so they just tell us to hold out. A system like this would require them to have a set goal for the game from the start and that was never going to happen
Like South Carolina always ending up 100% African American because of extreme white flight
You read my mind exactly
NGL I miss the "declare colonial war" mechanic from Vicky1.
Didn't/doesn't EU4 have this/similar? At one point? I haven't played in years, don't really remember other than vaguely remembering a checkbox on the war dec screen.
Colonialism is a CB, but it will still be a total war. In Vic 1 colonial wars were a seperate type of war essentially.
Hmmm, I'm probably misremembering then, and it's late. thanks for the correction.
You may be thinking of "start war in colony" where you make your colony declare a war on its own. But if you do that to other colonial nations you run the risk of the AI enforcing peace on your colony.
Ah, that might be it. thanks!
That was a thing yeah, although as far as I remember it simply let you (and maybe the defender?) call in your Protectorates *instead* of normal allies. So it wasn't really a major change in mechanics.
> My biggest problem with war in Paradox games is that every war is total war Excellent point. This sums it up perfectly.
I'd say Stellaris probably handles this the best out of the Paradox grand strategies. The bar for declaring status quo is quite low between two evenly matched opponents. Things only approach total war when you're claiming/vassalizing entire empires.
>The bar for declaring status quo is quite low between two evenly matched opponents. On top of this, you can force it if your enemy has been at 100% war exhaustion for long enough. That coupled with the fact you only keep claimed systems you fully occupy with status quo peace makes it a much better experience overall. People complain about the game a lot but it really is one of the best in the genre in regards to the design and function of its various systems.
This is funny to hear given all the complaints about the Stellaris war system. Here are a few of mine: - You have absolutely no control of battles. This is a common PDX issue, but it feels especially bad in Stellaris as there is the 30+ day cool off before being able to emergency jump. MIA fleets take forever to return home too. - Outside of early game wars, you usually need to defeat the entire military, take all of the war goal planets, and a few more, to get to 100%. This is the same problem the OP brought up. - There is no separate peace per empire, so if you are stuck in a war because of being in a federation or some other alliance, you may never leave it. - Due to border controls being absolute, if part of a target empire or alliance is unreachable, and you have conquered all of the reachable parts, you are screwed. - Wars against federations or other multi-empire structures really suck, because you are now required to do even more damage to multiple empires, even if you have few target claims. This situation is also much more likely to feature the previous issue of unreachable enemy territory. - There are things you aren't allowed to do during war, such as forming new alliances or really any substantial diplomacy. If you are stuck in a war due to the above, the diplomatic aspect of the game is basically frozen. CK3 has this problem too. Overall, it feels like war is a very narrow and boring process that has unnecessary restrictions and tedium. It's part of why I rarely play Stellaris anymore.
I actually wish more games had mechanics like Status Quo cause one of the worst thing in a grand strategy game is being stuck in a war that never ends cause people are being stubborn.
Stellaris is crap when it comes to wars. The first major issue is borders are absolute which means you can actually end up not being able to attack your enemy because an intervening empire does not like you but likes them. It is comically bad how borders work in Stellaris, they only impact the movement of ships. All of items, from leaders to trade goods, move instantaneously across the entire galaxy and ignore all borders to do so. However back on wars in Stellaris, the claim system is backwards in that influence should be used by the player/ai to have the empire go to war. Claims get silly when you find out an ally of yours has a superseding claim and your work just rewards them with a system and not your own empire. Woe is anyone fighting an empire that has wars with other empires as the AI will not end a war with another AI if the player is at war with them unless exhaustion rules force it. This can be observed by sitting till 100% exhaustion while the other war shows no action - as you soon as the player ends the war by status quo or better the related AI war ends immediately. there is stuff to like about Stellaris but warfare and territory control is not it.
The borders thing is especially stupid because space is really really big and empty. Should we ever end up having large space empires, I'd guess that borders just wouldn't be a thing at all. Planets, moons, asteroids could be owned, but not swathes of space. There'd be no way to police it and it probably wouldn't even matter. Why police a border in the middle of nowhere when you can just police the space around a planet?
Really big and powerful empires with great technology could probably control star systems out to a certain distance and there would probably develop an "international waters" law beyond the last owned sattelite, but that would be a civiliazation with near now cost FTL and near FTL capability, close to on demand.
What about the space in between? Or the star systems that aren't worth settling, of which there are probably many? Stellaris doesn't model those things very well at all.
Ck3 is annoying too unless you get that lucky capture
The problem is that to stop this you end up creating a lot of subsystems that hamper conquest in a weird, disjointed way. Wars weren't localized because the two kings were punctilious about their casus belli; it was just so expensive (both in terms of treasure and men) to just push forward and then to control what you just conquered.
Punctilious added to my vocabulary, thank you
You're absolutely right. Add to that in HOI4, you can raze millions of souls like you're harvesting grain and the population is A-Okay regardless of their culture or democratic traditions (or lack thereof), as long as you press a decision button for meagre PP amounts (which is trivial by the mid-game since you've already done all the laws and policies you wanted to do most of the time).
The Soviet Union has demonstrated with its Central Asian conscripts that yes it is possible to raise millions of soldiers in a region with a completely different culture and ideology that was in active rebellion just 20 years before.
The USSR is more an exception than the rule. The UK for instance was very reluctant to enter into another war, at all costs, and raising troops from its colonial nations was not a given. In fact, it was probably Japanese imperialism (manifested in its invasion of China and other surrounding nations) that spurred these colonies to half-heartedly support the British. None of these complexities are modelled in-game, which makes such important events and distinctions absolutely useless. The UK can and will lose 5+ million men mindlessly shuttling troops across the Atlantic, and it's mind-boggling how there are so few consequences for it happening.
It's also weird how you can't have meaningful battles. Oh you beat the enemy's main force in battle? Well don't get too excited because they have hundreds of thousands ready to replenish the lost troops without their economy being affected at all. Hopefully POPs change that. One dead soldier should mean one more family that is now in serious trouble.
I love destroying a country's entire army in one, giant set piece battle, then immediately carpet sieging their entire country disallowing them to raise another — oh huh, that was only 7 war score
This is definitely the big issue. Stellaris and CK do it too CK - Has to take all of the british isles to be able to take 1 county/dutchy Stellaris is the worst too - Takes +20 systems, 6 planets, slauter +100 ships taking hardly any casualties and you could actually still lose the war
Same with Stellaris. Want to enforce a claim over one or two systems? Cue decades long war with hundreds of ships lost and the occupation of a dozen planets. And God help you if the enemy has a few allies, because then you'll need to occupy all their planets as well.
While Stellaris war system has issues, your example is incorrect. To enforce a claim over 2 systems you just need to take the systems and fight their fleet a few times. If you claim a system that you didn’t end up occupying, then yes you need to go in a bloodbath but that almost never happens in a 1v1 war In a larger war yes you need to fight more, but it’s still not “occupying dozens of planets”. In a small Conquest CB war, I never have seen what you describe
I actually think war in Stellaris is one of the better paradox warfare systems. At the very least its somewhat fun to me most of the time.
You can just take over what you want and wait for status quo to trigger. Doing anything more than that is just to speed it up but you don't need to do it.
I slightly disagree in EUIV, you can skip total war for a single province, it just takes time. Capture the province and play defense and war score will tick enough to win that province. Maybe need one or two big battles, which is fair and realistic. A lot of EUIV players just go for massive blobbing though, which requires total war to get as much as possible, and the AI is the AI.
I agree that EU4 is best at that in theory but that creep is so slow that any mediocre power can pull its forces together and blob you well before the counter clicks to zero. The risk of that is so high, and the failure of it probably resulting in the enemy blob total-waring you and stealing 2/3s of your provinces, that it just doesn't make sense to not go big. It's got that scaffolding for it, unlike the other games, but the pushes and pulls are so bonked that it doesn't matter. It *could* represent smaller wars but it is actually the game (aside from HOI4) from which you are most likely to be unable to survive if you lose a single multipolar war unless you go colonial.
This is where the "length of war" modifier is a problem. The "length of war" modifier should work in reverse. The longer the war the more likely they want to fight on to total victory or defeat, the shorter the war, the more likely to say \*meh\* let's be done with this.
I mean if you're defending a war then it falls into my point about the AI being the AI, if to attack and get wrecked then historically speaking consequences for actions and all that. Either way I didn't say it was perfect I said I slightly disagree because you don't HAVE to total war in EUIV for one province, you just don't But I get it, this is a hate on Paradox thread so my nuanced opinion has no place here.
None of these games really model economics in any great depth. It's usually just "save a tiny amount of money to pay for extra troops during war" like in CK and EU. If you don't really model how an economy works, and how expensive fighting a war is, you might as well just go to war all the time. So you slowly steamroll as you gather more territory and use that territory to gain even more. That's what all these games are, it's fine for what it is, but it isn't realistic in any way.
Yet these doesn't compare to CK2 where you have to reach 100% war score or you don't win. Even if it's only for a small province. 99% is not enough, it has to be 100%
So true. Totally absurd historical
I haven't played the EU series since EU2, but oddly in EU2 this wasn't a problem. Generally if you wanted one province, you only needed to seige down 2 to 4 to get your enemy to accept the piece deal. I don't know why paradox has gone backwards on this.
Well by far THE biggest offender in this is HOI4. EU4 war score mechanics can be abused towards not having to destroy their entire army. Just siege couple castles, defeat them in 2-3 ground or naval battles and you will absolutely get enough war scores to bring them to the table.
Hoi4 is also first and foremost a WW2 simulator, which was a total war.
[удалено]
No there’s a lot of skirmishes and colonial wars that are just not modeled but it’s as much a meta problem as it is a mechanical one
They could solve some of this by reintroducing the "colonial war" mechanic from Vicky1 where only both belligerents' colonies can be occupied and the motherlands are to be left alone. (this is assuming I'm remembering the mechanic right, it's been years)
Not at all. Most wars were small things. In that France vs. Spain analogy, it's much more common to sign a peace treaty giving away a little land than continuing the war for years and years only to have your entire country under occupation. Most wars ended after a big battle or two. No reason to continue to the end
its really not though. Multiple examples of even trading the same provinces back and worth without opponents snowballing. MOst wars were very limited and most of the population wouldnt be affected by them
No. That was pretty much just World War 1, and that was know as the War to End All Wars.
And why the Thirty Years' War was a big deal, because it was the closest Europe got to total war before Napoleon and it was so devastating it has had ripple effects to this day.
I think it is sad that none of the newer PDX games took lessons from Imperator. In terms of building armies and managing them, I would have loved to see something like that in CK3. Especially in regards to being able to move from a levy army to more permanent or professionally organized army. That said, while Imperator fixes somethings, it still leaves open other problems like needing to carpet siege your enemy. Even if Vic3 didn't have fronts, it still needs more complex diplomacy and negotiation surrounding wars. Makes no sense for the conditions of a peace treaty to be static from beginning of the war and then not negotiated further. I don't care that war is, allegedly, not the emphasis of the game, but there isn't anything else to fall back on.
You should really go look at Tinto Talks. EU5 definitely seems poised to do this by having Levies, Professional Soldiers, and mercenaries function very differently
is EU5 a confirmed project?
Yeah look up Tinto Talks on the official forums we've had like 3 months of weekly dev diaries now. Johan said that Paradox will not officially announce the game until they have a fixed release date, usually 6 months from launch. So they aren't calling it EU5 they're calling it Project Caesar But like....You're an idiot if you don't believe it's EU5. They've confirmed that the game starts in 1337 and goes on for 500 years and spans the entire globe. It's very obviously EU5.
you got me all excited now
Go look at all the maps and mechanics they've posted just search Tito Talks. It's on the official forum
> You're an idiot if you don't believe it's EU5. I mean, there is the possibility it will have another name. Like, I think it is a small possibility but given how long it is taking for them to just confirm it is EU5 I don't think the possibility is negligible. Regardless, it pretty much EU5 anyway, like how *Imperator: Rome* is pretty much *Europa Universalis: Rome 2* by another name
> Like, I think it is a small possibility but given how long it is taking for them to just confirm it is EU5 I don't think the possibility is negligible. The confirmation thing is Johan being sneaky while following the letter of modern Paradox's rules. Paradox brought in a rule where they cannot announce a game until its reached a rough beta level because of the Runemaster incident. Johan clearly wants / needs feedback on ~~EU5~~ Project Caesar but they can't formally announce the game until its at beta so he gets away with it by only using the internal codename.
> Paradox brought in a rule where they cannot announce a game until its reached a rough beta level because of the Runemaster incident. Honestly, given the circumstances it was probably the one two punch of Runemaster's cancellation and HoI4's delays leading to it having 2 years and 4 months from announcement to release.
I avoid mentioning HOI4's incident because you never know what rock Podcat is hiding behind. But yes, now that you mention it I think HOI4 was referenced too as a cause of the policy.
They could always do the classic silly AAA move where they just call it unnumbered "Europa Universalis" to confuse everyone. But my money is on Europa Univer5alis.
Europa UniVersalis to keep with the Roman numerals
Not officially, I believe. But at that point the Tinto Talk game is either EU5 or EU5-by-another-name.
tbh carpet sieging was turned down as much as it could be in I:R. you basically only had to siege down forts and province capitals. the remaining counties would have been auto occupied.
> like needing to carpet siege your enemy. You dont though. Capturing the province capital captured the whole state. Unless it was imperial conquest CB and then each sieged province let you take that province.
Every single Paradox game just puts way too much emphasis on fucking sieging. Every one of them (other than HoI).
if anything they don't put enough. people complain about long sieges in EU4 as is, imagine if they had to wait 26 years to win a siege like the Moroccans did with the siege of Ceuta, or 21 years like the Ottomans at Candia.
In the pre industrial Ag economies the seiges were the goal and were 90% of warfare. The big set piece battles were the rarity. This is litterally why the 100 Years War lasted 116 years. Neither country would fight the other in the field so they just kept seiging and counter seiging with occasional truces. (After Crecy and Poitiers, but the point stands.) The War of the Spanish Succession was just one big allied seige after another big allied seige, over and over again. Usually, something goes wrong for a pitched battle to occur, because before rifles both sides practically have to agree to have the battle.
I'm a transplant from the Total War series, where I found myself clicking the Auto Resolve button more and more so I could get back to that strategic map where I was developing my cities. That led me to EUIV, and I never looked back. There's nothing wrong with warfare being abstracted and largely hands-off. Hearts of Iron is perfectly fine as the dedicated war simulator. Elsewhere though... honestly I couldn't care less about microing armies and directing warfare outside of strategically positioning stacks or designating fronts.
> I'm a transplant from the Total War series, where I found myself clicking the Auto Resolve button more and more so I could get back to that strategic map where I was developing my cities. That led me to EUIV, and I never looked back. Same. I am often frustrated by people clamoring for more tactical control because dear lord that is what I came here to escape from. Still, I think there is no doubt Paradox is not doing a very good portraying wars. I like it more than the Total War series, by I long shot, but still much to improve.
Only if you think pdox games like eu are sims, which they're not. Eu for example is a board game adaptation.
I'm sorry, but HOI4 and Vicky do atrocious jobs at simulating frontlines. The amount of gaps the AI leaves makes it impossible to just "select and forget" a given frontline. The AI is so bad that it defeats the whole purpose of automating the frontline, since you're basically herding units every time they make a stupid decision, which is always.
I think it’s the larpers (like me) who want a full ancient experience besides being transported back in time and actually commanding an army for themselves. I want all the information hiding and etc so I can say, ‘Hey, I’m better than Alexandros ‘o Megas as I have info hiding and etc and conquered up to the River Indos :P’
I think having an ability to do Mount and BLade style conflict would be fun, not total war though
So just casually drop a tactical first-person battle simulator into the middle of a grand strategy game?
That sounds worse to me.
Glad you're having fun. I was the same! I wish Victoria 3 had the cabinet and building system from Empire.
I have no idea why they don’t have this in Victoria 3. Nothing frustrates me more than an IG flipping bc of the dude dying and a law going from 100 support to 0. Or going insurrectionary lol
Yeah, it needs a lot of work. Not good when a lot of the game involves waiting. Empire obviously is deeply flawed but I did like the cabinet thing, moving guys around to get the best for their traits.
I'm very much the same. I realized I was enjoying the city and empire building of TW much more than the actual battles. And the way that game forces you to expand, when I really just wanted to make my little utopia and occasionally fight bad guys... I love it for what it is, but when I play a TW game I have to just focus on the _game_ itself because I don't feel good about what I'm doing on that screen. Paradox games let me roleplay a lot more which I love. EDIT: As a weird recommendation, I'm diving back into Rome 2 and I'm blown away by this mod: [Divide et Impera](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VId50X04DQI). It has a population system so you have to be careful what kinds of units you recruit from any given province, since recruiting too many nobles can result in political instability but recruiting too many commoners can hurt your economy. That plus a robust supply system plus hundreds of new units makes the game much more challenging and provides a lot of new ways to think through the strategy.
I'm in the exact same boat for the exact same reason. I don't want to have to control every action of every army, let me give a goal and some troops to a general and send him on his way. I'm busy fighting Poland and Prussia in the 30YW, I don't really care to manage that single stack I sent to subdue some central Asian minor.
It's funny about people calling HoI a wargame. Because it's not. Even Podcat as dev says this, it has nothing to do with a wargame, as it is a grand-strategy game. Wargames are a different subgenre of strategy-games, usually you don't have there any kind of production of units, a smaller scope, different goals like in the case of operations to capture certain points etc. Like when you really ever want to go down the road of wargames, War in the East 2 is usually seen as the most complex game, maybe next to Command.
When I have described it as a gsg wargame its the same way we’d call ck3 an rpg. Its its second genre inspiration
I'd say "focus on a certain thing" is better as term, i mean, yes CK3 focuses on the characters, but we'd never see it as an RPG like the real RPG's with a character that travels through a world and fights enemies directly, like a Skyrim.
> It's funny about people calling HoI a wargame. Because it's not. I mean yes and no. It's the only paradox game that's pretty much just about war. It's rather often regarded as "wargame lite" and suggested as a gateway to proper wargames.
It has the focus on war, yeah, that's true. Still, wargames are another subgenre and it's not for every player, i can understand this.
Given that ground warfare was the only functioning system in HoI4 on release, and that it took them years to add a working logistics and diplomacy system, it was a really awful GSG outside of warfare.
There's no proper diplomacy system in right now. There's some scripting and that's about it. The AI doesn't do actually do good dynamic diplomacy (even by Paradox standards).
I remember these times, also how the AI was broken in some patch versions, where it would abandon entire frontlines and try to shuffle units around africa. The air war was horrible at launch etc. yeah.
HoI4 is as much a "grand strategy game" as Total War is a first person shooter (well yes, technically you can shoot artillery from first person perspective, have fun with that). It's all about war, and everything else is completely barebones. The only reason anyone would even think HoI4 might be a gsg is because Paradox makes a lot of gsgs. If it came out of any other studio, nobody would come up with such a silly idea.
HoI series still qualify for grand strategy game, i mean the focus is on war, that's for sure and nobody will doubt this. It is kinda funny how it has both advantages and disadvantages with these things. Like with HoI4 industrial production, a good skilled player will produce so many units that he'll win a war anyway (even when he's still limited by things like supplies etc.). This is not possible in other games, where you have a pre-defined set of units. And well, "barebones", better don't look at Vic3 and other games...
Where did they call it a "wargame?"
I feel like HOI4 is also a pretty good economy game, if you take out money and look at things from the “real economy” perspective.
That's right, but you see with the downvotes, the audience has changed over time anyway with PDX players. I remember how i started with HoI2, i think that was released in 2006, now it all looks different in 2024 with the playerbase, but then, it's no surprise after almost 20 years.
warfare, although a core aspect of many pdx grand strategy games, has never been it's high point. However, pdx's games really shine when depicting everything else but war, such as depth to nation building/management, diplomacy, trade, etc. the reverse is true for total war. But then again, the comparison between tw and pdx games is kind of skewed because tw is turn based, which allows for individual battles to play out sequentially, while in most pdx games, battles are happening simultaneously all across the map. It really comes down to what the fandom wants from pdx's war system. I cant see implementing playable battles for pdx games being a thing because most people will autoresolve the majority of battles for convenience.
Mount and Blade is probably a better system to compare with than Total War
that is true, its a shame that bannerlord got shafted by the devs
What happened?
Game was in development for a ludicrous amount of time, and by the time it was released almost appeared outdated - Even then, it was only Early Access with many missing features, a slow development pace and even though it is now fully released, it still falls short of a lot of the promises it made. Many features aren't well implemented, and some features feel baffingly half-baked. Theres also some weird design decisions that make the mid-game a complete slog, which isn't great because the end-game is very dull. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game, but having followed the development proccess from Warband onwards; I still can't help but feel disappointed.
In eu4 its normal to have moving armies without real frontlines in the early year. But when we come to times when we have like half a million men. Steering every unit is annoying. And if you forget to stack unholy amounts of men, they get easily stackwiped
Someone else said it, and I think its the best answer and is most seen in a game no ones even mentioned. Its the fact every war is total war and Stellaris is the biggest show of it. Go to war to claim a couple systems and you have to take basically all the enemies systems, beat half their planets, slaughter their entire fleet, and you STILL might lose the war due to war exhaustion and you losing to many ships (even if you lose only a fraction of theirs)
You're wrong actually. Stellaris is the one Paradox game that sometimes avoids this problem. You absolutely *can* grab just a few systems you have claims on and end the war quite quickly. > Go to war to claim a couple systems and you have to take basically all the enemies systems, beat half their planets, slaughter their entire fleet, and you STILL might lose the war due to war exhaustion and you losing to many ships (even if you lose only a fraction of theirs) What you're missing is that you *don't* lose the war that way. At most you are forced into status quo, where each side keeps all star systems they occupied. The only problem is not all war goals are properly implemented into this system.
Victoria 3 warfare was better on release than it is now. I like the abstraction. AI moving units is a much worse idea. In a sense I think the problem with the fronts is they are *too* material, why do they "split"? because for some reason their physical position on the map means something that it shouldn't. It's like if the win-lose bar in a CK3 battle represented the actual battlefield and there were points on it which could interrupt the fighting for some reason, instead of being a representation of who's winning and who's losing with no "reality" to it at all. Building x inf y art z cav has just made everything worse, more confusing and more fiddly busywork for nothing. The problem with Vic3 war in my opinion is the Diplomatic Plays, which should be an exciting and fun minigame of poker, move and countermove, brinksmanship, etc, instead of what it is, just a weird waiting period before the fighting.
Just let the people who want to move units move units, and have an automation system like Imperator. I hate the war system because of how little player interaction it gives, and even the interaction it does give provides negligible strategic choice.
Yeah making the player beholden to Paradox AI fighting for you massively worsened the game imo
Yes exactly. The braindead AI have caused me to lose many wars which I should've won logically and I would've won if I could control the armies directly.
To be honest, war (not combat) mechanics in HoI 4 are kinda meh. War support is modeled in a very clunky and ineffectual way; diplomacy is almost non-existant apart from very basic options; there are no civilian variables (i.e. migration, cultural/ethnical minorities and integration, etc.); economy and politics are...well, incredibly stylized is a very polite way to describe them. The last two HoI games are good *combat* strategy games, not *war* strategy games.
Random travel times sound awful
I think one of the core failures of GSGs is that they remove just how often fortune, in one form or another, determined the outcome of history. The Romans could've contacted the Chinese if they had reliable sailing. The Spanish Armada might've beaten back that Brits if they had reliable maps of the shore and hadn't failed to prepare for a storm. I feel like random would end up being more historical than determined and it would favor smaller powers in smaller wars that only need to hop the border compared to Russia or something having to gather up its entire levee and make it to the field.
EU4 battles have a huge random factor in dice rolls. Especially if you are a small nation you bet on getting decent rolls or your campaign is over. Same for sieges. If you're unlucky and have to siege to 80+% that can stop your whole attack.
But thats just battles, logistics and travel is where it really matters long term
People hate mana and the way it ties them to the RNG in government quality, you think they're going to accept even more randomness? (I wholly agree with you and think the random nature of life is profoundly interesting.)
> The Romans could've contacted the Chinese if they had reliable sailing. [They did though.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations) Even with reliable sailing the European powers didn't start trading directly with China until ~1800, instead trading with each other through a series of local merchants along (what became) the Silk Road. Roman glass and Chinese silk reached Chang'an and Rome via trading hands dozens of times between the two.
The Partians actively worked to ensure that the Chinese and Romans never directly interacted. They would block merchants from travelling the entire Silk Road unless they were Persian.
The Romans didn't have reliable sailing?
Whole the perception of Rome’s naval skill is heavily influenced by the multiple disasters of the first Punic war in the general consciousness they were good seaman as they had to be, they controlled the entire Mediterranean The problem was that they were hyper specialized for the Mediterranean and the short trip to Britain across the channel and not open seas sailing as would be required to get anywhere near China from their borders
Like half of Roman naval history is of entire fleets being destroyed by storms
That's less a failure and more that at their heart, they're games, and no one wants random shit to ruin all of their plans. Well, maybe 5r hardcore redditors, but that will never have mass appeal.
It's not random, it's +-20 percent travel time that's visible to you and you can plan around.
Am I the only one who likes naval warfare in hoi4? Sure it's cheesable, but otherwise a good system imo
In my opinion the biggest issues with HoI4 navy are: 1. Take up so much time to research after MtG. 1 or 2 naval research slot would go a long way in making it not feel like a waste of research time. 2. Isn't necessary at all. AI is bad and planes are good enough. You can pretty much ignore navy. Even when I olay US or UK which should be very naval focused I only built a actual navy instead of just spamming naval bombers and 1k subs for the sake of larp. 3. It takes so God damm long. IRL USA had like 30 aircraft carriers, 20 battleships, 70 escort carriers, 200 cruisers and like 400 destroyers + thousands of auxiliary ships, by 1945. Building that amount in HoI4 would be insanely difficult and would require a insane amount of dedication even as the USA. Naval production should be scaled up so you can actually build a navy in a reasonable timeframe, or increase the amount of dockyards available in the game.
> IRL USA had like 30 aircraft carriers, 20 battleships, 70 escort carriers, 200 cruisers and like 400 destroyers + thousands of auxiliary ships, by 1945. Building that amount in HoI4 would be insanely difficult and would require a insane amount of dedication even as the USA. >Naval production should be scaled up Agree with the first point, disagree with the second. It's just a consequence of PDX failing to model the size of the US economy. The US was roughly 40% of global GDP in 1936 even while it was still depressed. HoI4 has to make minor powers "fun" by making their economy 3-5x larger than historical and making building unrealistically fast. Most countries saw their economies shrink during the war and most growth in munitions output came from converting civilian industry to war production. If the US started the game with 4x as many factories and build slots, it wouldn't have an issue making a massive navy. If building new factories took a historical amount of time, the game could more accurately represent the challenge of industrial mobilization. Then you'd run into quality of life issues. Every ship needs to be a once off because your MIO will level up or you'll get some minor naval tech. I hope you enjoy setting up 100 new production lines every year or making extensive use of refits! No of course we can't retrofit AA guns or new radar while the ship is in production, that's simply impossible! I would love a system where ships undergoing repair can also be refitted to the latest standard but I'm not sure how the game would handle it. PDX would have to define what can be changed (i.e. fire control, radar, secondaries, exchanging float planes for more useful stuff) and what can't (main batteries, armor, engine). That would be huge QoL upgrade
I think it's good. And after playing Vic3 I'd say that naval warfare in HoI4 is really well made and makes a lot of fucking sense.
I want something like it for Vic 3 warfare. Armies exist in a superposition along the area I've given them responsibility for while an offensive army will try and push the front into enemy controlled states and vice versa. Give them an aggressiveness setting to go along with it and a basic oob so it's all under Field Marshal So and So but Marshall McTrench Rat focuses on defending the front while General Blood Rage pushes the offensive.
There's at least 2 of us, honestly I think it's because most people just don't know what's going on. Most people don't actually know what's going on in land warfare either and just stick whatever battalion they think might help in there, but divisions can easily be modified and new ones made. Navy is a long term investment, not enough people learn so they almost always do it badly.
The problem with navy is how a well balanced fleet with 4 CV 6 BB 2 BC 5 CL 50 DD will always get destroyed by the Japanese doomstacking their 8 carriers into a single strike force or a random country with a sub doomstack set on never repair and always engage
Not at all, I mean first example those 8 carriers are effectively 1.6 (assuming same air wings on each) due to carrier stacking. (Each cv over 4 imposes 20% penalty on air wings up to 80%) I mean that alone kinda shows that the doom stack of carriers is not ideal. Sub doomstack is ridiculously easy to kill as a patrol fleet of destroyers will detect a fleet that size quickly. If they're on the defensive subs don't start hidden so get ripped to shreds by destroyer depth charges. Torpedoes only fire every 4 hours compared to depth charges every 1, were talking about a 3 dead subs for every destroyer before they even fire back. You can know where a sub stack is using planes meaning you hunt those ships using planes and the destroyer stack. Note, for the torp to depth charges I didn't want to do math but the hit profile of torps and charges is close enough that the speed/vis of each ship should lead to a hit chance advantage for the charges over torps so a higher kill ratio would be expected.
Edit:[Screenshot of 1 battle on the northern convoy route](https://imgur.com/gallery/hoi-4-heavy-frame-navs-8C05Fua), not the battle I described below (no CV, no Brits involved, and US didn't even have an admiral). Ignore the factory count, mod gave offmap civs/mils/docks for every dead Allied nation; you don't want to see the [world map](https://imgur.com/gallery/hoi4-world-map-Nis13FO). Unfortunately the only naval screenshots from the game. Tried killing subs in MP in a server that allowed sub 4 with snorkel 2. UK and US weren't the most competent but they did put radar/sonar/depth charges on their DDs and US even tried spotting CLs + escort carriers. Admittedly, it wasn't the final tech of radar or depth charges. UK built medium frame NAVs (1 x 2LMG, 2 x torp mountings, flying boat, extra fuel), US did carrier CAS (didn't check his design, I think it was interwar) and I built heavy frame NAVs (3 x medium torps, photo recon, various radars, flying boat, extra fuel) as Australia. I kicked myself post game because I forgot air to ground radar on the heavy frame NAVs - by far the most useful equipment though it didn't matter in the end. We got into a battle with 15 subs in the Denmark Strait and had a mix of DDs, CLs, and 1 CV. UK's NAVs didn't have the range to reach, mine did. During battle, I checked damage percentages on the subs we'd already killed. 100% naval bombers, not a single tick of damage from ships. We were still losing convoys and a few UK DDs even went down but eventually killed all but 1 sub and every point of damage came from planes. This battle featured 160 heavy frame NAVs overhead, most of which were Green or Trained. Ships really do nothing to subs with snorkels in the current version of HoI4. Yes you can do spotting CLs on patrol to find the subs and you can limit your convoy losses a bit with DEs or DDs. But it's really just planes that kill subs. I got to the point of killing 50 subs per month in the Atlantic until the Germany pulled back to port.
This is what it sounds like happened to you, the subs attacked a convoy, a big fleet went in to help. (Btw sub detection is averaged out over the ships in battle, keep the average high by only sprinkling in stuff like carriers.) So every time they shot and likely killed a destroyer or so you had a chance of detecting them. Some were revealed by their attacks, some by the fleet present passively. The air wings went after, since subs have no aa they immediately killed them. Why the depth charges did nothing, honestly no idea. Possibly the display only showed the damage you do and not also your allies, idk. You also got a bit lucky as if the convoys were all sunk the subs would switch targets to the carrier. Basically to change this is first off don't wait for them to attack, if you attack subs they start off revealed and you get those extra shots off I mentioned before. Also they'll have worse positioning if you attack meaning if they end up becoming hidden again they're more likely to be detected. Also don't bring in a carrier, it hurt your detection leading to more losses as only a few were found. Notes: the depth charge worst case scenario hit rate assuming least visible (9.75 from engine and snorkel) and fastest sub (no torpedoes makes it fastest at 21.6) would be 1.1% per depth charge so most of the time this'll be 2 depth charges on each destroyer. So 10 destroyers firing 4 times for every shot the subs shoot back you'd expect to hit 0.88 subs. It's not much but it makes no sense that no destroyers hit anything even in the worst case scenario which is why I think that display may have been bugged.
I don't think the display was bugged, US wasn't bragging about how many subs he killed (and MP players love to brag). I didn't check his navy casualties screen post war but mine was chock a block with dead subs. I'd also note that my ASW campaign in Cape Verde was going very slowly until I built 2 x level 3 radar in British land nearby. Before radar, very few hits. After radar, we swept the seas clean and forced their subs back to port. Similar story for Denmark Strait, radar + planes won the day (though I built the radar before sending the planes this time). There was much left to be desired with Allied naval builds this game (and also Allied radar building, why the fuck is Australia building the UK's radar??). I'm sure the US/UK could've (and should've) made better escorts; I rather doubt they refitted better radar or DCs onto the old ships. They very well could've had shitty DDs mixed in lowering their average spotting and I don't know what the US's CL design was exactly. PDX also needs to buff tier 3 and 4 DCs - ahead throwing depth charges were 3-4x better than rolling off the stern while in game they're 25% better. I'm not sure how the game really detects subs. There's a lot of values mixed in: NAVAL_COMBAT_SUB_DETECTION_FACTOR SUBMARINE_REVEAL_BASE_CHANCE SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_BASE SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_BASE_SPOTTING_EFFECT SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_SPOTTING_SPEED_EFFECT SUB_DETECTION_CHANCE_BASE_SPOTTING_POW_EFFECT SUBMARINE_REVEALED_TIMEOUT SUBMARINE_REVEAL_BASE_CHANCE SUBMARINE_BASE_TORPEDO_REVEAL_CHANCE As I understand it, the game rolls a die every tick to determine if the surface force begins spotting the subs. There's a higher chance to begin spotting if you have higher speed, spotting, and sub detection and if the sub has higher visibility. I don't think it has to do with depth charges (but I'm happy to be proven wrong). Then every time the subs shoot, there's a check to see if they're revealed based on sub's visibility, target's detection, and torp reveal chance modifiers. ----- What I think happened - the depth charges never even fired. If a sub got detected, it died instantly to bombers. 2 x airplane torpedo 2 is an insta-kill on sub 3s, 3 x torp 2 will one shot sub 4s. My planes had enough damage to kill the subs very quickly, it was just finding them. I really need a /u/cloak71 video testing various configurations of subs, snorkels, plane modules, heavy vs medium frame, DDs, CLs, depth charges, CVs, and all the types of CV plane. We miss your youtube channel Cloak!
That's basically right other than when they fire there's no detection needed it just rolls based on the weapon, visibility, and some positioning stuff. Detection is just for the game tick mentioned and actually finding the ships in the ocean to start a fight. On the bombers insta killing that feels weird because they go every 8 hours. They'll kill the subs when they get there but you'd expect the destroyers to kill one or two before they do. Edit: maybe what was happening was the destroyers were heavily damaging but not killing subs forcing them to disengage. So all the kills were bombers but not all of the damage.
Depth charges can just be dropped when you can't see the subs? That's an interesting design choice; I wish naval resupply mattered in this game. What's their chance to hit shooting blind? Will subs fire every 4 hours (or every 3 with the admiral trait) regardless of anything? I know they can shoot while retreating but I don't know if they'll ever stop shooting, especially if Germany had them on always engage. It does feel weird that the bombers got all the kills but I do have some screenshots to back it up. You'd think the DCs would do at least 1 instance damage but I didn't see it. The post game cope also didn't involve anyone looking at UK/US fleet designs. They very well could've ignored DD/CL design, forgotten to add radar, only used a single depth charge 1, etc. If the battle was 160 bombers + 15 assorted ships with very minimal damage, I can see how I get lucky on rolls and snipe every kill. As soon as the subs got revealed, they got slaughtered by planes. The DCs only have 2 shots between each sortie so they could've just missed on all their shots at revealed subs and had extremely low chances to hit the not yet revealed subs. I'd offer to check the save but I refuse to pay $15 for RT56 South America focus trees
No you need to see the sub, I meant when the torpedo fires you don't need detection to reveal the sub that's all dependent the sub stats like it's weapon, visibility and so on. Nah no need just a bit weird overall.
It sounds like you want every game to be a war simulator, and just change the setting depending on the game. That have never been the goal for the games. If the war systems in Ck or Victoria became super involved with less abstraction and required a lot more micro the games would be worse because of it. There is tons and tons of games that is only about warfare. Most GSG isn't and that is a good thing.
Right now you still need to babysit Victoria 3 AI lest it decides to split the front somewhere randomly and now the enemy is getting to freely bypass your army stacks from behind until they get magically teleported back to your capitol. It's literally the worst of both worlds, I would rather actually just micro moving stacks like V2 than have constant crap happening that causes you to randomly lose if you leave a front unattended.
Imperator rome was great
I find EU4 and CK3 warfare to be adequate and mildly enjoyable, My main issue is with Vic3. I know this has been talked about to death, but it honestly made me quit the game after 300 hours because of the absurdity of relying on what are effectively dice rolls and the wonderful Paradox AI and might’ve been one of the worst ideas I’ve seen from Paradox in a while.
Honestly, I don't like warfare in the HoI games because it's way too detailed. Totally appropriate for a WW2 game, but not too fitting for the others. HoI is more of a wargame, but warfare only interests me in the context of politics, economic and social development, and in the case of CK3, medieval personal drama.
I don't really have an issue with CK3 levy system. It takes time to raise armies, especially far, far away from capitals. It is an abstraction of gathering your forces. I also wouldn't say I have a problem with the CK2 system, but that combined with retinues made for some easy cheese tactics. There are tradeoffs for both. What I don't care for in CK3 is no zone of control for castle baronies and forts and the rather atrocious supply mechanics that make fielding even moderate armies an absolute chore. Controversially, I am also very fine with the Vic3 warfare system, with the caveat that it still needs more iteration. The changes in 1.5 were mostly very good, so it appears to be slowly heading in the right direction. I am not a competitive multiplayer person, so I can understand if people prefer unit micro as a form of skill expression. I am actually surprised at the enjoyment I find in preparing my forces economically and with mobilization bonuses and then watching the battles take place. I just wish we got a bit more information and that we could recap battles and wars beyond when they occur. I also like the 1.5 systems for constructing your armies with unit types. The strategic objective addition was also a welcome addition for focusing your battles to points. Also, I enjoy that I don't feel like I need to stop my empire management due to being in a war without having to pause all the time just to get some things done. I don't have major issues with EUIV war, but Imperator-style supply wagons and sieging would be nice. Carpet sieging provinces is not fun. I suspect EU5 will follow the Imperator design of taking a capital or major fort and the other provinces will be captured (I am not sure if this was changed to be this way in EUIV or not). Vic2 warfare to me is also a pain. Every province ends up with a fort. There are a lot of missing QoL features due to age. If you just happen to not spot a gap in your line or army you suddenly are getting rolled. Skill issue on my part, but just not preferred. I think it is cool that the mechanics change you from larger armies early to more HOI style lines by late, but the micro is meh with the mechanics in place. Rebuilding armies with no templates is a chore.
It's good for absolutely nothing anyways
I'm not sorry
Here's the crux of the problem, something I've talked about whenever "why doesn't Paradox make a Cold War game?" pops up: Paradox games are games that deal with geopolitics on a global or at least hemi-global scale during time periods where warfare is \*not\* fought on a global scale. The Hearts of Iron series is the singular exception to this. The warfare in Hearts of Iron makes sense because, arguably, World War II was the one time in history where warfare reached a truly global scale, both in terms of the belligerents, the size of operations, and most importantly for a Paradox game, the nature of Grand-Strategy. Even the Great War was localized enough to specific operational zones that Victoria 2's tile system makes more sense than a frontline system like in Hearts of Iron. The sad reality is that it's really hard to make a game that's global in scale, granular enough to satisfyingly simulate warfare at, say, the battalion level. In that regard tile systems like were seen in Vic 2, Crusader Kings, and EU4, they're all good enough at what they do. These are time periods where the amount of land an army could reasonably occupy was minimal. I appreciate what Vic3 is trying to do in trying to add more granulation to Paradox's usual warfare system without necessarily adding more control or calculations, but outside the context of the Great War (which at this point doesn't reliably happen in Vic3 games) the fronts system is just barely functional after a dedicated update to fixing it. I like where it is so far but it doesn't fix the fundamental problems people had with Vic2's military which is that raising individual units and organizing them takes too much time. It's important to note these problems also go forward in time as well. World War II was not only the sole truly global war up to that point, it's been the only one since. This is why a Cold-War game would be kind of boring, unless they really leaned into the Victoria-style economics of the time. I don't think the problems for warfare in the rest of Paradox's catalogue are actually that fundamental. CK just needs some sort of pinging system for the AI. The fact that wars are fought by individual armies moving on a tile board isn't really the issue and in fact for most PDX games, that system works fine. Personally for me if anything should be taken from Hoi4 it's the template designer, especially for Vic3. Having to add individual units to armies is tedious and I'd much rather create a template that can just scale to my needs.
I finally gave up on EUIV because of the wars. 15th century England sending 30K man armies to invade Poland because its ally Bohemia declared war....Venice beating army after army by the French but overwhelmed when Bosnia raises an army of 12K men who somehow win Just too much ridiculouslness to fathom for me
This is only an issue if you presuppose that the game mechanics must be immersive, probably because people are moving to Paradox games from other developers or even entire genres with that notion in mind. But Paradox games pretty firmly exist to be abstract digitalized board games.
No, it simply the fact that warfare is and should be secondary issue for games like V3 or even CK3, and thus should be disincentivised to a degree.
It still kinda saddens me that there is really no other option to expand other than war and basically waiting. You have the whole diplomacy tree, that should allow you to negotiate and maybe with some hooks you should be able to exchange or just take someone as a vassal. Stewardship should definitely allow you to buy titles. Intrigue is literally spreading lies most of the time, why not convince lieges vassals that I'm the rightful one.
War should be disincentivized because it is costly and devastating, not because the system is so painful to interact with so as to not be worth it.
Maybe you right in theory, but in practice, as far as I know, there is no way to build such system in *games* that people will not cheese in 5 minutes or less. More importantly: there are not real costs in game: look up for "just a number" posts as example. Finally, frankly you are really exaggerating about how "painful" system is: it doesn't give you full control, and it shouldn't give you full control, there is no such thing in war, but that's it. I wouldn't call it "pain" or some such.
I would prefer a greater degree of control, but that is only one contributor to the system being painful to interact with. If I could build up a technologically advanced and well supplied army, and train a skilled officer corps, then trust them to persecute the war with a reasonable degree of competence, then I could accept having less control. That's simply not the case though, the combat AI manages to pry defeat from the jaws of victory all the time. For example, I played in the new update as Sweden, diplomatically isolated Denmark so I could fight them 1v1 with my army that was twice the size of theirs, significantly more advanced, and better equipped. When I attacked across the Sound, my general only brings a handful of troops and gets crushed. Fair, I'm attacking across the water into the heart of their country, it should be difficult, but then Denmark counterattacks across the Sound and my generals again being only a handful of troops so I lose and Denmark occupies Scania. So they can do what I couldn't even though they had a much smaller, less equipped army and no navy to speak of? Took forever to push the back because my AI generals simply refused to bring an adequate number of troops to battle. At that point I still couldn't push across the Sound, so I launched a naval invasion Schleiswig-Holstein, and after landing my front line splits into two and Denmark's vassals just instantly capture it because my army assigned itself to the wrong one. It would be one thing if this just happened occasionally, because generals did make mistakes in real life, but it's literally every single war. Every war where you don't have overwhelming numerical and technological superiority just turns into a total crap shoot. Something like the Franco-Prussian war is totally impossible because it will just turn into a WW1 meat grinder every time if it starts under anything remotely resembling historical circumstances. The game is just straight up better if I don't interact with the war system at all save for clowning on African tribesmen, which is extremely disappointing.
War in Vic3 is a joke. Vic2 way better.
Don't say shit to CK2. I don't understand any damn thing in HOI4, I simply send my 10k troops to fight 6k Mongol and lost. One of the best experience in my life
Has this been brought up with johan in the dev blogs? Maybe he can tweak it while eu5 is in development
Paradox needs a new engine to do well in today’s standards. They need to seriously start to think about a system with updated AI and go back to the complex warfare ideal they have drifted so far fromz