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Node posted:Who cares about stupid poo poo like military tactics and troops that use guns when you have eighty billion men? Nope I totally I agree, numbers + morale can beat superior quality and leaders.
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Nov 9, 2015 05:51
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What's so great about Defensive, to make it better than any other mil idea group? It always seemed kind of situational to me.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:04
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:What's so great about Defensive, to make it better than any other mil idea group? It always seemed kind of situational to me. I'm not going to argue it's strictly better than Offensive or anything, but it's basically tied for best in the military category and I pick it within the first five groups nearly every game because: +1 Army Tradition is great. +15% Morale is great. +1 Leader Maneuver is good and underrated, there are plenty of military sub-ideas worse than this. -10% Land Maintenance is pretty good. This is the standard for a bonus in this stat, and like most bonuses it gets better the more copies you have of it. If someone tells you that it doesn't matter because you should be making more money than you can spend anyway, they are not good at spending enough money. +33% Reinforce Speed (with implicit +10% from the +1 leader maneuver) is good. This lets you keep up strong armies even in enemy territory. -25% Attrition is decent. It can help keep your manpower high enough that you don't have to worry about starting new conflicts, and lessens your war exhaustion gains. The other bonuses are good in the early game, less so once you aren't fighting fair wars.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:31
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:What's so great about Defensive, to make it better than any other mil idea group? It always seemed kind of situational to me. defensive has +15% morale and an event that gives +15% morale, and -10% maintenence and an event that gives -25% maintenence, which couples with the +defensiveness and +enemy attrition mod makes it good for countries with high base manpower already, i.e. russia Defensive is my go-to mil idea for Russia, because it's not like it gets anything out of quantity anyway e: that is to say, it's my first pick for russia/russian minors, because they don't necessarily need the manpower benefits from quantity in the early game. in my big pre-1.12 russia mega-blob game, I remember taking quantity like 7th or 8th, but it was just icing on the cake and let me dominate 5 fronts instead of 4. but defensive is what won me the early wars. quadrophrenic fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 06:34
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:What's so great about Defensive, to make it better than any other mil idea group? It always seemed kind of situational to me. There is no one true military idea set. Defensive is good because it makes leaders better. Offensive is good for the same reason. And now quality is also sort of on the same page as it also adds +AT. Leaders have a huge impact on winning battles, more so than most other influences. That these 3 idea sets also have the best modifiers for making troops better besides improving your leaders just makes it sort of silly in terms of which idea sets to choose. The rest of the idea sets are more situational, except Naval, which is a bad Maritime that cost military points and is awful and bad. Quantity is a must for colonizers. Aristocratic is ehhhh, but if you really want to go all in on cavalry and you need a diplomat and you really don't want your leaders to be best ever, then I guess it is an okay pick.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:35
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Pellisworth posted:Nope I totally I agree, numbers + morale can beat superior quality and leaders. In my most recent Russia game I had about 400k troops vs Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden in one war. I had about 150k troops more than them, had tech parity, better morale, equal discipline to lithuania and was worse than the others in morale and disc. What I didn't have was god generals. I had one decent two star and the other 2 at 1. I had so many armies that some of them didn't even have generals though I always tried to fight battles where a general was present. It got ugly very quickly for me. I'd win battles by pouring men in, then have my weakened army stack wiped several times. I had a treasury of over 10k from Siberian colonies and Mideastern/Persian trade so I was able to supplement with huge amounts of mercenaries and my manpower recovery was about 3k/mo at that stage in the game. On such a wide front numerical advantages are only important if they're local and I was spread too thin to leverage huge advantages anywhere. They broke through and sieged down several key forts but after I beat them back off of Moscow they were completely drained of manpower while I still had hundreds of thousands in the bank. by the time all this was over my AT had skyrocketed to the point where I was able to recruit equally as good generals. My war score was in the toilet and my war exhaustion was crippling but I'd won. It was extremely difficult and not worth it, but I won.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:36
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Cynic Jester posted:The rest of the idea sets are more situational, except Naval, which is a bad Maritime that cost military points and is awful and bad. I've been wondering lately if there are any exceptions to this. I gave up on my Kongo African Power game, but I was thinking that Naval might have been a viable choice in that game because leader shock/fire and heavy combat ability + the Kongolese high naval forcelimits (and the forcelimit modifier from Exploration) would enable large stacks of heavy ships to crush European forces before they get a chance to land. I never actually got far enough in that game to test it out though, so 
quadrophrenic fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 06:42
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Naval seems focused on just naval combat, which is not at all useful for many nations especially given the way naval combat actually works. It would probably make sense to delete it and have another military idea. Or fix naval combat, but I don't think that's coming soon.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:49
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Quality's got awesome policies but grabbing Innovative makes me feel bad even though the events are pretty good and the policies are even better.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:51
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Eej posted:Quality's got awesome policies but grabbing Innovative makes me feel bad even though the events are pretty good and the policies are even better. I'm always tempted by Innovative but swayed by the thought that "there will come a time where I will have to spend 400 adm on possible advisors +1" all in all, i'm always curious about which countries benefit the most from underpicked idea groups. like sure, naval is bad, but is there a country out there with enough naval potential + hopeless land tech imparity that Naval would be a good idea? Exactly who benefits the most from Plutocratic, at the behest of other mil ideas? what country will, at some point in the timeline, have a position that says "oh man, if only I had Espionage I could be wrecking this poo poo right now"?
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Nov 9, 2015 07:03
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Then there's the secret 7th Military Idea set, "Prussian Ideas".
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Nov 9, 2015 07:12
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Plutocratic rules and I always pick it as my second idea group if I can.
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Nov 9, 2015 07:21
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Plutocratic is like Humanist except good
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Nov 9, 2015 07:27
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quadrophrenic posted:I'm always tempted by Innovative but swayed by the thought that "there will come a time where I will have to spend 400 adm on possible advisors +1" Yeah but Innovative + Quality nets you 20% Infantry Combat and Innovative + Offensive gives you the delicious +10% Siege Ability and +1 Leader Siege so sometimes it's worth it. Also -25% advisor cost can save you a lot of dukes.
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Nov 9, 2015 07:42
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The one thing that still bugs me interface-wise is that there's no way to tell at a glance which of your provinces lack manufactories, since being unable to build one because the province is full shows up the same as being unable to build one because it produces the wrong type of trade good for that manufactory. And manufactories are the one thing that I basically always want to build everywhere.
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Nov 9, 2015 08:13
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Important question, is the Venice to Byz strategy called Byznice
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Nov 9, 2015 08:26
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quadrophrenic posted:I've been wondering lately if there are any exceptions to this. I gave up on my Kongo African Power game, but I was thinking that Naval might have been a viable choice in that game because leader shock/fire and heavy combat ability + the Kongolese high naval forcelimits (and the forcelimit modifier from Exploration) would enable large stacks of heavy ships to crush European forces before they get a chance to land. The big problem with Naval is that Maritime exists. Maritime not only is equal or better for naval combat except at very high levels of Naval Tradition(+2 Maneuver is absurd, +1 Naval Tradition too), it adds more utility(Blockade efficiency+50%Force limit+repair in coasts), has better economical benefits(Thassalocracy+reduced ship cost) and it costs diplomatic instead of military monarch points. There is not a single situation I can picture that would lead me to pick up Naval. Not a one.
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Nov 9, 2015 08:28
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1596 in my Ayutthaya game. I control lots of SE Asia, the Congo and colonies in Australia and Brazil.  Just westernized, but my tech is still 11/12/12, which is super backward. So when Ming and Lan Xang jumped on Dai Viet again, I got called to arms and they kicked my rear end, taking a province off me and most of Vietnam. Bengal just flipped hostile on me too, and they're allied to Bahmanis and Delhi... all I want to do is tech up in peace, and then fight everyone. After the discussion above I regret taking Offensive as my first mil idea, but it will work out eventually. This is like a harder version of my Japan game, where I actually have to worry about the home front all the time, even as I expand worldwide.
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Nov 9, 2015 09:06
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Hah, good lord. Just got to the 1760s as France, and I get an event where I can choose to implement Turgot's economic reforms! Sure, it costs a stability to get the permanent modifier, but check out the effects: +1 National Unrest +10% tax modifier -.10 yearly inflation reduction (that is, .1 yearly inflation gain) How can I turn it down?! (actually, thinking about it, maybe it's in there as an AI trap, to try to encourage France towards the revolution)
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Nov 9, 2015 10:03
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I kinda quit playing around the time Common Sense came out, and I see a new expansion is upcoming and some of the changes sound extremely cool so I'm hoping to dive back in. Had a few questions though: 1. One issue I had when the last expansion came out was that monarch points seemed super-strained with the increased coring costs and development. I basically felt super-taxed playing anything but a Western nation, and even those seemed a lot slower going. Is this still the case? I fully admit I may have not played it enough to make a proper judgement before. It also seemed taking tons of land would be prohibitively difficult, even with one of the superpowers. Is that still the case/was it ever the case in this expansion? 2. How's combat? I know the fort system seemed kinda odd when I first tried playing-it seemed sometimes I couldn't move to adjacent forts and would have to far around to come in from different directions, etc. Again, may have been my not understanding of the situation but it didn't seem to reduce tedium at all. 3. How useful are the buildings? And is it actually viable/possible to build super "tall"? I'm just kinda curious about this one since I know part of the whole development change was to make that more of an option. How about managing large vassals/PUs? It seemed they'd break away a lot easier which I'm not sure I liked. Basically, I got kinda negative first impressions of the big changes, and wonder was it more me just not adjusting to a new playstyle/being bad rather than the systems in the game actually being much more difficult for taking over land/waging war.
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Nov 9, 2015 10:08
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Strudel Man posted:Hah, good lord. Just got to the 1760s as France, and I get an event where I can choose to implement Turgot's economic reforms! Sure, it costs a stability to get the permanent modifier, but check out the effects: It should be -.10 inflation reduction, according to the wiki it is anyway. You sure you caught that right?
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Nov 9, 2015 10:30
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Eej posted:It should be -.10 inflation reduction, according to the wiki it is anyway. You sure you caught that right? edit: Hm, I see it's in green on the wiki. But checking the source, it's code:code:Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 10:52
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alansmithee posted:I kinda quit playing around the time Common Sense came out, and I see a new expansion is upcoming and some of the changes sound extremely cool so I'm hoping to dive back in. Had a few questions though: 1. If you play as a fast-expanding Eastern Empire like the Timurids, Mamluks, or Bahamanis you'll likely spend a crap-load of admin points coring things and end up very far behind. You can mitigate this with things like coring cost reductions in National Ideas or the Administrative group. Some countries have access to government types or events that can get you better quality monarchs. Smaller countries don't have as much of a problem with this and can usually Westernize quickly so long as they get to a Western neighbor. 2. Fort's Zone of Control currently are a little unpredictable, especially in areas where a fort is on the border adjacent to enemy or neutral territory where enemies have access. Dev Diaries for the next expansion have listed changes to this and forts will exert Zone of Control on all adjacent territory, also occupied forts will have ZOC which they don't now. 3. Buildings are very useful, but building tall is a very niche strategy that is almost always less optimal than painting the map. Buildings are strong but are limited by development, this is fine because most buildings give multipliers to gains from base development and are much stronger in high development provinces anyways. Also they don't cost monarch points anymore so they're an excellent gold-dump once you get a strong economy going.
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Nov 9, 2015 11:31
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:1596 in my Ayutthaya game. I control lots of SE Asia, the Congo and colonies in Australia and Brazil. I know I ask this a lot, but what idea group should I take? It's 1614 and I have Exploration, Humanist, and Offensive filled out. Still pretty behind in tech, so I was thinking about Innovative, and I'm not blobbing that much but Quantity and Admin would still be nice for more dudes and more mercs. Also Diplomatic could be useful for making more friends? Vivian Darkbloom fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 12:31
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Who is up for some border gore? It only took about a 100 years, but I managed to link up my lands so I don't have to bother with military access. Provence is pretty fun to play as, you get +1 dip rep to start with and one of your NIs are +2 dip relations. I decided to join the HRE early on and took influence ideas so I have 7 relation slots and +5 dip rep. Of course, France fell under a PU with England and while I was given the option of contesting it I didn't feel up to fighting England, Austria and Sweden. In the early game I was allied to and BFFs with France and we were beating up Burgundy. Then the Burgundian inheritance happened (Hesse had just become emperor, so they got huge) and France flipped from friendly to hostile instantly. If they weren't under the PU I would have eaten bigger chunks of them already.
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Nov 9, 2015 13:29
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Sharzak posted:They broke through and sieged down several key forts but after I beat them back off of Moscow they were completely drained of manpower while I still had hundreds of thousands in the bank. by the time all this was over my AT had skyrocketed to the point where I was able to recruit equally as good generals. My war score was in the toilet and my war exhaustion was crippling but I'd won. It was extremely difficult and not worth it, but I won. WW2.txt
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Nov 9, 2015 14:10
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I once played a game with Songhai where I went for innovative early, and soon after westernizing got the event "liberte etc", turning my research costs into sub 100 monarch points for several jumps.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:31
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Nov 9, 2015 15:38
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Speaking of Songhai, do any of the West-African states have anything interesting in terms of events and mechanics? East Africa has Mutapa's infinity gold mines and Ethiopia is the favorite of gamblers everywhere, but the other side of the continent has always just seemed like so much map filler, which is a shame.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:48
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Songhai starts getting really powerful events once they take Timbuktu. Something like -20% to both idea cost and tech cost for the rest of your ruler's life the biggest of them
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Nov 9, 2015 16:04
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I enjoyed my Air run (partly because I could release Earth, Water and Fire as client states after tech 22 or whatever  ).
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Nov 9, 2015 16:06
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Sharzak posted:In my most recent Russia game I had about 400k troops vs Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Sweden in one war. I had about 150k troops more than them, had tech parity, better morale, equal discipline to lithuania and was worse than the others in morale and disc. This matches up with the Russia game I just finished, where I had 1.5 million men under arms. I triggered the Revolution and attacked Scandinavia for fun in the last decade; by the time I won, my manpower pool had shrunk by eight hundred thousand men. To be fair, I took Defensive, Quantity and Aristocratic for my military ideas to get the decent reserve achievement, so my armies sucked. As an aside, for the last 150 years or so, the majority of my income wasn't tax, production or trade, but purely the 'Trade Company Booming' event, which would go off about 6-7 times a year for 2000 ducats each 
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Nov 9, 2015 16:16
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Cynic Jester posted:The big problem with Naval is that Maritime exists. Maritime not only is equal or better for naval combat except at very high levels of Naval Tradition(+2 Maneuver is absurd, +1 Naval Tradition too), it adds more utility(Blockade efficiency+50%Force limit+repair in coasts), has better economical benefits(Thassalocracy+reduced ship cost) and it costs diplomatic instead of military monarch points. There is not a single situation I can picture that would lead me to pick up Naval. Not a one. Naval is useful for multiplayer. 10%+ ship durability is a huge bonus that'll singlehandedly decide lots of battles, and the other bonuses it gives add up too. In singleplayer though where you can pretty much always outnumber the combined fleets of the entire world 3 to 1 if you set your mind on it yes it seems pretty pointless.
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Nov 9, 2015 16:18
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Allyn posted:Songhai starts getting really powerful events once they take Timbuktu. Something like -20% to both idea cost and tech cost for the rest of your ruler's life the biggest of them I hate those "for the rest of your ruler's life" modifiers, I always get them close to my rulers death, and I've never managed to take advantage of any tech/idea cost discounts from those modifiers. It'd be better if they lasted 10 years or something. Literally my most recent screenshot:  -10% tech/idea cost discount for the rest of my 69 year old rulers life... 
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Nov 9, 2015 17:03
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This war is starting to swing my way:  What would be the peace deal to ensure that the Commonwealth does not form? My AE is low. I don't have that much interest in taking land, my interests lie mostly to the west. I'm pretty broken, my military is 90% mercs and my WE is high and getting higher, but I don't mind stretching the war out and breaking Poland so long as it ensures that Poland stays broken, at least long enough for me to form Prussia. I'm happy to stay peaceful for the next ten years. My manpower has been 0 for almost the whole campaign so far. My next step is to vassalize Brandenburg, but I can put that on hold long enough for my manpower to recover. Edit: Poland and lith have no PU, btw. Honestly, would annul treaties with Lithuania be enough to do it? quadrophrenic fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 17:38
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Deport The Irish posted:Speaking of Songhai, do any of the West-African states have anything interesting in terms of events and mechanics? East Africa has Mutapa's infinity gold mines and Ethiopia is the favorite of gamblers everywhere, but the other side of the continent has always just seemed like so much map filler, which is a shame. Funny you should say that, I've been playing an Ethiopia game where everything came up Milhouse: - I inherited Adolia without even an interim PU out of nowhere. - Oman ate Yemen, but separatists brought Yemen back, so I proceeded to immediately gobble up the COT and vassalize them before they could ally anyone. - Hejaz had a brainfart and abandoned their alliance with the Mamluks, so I have Conquest of Mecca now. And finally: - I got military aid from Portugal against the Mamluks just as they were having a war with an already crippled OE (meaning Mamluk armies were stuck in Anatolia), and I'd just allied Qara Quynlu, who have basically taken the traditional OE spot as the big kid on the block, but they hate the Mamluks so they like me. I grabbed a big chunk of Egypt off them, peaced out as military aid expired, and hope to be able to go back for seconds later. It's 1544. The worst that's happened to me was when most of Arabia erupted into a separatist revolt and wiped out a stack. I think next stop is the infinity gold mines and figuring out a way to westernize. Edit: Here's a screenshot 
Sulphagnist fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 17:59
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quadrophrenic posted:This war is starting to swing my way: They need to have Danzig, Krakow, and Marienburg as a core to form the Commonwealth, so if you can take either of those from them, or keep either of those from them, they can't form the Commonwealth. Edit: Them annulling treaties would just expire when the peace treaty was over. If you can beat their prestige down to less than zero they won't be able to keep any PU either. Tsyni fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Nov 9, 2015 |
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Nov 9, 2015 18:01
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Tsyni posted:They need to have Danzig Wait what Well they sure as poo poo ain't getting that I'm thinking release mazovia might work. Vassalize their capital should keep them from getting up to any funny stuff.
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Nov 9, 2015 18:07
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quadrophrenic posted:Wait what Yep keeping Mazovia around would work too.
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Nov 9, 2015 18:12
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The AI cannot form the Commonwealth unless Poland and Lithuania are in a personal union of some kind, and forming that union by decision requires Lithuania being ruled by Kazimierz Jagiellon and Poland to be in an interregnum (i.e. having a regency and no heir). If they haven't formed a union by 1470 (or if the union already broke by that point) then you should be in the clear regardless of who owns which provinces, unless one of them gets lucky enough to get a PU the normal, random, way.
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Nov 9, 2015 18:30
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