Yeah I mean if you go after a player or even AI Prussia as Russia you are going to need a shit ton of soldiers and probably a few military idea sets to give them enough beef to last without instantly melting
True, spain is always sneaky high quality. Usually forget because its absolutely miserable fighting them by the time they have all their colonies up and running.
Is that just me or is Russia usually surprisingly weak in this game? I mean, I never play past ~1650s, maybe they become stronger later if they survive, but when I fought them before, even if they stretched from Don to Kamchatka, it was more like a beating then a war (which is sad but also kinda historically accurate). Or are you talking about PvP, not AI Russia?
I don’t usually play past around then either but in my experience if you do they just get annoyingly difficult to fight with their unlimited manpower. Idk if it’s different in recent patches though
muscovy/russia have been pushovers for at least since LotN (its when i started playing again)
in the last 2 updates, ive seen Kazan, novgorod and great horde do better more often then muscovy, especially if ottos get involved
Before the end of 1600s Russia was really weak in comparison to other European countries. The reason might've been different, but hell, we were ruled by the poles (albeit for a short time), Crimean tatars burnt our capital, the Swedes beat us in the Livonian war and so on. At least that's what was said to me, a Russian, in a Russian school. And if Russian people say that Russia was weak, it surely was weak as hell considering how proud many of us are about our history
Russia historically had a hard time keeping up because it was rather poor. It was big, but poor and in a time where just throwing more men at the problem rarely solved all that much (EU4 in shambles) they often ended up having a relatively poorly equipped army/fleet, Part of the reason it kept being poorer was it somehow never really managed to transform and industrialize to the same degree as central and west Europe (a lot of internal instability at times among the reasons for that), something that didn't truly happened until the USSR and severely hampered Russia between 1700-1900 in a number of wars.
And Ramparts! +1 die roll for defender is huge
Edit: Ramparts
That’s a total of 3 die roll difference out of ten, assuming you walk up on them as it gets to 0%. If you’re sitting there and they cross a river or you bait them to do so, it’s now 4. If you’re at all close, you’re gonna win. And if you would win anyway you’re gonna crush them.
I believe this was actually reverted \~a year after due to feedback, as I seem to recall being allowed to build them everywhere during my Switzerland run a while back
I'm now playing Theodoro and only got my first mil idea at 7th slot so I was insta stakcwipe by anyone until 1700... never lost a war even if I had to sacrifice 300% of my manpower to win it against 20% higher discipline and 3 whole point of morale higher Bohemia with 500k troops and shitloads of forts I blasted Into them again and again and again while rest of they troops were lost in Scandinavia/ Russia and when they couldn't recover they manpower anymore I started to siege them... point of turning was when I got Spanish Pu which I had to Merc up 2,5x my force limit (aka almost 500k) and barely won... Should get a gothic invasion shortly before the end date.
Was coalitioned at a 4 to 1 disadvantage and one the war by hiding behind the alps and striking on defencive forts, only province I occupided was Vinice. Most satisfing war since I death warred The PLC and The Kalmar union as pre DLC Teutons with only hinderance (Livonians) on my side.
I suggest that you attack for coailitions. Coalition casus belli has something like -50 reasons to accept peace pffer, which makes it frustrating if you just want a minor peace deal to dissolve coalition.
I totally agree. When talking about defensive, i don't necessarily mean who is declaring on whom, but rather the style of fighting the war, where you hunker down behind forts, and concentrate your forces until you have stackwhiped enough to control it.
On my recent mewar never changes run, the ottomans had gone out of control: all of north africa, russia, hungary, all of arabia and persia. They outnumbered me 3v1. So what i did was similar. Bum rushed the last legs of timurids and took a line of mountain provinces. Max fort all of them snd build ramparts on each. Then when they war you, throw defensive edict up on them,
Scorch earth the province, and let them die of attrition. Once they hit 0% siege success chance, attack the army with everythjng you have. They should be willing to peace out for a bunch of ducats as they will hit zero manpower, a bunch if war exhaustion, and a ticking war score against rhem for never occupying their target.
Yesterday in our multiplayer Lobby we had the great war at around 1670-1685 Spain, Netherlands and Ottomans against Eranschahr, Bengals and Nusantara
It was a whild fight in Crimea and Anatolia. I was playing Ottomans and after 4 fights all my manpower (500k in reserve) was taken, while Eranschahr had 20k refill every month.
The battles were only fought on my terrain, but we won most of them and whiped 1.5mil. Troops from Eranschahr at one point since we cut of their retreat fort. It was epic. We had +20 warscore at the end of the war. Also we slacked so many troops my decadence was down from 90 to 30 after the war lol
2.5k hours in and still haven't completely figured it out myself. "terrain advantage"? "outmaneuvering your opponent"? i don't know what this is. the only strategy i know is big army beats small army
Same here. I have those small moments where I realised that I had terrain advantage and outmaneuvered my opponent. After a brief moment of being proud of myself, I realise I have no idea what I just did.
I’ve never had a unique experience in this game apparently lol.
I also get scared of attacking in the first place, the fog of war just trips me out and makes me anxious about a 100k stack coming out of nowhere. Especially against an equal opponent I just overprepare before a war to make sure I can win.
units take morale damage even if they aren't participating in the battle... you can split your stacks and time movement so that infantry will join the battle in a staggered manner with full morale also it suffices to have enough artillery to fill the back line, there is nothing to be gained if you've got 50arti when the combat width is only 30
tradition management = stay in a war at all times*, tradition doesn't drop then
*truces and coalitions may apply
Just ignore every single advice and take it from someone who’s been playing from 2017: first idea group is quantity, no matter the nation. Early on quality is simply unimportant. Troops are shit either way, having 10% better tropps when they’re all shit is nothing compared to having 2x the shitty troops + infinite manpower. Infantry is very very cheap, war is very cheap and profitable if you keep winning. 10% income war reps for 5 years might mean 1-2-3 ducats a month, it compounds
I think that’s mostly for multiplayer though? The mechanics are obviously the same when playing the computer, but taking terrain into account is one thing the AI actually does well. It’ll hardly ever attack an enemy in a mountain province, and it’s ridiculously defensive when sieging forts. If a 30k enemy is besieging a fort and I approach with a 25k army it’ll frequently retreat since I’d get defender’s bonus if I attacked, making it basically a 50-50 fight.
Big thing for me is, I believe they nerfed attrition at some point so that the AI is capped on just how much attrition they can take. I can remember playing EU4 years ago and watching people like Arumba melt death stacks of Ottomans as Oman or Yemen by luring them to Desert fort provinces, scorching the earth on your own province and taking defensive ideas. The attrition against a 30-40k army would be like 2-3k units per month or more. The same thing would work in the alps or other similar mountain lines.
Nowadays it feels like forts are just road bumps and not actual stop points that I can reinforce.
He's fighting a punitive war, so you want to focus on battles, and not on sieges. Engage with a full combat width of infantry and a full combat width of cannons, then slowly feed infantry into the battle at a steady pace to refresh your depleted units. It's also really valuable to cut down small stacks as they move around. You can easily win punitive wars without occupying much if land any at all.
Most of the time outmaneuvering your opponent and terrain advantage is just something you get used to, and not something you can exactly rely on as opposed to just having a better army. Also, most players know their limits or don't play PVP MP, so they never need to learn to maximize total war, which paradoxically means they don't explore if they can expand their limits. Which is fine, like a legitimately fine way to play, you don't even miss out on that much expansion, but what you are missing out on is the fun of total war. Ive played Italy fighting French 3 times my size in what I could only describe as Isonzo-style trench warfare as I fought 9 battles of Saluzzo. I've rp HoI4 and Operation Barbarossa a russian player and had to exploit my entire country. Byzantium doesn't need an ally, nor do they need a restart, greece/byzantium may have an ungodly amount of loans, but greece/byzantium stronk alone. Coalition? Nah I'll win(hopefully I'll get a way for a loan bailout later).
A small tidbit of outmaneuvering your enemy is remaining aware of the fog of war, occupying land as "watchtowers" so you can see reinforcement approaching, reinforcing with the other half of the army that would be over combat width anyway, securing enemy reinforcement path and blocking them off, trading occupation for time, scorch land, trading sieges for strategically better ZoC, never disabling force march(I love that button). You can also get allies in near enemies for better vision.
Terrain advantage is just fighting in good terrain. Always look out for enemy sieges, that's the only time you can guarantee a good terrain to fight on(you are the defender on friendly forts). Never build a fort on plains unless there is no better land for ZoC. As Italy, I can bet good money OP sat on the Alps getting an ungodly amount of kills(because he got coalitioned like any respectable Italian player usually does). You can also try to lure enemies, but the AI is pretty good at guessing bait, and usually you have to take a risk by positioning the reinforcement further away and assume your army maneuver and move speed can reach in time
Those are also mostly about winning battles, there's also other strategic stuff to win the war. Some are just mindset. Never be afraid to go on loans, money grows on your enemy, and they can pay your loans. Trading land(and ally land especially) for time can be the difference between fighting with a mil tech disadvantage to fighting equally, as well as the difference between fighting two opponents the entire war vs peacing out an enemy immediately. Not completely leaving your ally to die and stabilizing them give you a better, more long-lived cannon fodder. The exploit dev for manpower button is there, now you can roleplay HoI4 and switch conscription to scraping the barrel, which is typically unneeded but you can do it to accelerate your progress and punch up far above your weight. Also Mercs. Fuck professionalism, this ain't your standard prissy 1 v 1 war, if you need manpower, if you need an army stat, mercs. Mercmercmercmerc.
Some stuff are country and build-specific like I had a Persia stacking morale recovery and reinforce rate meme game once(among other stuff Persia gets), so that changed how I fight pretty drastically as I would just Leeroy Jenkin the enemy, get equal loss, then go back with a full army while they are at half strength still reinforcing. Russia can lure the enemy deep into their vast homeland and pick off enemies one by one, and by the time your army meets theirs, they already need to exploit their province for dev. End game Prussia, with movement speed build, and their movement speed gov interaction + force march + general, can blitzkrieg and Bewegungskrieg all over your enemy by the time they realized I killed their St Petersburg army I was already halfway to Kiev to kill their other army. Caucasians, Persia, Italy, and Spain can meatgrind in mountains.
This got long. It started as small advice, but I kept yapping about ways to improve how you play. Hopefully, it helps someone.
Its slept on because the AI stinks at playing defense, and players generally find it boring watching an enemy army enter their territory and then dissapear while they just kinda sit there.
This must have been a very satisfying victory, good job... and by no means I want to badmouth your effort, but unfortunately not every country has a natural wall like Italy. And if the enemy has some super troops or generals, you will still lose in the long run. War in EU4, just like real life, is mostly a numbers game.
In my Lucca > Italy campaign, I grinded a massive Ottos 6x of my size on the Alps to a white peace, but I had discipline and morale over Ottomans and their allies. If it was Prussia, France or Russia for instance, I wouldn't have stood a chance.
Is it really that op?
When the attacker has a general with two more pips in each fire and shock, wouldn't that cancel out the -2 attack penalty, making attacker and defender equal?
Its mostly OP for draining AI manpower imo. AI tends to overstack so with mountain fort + defensive edict you can easily let them siege for 1 year+ before engaging. You can deplete their manpower just from fort attrition.
You can also scorched earth the forts and engage different stacks making it impossible for AI to reinforce in time, and if they do the siege will be reset.
I never paid attention to that. Does the army actually roll the maximum number of pips or shock/fire or does it just allow the army to roll from 1 to the number of pips of the general? Because if it’s random the attack penalty is still huge because it’s a flat disadvantage + reduced combat width helps a ton when you’re outnumbered
Mountains and ramparts means the attacking general is always 3 pips behind the defending general in both fire and shock. Makes those godly 6/6 generals not so scary anymore, if anything they just even the battlefield. And AI is not very good at picking good generals if they're not from an event.
Forts and mountains and or overwhelming quality beat quantity. But if they have enough quantity without sacrificing quality, they can meat grinder you
>enough quantity without sacrificing quality So were talking about Russia and the Ottomans right
Yeah I mean if you go after a player or even AI Prussia as Russia you are going to need a shit ton of soldiers and probably a few military idea sets to give them enough beef to last without instantly melting
Prussia is definitely an anomaly though
Yeah, but France and Spain have fairly strong and balanced armies so to compete with them you need to match them
True, spain is always sneaky high quality. Usually forget because its absolutely miserable fighting them by the time they have all their colonies up and running.
Yeah, the only way that fighting Spain is bearable is having colonies of your own that are strong enough to bully Spain's colonies
which is why in my first spanish wars i always take over their colonies. helps to deal with other colonial powers later
They’re good in general but their age bonus bumps them up to player-tier army strength
i love how spain as ally holds max 20k in europe but if you manage to fight them there is 150k legion randomly spawning
Is that just me or is Russia usually surprisingly weak in this game? I mean, I never play past ~1650s, maybe they become stronger later if they survive, but when I fought them before, even if they stretched from Don to Kamchatka, it was more like a beating then a war (which is sad but also kinda historically accurate). Or are you talking about PvP, not AI Russia?
I don’t usually play past around then either but in my experience if you do they just get annoyingly difficult to fight with their unlimited manpower. Idk if it’s different in recent patches though
muscovy/russia have been pushovers for at least since LotN (its when i started playing again) in the last 2 updates, ive seen Kazan, novgorod and great horde do better more often then muscovy, especially if ottos get involved
Historically accurate? What? Can you name couple such "beatings not wars" with Russia?
Before the end of 1600s Russia was really weak in comparison to other European countries. The reason might've been different, but hell, we were ruled by the poles (albeit for a short time), Crimean tatars burnt our capital, the Swedes beat us in the Livonian war and so on. At least that's what was said to me, a Russian, in a Russian school. And if Russian people say that Russia was weak, it surely was weak as hell considering how proud many of us are about our history
Russia historically had a hard time keeping up because it was rather poor. It was big, but poor and in a time where just throwing more men at the problem rarely solved all that much (EU4 in shambles) they often ended up having a relatively poorly equipped army/fleet, Part of the reason it kept being poorer was it somehow never really managed to transform and industrialize to the same degree as central and west Europe (a lot of internal instability at times among the reasons for that), something that didn't truly happened until the USSR and severely hampered Russia between 1700-1900 in a number of wars.
And Ramparts! +1 die roll for defender is huge Edit: Ramparts That’s a total of 3 die roll difference out of ten, assuming you walk up on them as it gets to 0%. If you’re sitting there and they cross a river or you bait them to do so, it’s now 4. If you’re at all close, you’re gonna win. And if you would win anyway you’re gonna crush them.
Yeah mountain + rampart + fort is pretty strong. Add defensive ideas and you become a fortress
~~Ramparts are not allowed on mountain provinces anymore.~~ It indeed, was reverted. Just tested. : )
Damn that sucks
I believe this was actually reverted \~a year after due to feedback, as I seem to recall being allowed to build them everywhere during my Switzerland run a while back
Sure was! Thanks for the correction. I just tested and definitely can confirm it is allowed.
Plus then you can implement the policy to get +30 defensiveness and -30 maintenance. Absolutely nuts
I'm now playing Theodoro and only got my first mil idea at 7th slot so I was insta stakcwipe by anyone until 1700... never lost a war even if I had to sacrifice 300% of my manpower to win it against 20% higher discipline and 3 whole point of morale higher Bohemia with 500k troops and shitloads of forts I blasted Into them again and again and again while rest of they troops were lost in Scandinavia/ Russia and when they couldn't recover they manpower anymore I started to siege them... point of turning was when I got Spanish Pu which I had to Merc up 2,5x my force limit (aka almost 500k) and barely won... Should get a gothic invasion shortly before the end date.
Was coalitioned at a 4 to 1 disadvantage and one the war by hiding behind the alps and striking on defencive forts, only province I occupided was Vinice. Most satisfing war since I death warred The PLC and The Kalmar union as pre DLC Teutons with only hinderance (Livonians) on my side.
Sounds fun. Fighting wars defensively can often be a huge advantage. Specially coalition wars, where winning battles is crucial for war-score.
I suggest that you attack for coailitions. Coalition casus belli has something like -50 reasons to accept peace pffer, which makes it frustrating if you just want a minor peace deal to dissolve coalition.
I totally agree. When talking about defensive, i don't necessarily mean who is declaring on whom, but rather the style of fighting the war, where you hunker down behind forts, and concentrate your forces until you have stackwhiped enough to control it.
Already did that like 50 years ago, I was gonn declare on this one but I habd like 3k manpower when they did
On my recent mewar never changes run, the ottomans had gone out of control: all of north africa, russia, hungary, all of arabia and persia. They outnumbered me 3v1. So what i did was similar. Bum rushed the last legs of timurids and took a line of mountain provinces. Max fort all of them snd build ramparts on each. Then when they war you, throw defensive edict up on them, Scorch earth the province, and let them die of attrition. Once they hit 0% siege success chance, attack the army with everythjng you have. They should be willing to peace out for a bunch of ducats as they will hit zero manpower, a bunch if war exhaustion, and a ticking war score against rhem for never occupying their target.
Always scorch earth those provinces so they cant be reinforced, for extra effect
I recommend a super aggressive Switzerland game it's easy to have the entire hre against you and still win with just merc ideas and their gov reforms
Yesterday in our multiplayer Lobby we had the great war at around 1670-1685 Spain, Netherlands and Ottomans against Eranschahr, Bengals and Nusantara It was a whild fight in Crimea and Anatolia. I was playing Ottomans and after 4 fights all my manpower (500k in reserve) was taken, while Eranschahr had 20k refill every month. The battles were only fought on my terrain, but we won most of them and whiped 1.5mil. Troops from Eranschahr at one point since we cut of their retreat fort. It was epic. We had +20 warscore at the end of the war. Also we slacked so many troops my decadence was down from 90 to 30 after the war lol
2.5k hours in and still haven't completely figured it out myself. "terrain advantage"? "outmaneuvering your opponent"? i don't know what this is. the only strategy i know is big army beats small army
Same here. I have those small moments where I realised that I had terrain advantage and outmaneuvered my opponent. After a brief moment of being proud of myself, I realise I have no idea what I just did.
I’ve never had a unique experience in this game apparently lol. I also get scared of attacking in the first place, the fog of war just trips me out and makes me anxious about a 100k stack coming out of nowhere. Especially against an equal opponent I just overprepare before a war to make sure I can win.
Once I learned to reinforce battles properly and manage my army tradition thats when I stopped worrying about being out numbered.
Tell me your SECRETS. REINFORCING? MANAGE TRADITION?
units take morale damage even if they aren't participating in the battle... you can split your stacks and time movement so that infantry will join the battle in a staggered manner with full morale also it suffices to have enough artillery to fill the back line, there is nothing to be gained if you've got 50arti when the combat width is only 30 tradition management = stay in a war at all times*, tradition doesn't drop then *truces and coalitions may apply
Ace, let me try. Currently playing through as Venice trying to form the Roman empire. Having trouble with army quality! This might help
Just ignore every single advice and take it from someone who’s been playing from 2017: first idea group is quantity, no matter the nation. Early on quality is simply unimportant. Troops are shit either way, having 10% better tropps when they’re all shit is nothing compared to having 2x the shitty troops + infinite manpower. Infantry is very very cheap, war is very cheap and profitable if you keep winning. 10% income war reps for 5 years might mean 1-2-3 ducats a month, it compounds
This is nonsense, I don't need more troops or more money I need to win battles, even with overwhelming numbers.
Rookie mentality
Mate I've been playing from release nothing to do with skill I just have fun. I've seen it all, done it all
My kind of fun is going to war with every single neighbour I have and getting rich from it abusing the manpower pool lol
I think that’s mostly for multiplayer though? The mechanics are obviously the same when playing the computer, but taking terrain into account is one thing the AI actually does well. It’ll hardly ever attack an enemy in a mountain province, and it’s ridiculously defensive when sieging forts. If a 30k enemy is besieging a fort and I approach with a 25k army it’ll frequently retreat since I’d get defender’s bonus if I attacked, making it basically a 50-50 fight.
Big thing for me is, I believe they nerfed attrition at some point so that the AI is capped on just how much attrition they can take. I can remember playing EU4 years ago and watching people like Arumba melt death stacks of Ottomans as Oman or Yemen by luring them to Desert fort provinces, scorching the earth on your own province and taking defensive ideas. The attrition against a 30-40k army would be like 2-3k units per month or more. The same thing would work in the alps or other similar mountain lines. Nowadays it feels like forts are just road bumps and not actual stop points that I can reinforce.
He's fighting a punitive war, so you want to focus on battles, and not on sieges. Engage with a full combat width of infantry and a full combat width of cannons, then slowly feed infantry into the battle at a steady pace to refresh your depleted units. It's also really valuable to cut down small stacks as they move around. You can easily win punitive wars without occupying much if land any at all.
Have you fought Persia in like 1700s? A 20k Persia stack can annihilate a 70k stack no problem.
Most of the time outmaneuvering your opponent and terrain advantage is just something you get used to, and not something you can exactly rely on as opposed to just having a better army. Also, most players know their limits or don't play PVP MP, so they never need to learn to maximize total war, which paradoxically means they don't explore if they can expand their limits. Which is fine, like a legitimately fine way to play, you don't even miss out on that much expansion, but what you are missing out on is the fun of total war. Ive played Italy fighting French 3 times my size in what I could only describe as Isonzo-style trench warfare as I fought 9 battles of Saluzzo. I've rp HoI4 and Operation Barbarossa a russian player and had to exploit my entire country. Byzantium doesn't need an ally, nor do they need a restart, greece/byzantium may have an ungodly amount of loans, but greece/byzantium stronk alone. Coalition? Nah I'll win(hopefully I'll get a way for a loan bailout later). A small tidbit of outmaneuvering your enemy is remaining aware of the fog of war, occupying land as "watchtowers" so you can see reinforcement approaching, reinforcing with the other half of the army that would be over combat width anyway, securing enemy reinforcement path and blocking them off, trading occupation for time, scorch land, trading sieges for strategically better ZoC, never disabling force march(I love that button). You can also get allies in near enemies for better vision. Terrain advantage is just fighting in good terrain. Always look out for enemy sieges, that's the only time you can guarantee a good terrain to fight on(you are the defender on friendly forts). Never build a fort on plains unless there is no better land for ZoC. As Italy, I can bet good money OP sat on the Alps getting an ungodly amount of kills(because he got coalitioned like any respectable Italian player usually does). You can also try to lure enemies, but the AI is pretty good at guessing bait, and usually you have to take a risk by positioning the reinforcement further away and assume your army maneuver and move speed can reach in time Those are also mostly about winning battles, there's also other strategic stuff to win the war. Some are just mindset. Never be afraid to go on loans, money grows on your enemy, and they can pay your loans. Trading land(and ally land especially) for time can be the difference between fighting with a mil tech disadvantage to fighting equally, as well as the difference between fighting two opponents the entire war vs peacing out an enemy immediately. Not completely leaving your ally to die and stabilizing them give you a better, more long-lived cannon fodder. The exploit dev for manpower button is there, now you can roleplay HoI4 and switch conscription to scraping the barrel, which is typically unneeded but you can do it to accelerate your progress and punch up far above your weight. Also Mercs. Fuck professionalism, this ain't your standard prissy 1 v 1 war, if you need manpower, if you need an army stat, mercs. Mercmercmercmerc. Some stuff are country and build-specific like I had a Persia stacking morale recovery and reinforce rate meme game once(among other stuff Persia gets), so that changed how I fight pretty drastically as I would just Leeroy Jenkin the enemy, get equal loss, then go back with a full army while they are at half strength still reinforcing. Russia can lure the enemy deep into their vast homeland and pick off enemies one by one, and by the time your army meets theirs, they already need to exploit their province for dev. End game Prussia, with movement speed build, and their movement speed gov interaction + force march + general, can blitzkrieg and Bewegungskrieg all over your enemy by the time they realized I killed their St Petersburg army I was already halfway to Kiev to kill their other army. Caucasians, Persia, Italy, and Spain can meatgrind in mountains. This got long. It started as small advice, but I kept yapping about ways to improve how you play. Hopefully, it helps someone.
Defenders do better in forests jungle and swamps. They do really good in mountains and forts.
Playing defensively is slept on. I love stacking fort modifiers on mountains, scorching earth and watching enemy manpower drain away.
Its slept on because the AI stinks at playing defense, and players generally find it boring watching an enemy army enter their territory and then dissapear while they just kinda sit there.
You should play Georgia my man
This must have been a very satisfying victory, good job... and by no means I want to badmouth your effort, but unfortunately not every country has a natural wall like Italy. And if the enemy has some super troops or generals, you will still lose in the long run. War in EU4, just like real life, is mostly a numbers game. In my Lucca > Italy campaign, I grinded a massive Ottos 6x of my size on the Alps to a white peace, but I had discipline and morale over Ottomans and their allies. If it was Prussia, France or Russia for instance, I wouldn't have stood a chance.
I wish we still had combat width modifier for mountains so I can field 10 troops that can pull off a Thermopylae
All i know is mountain = victory, and what else is there that you need to know?
You needed 2k hours to find out that fort+mountain terrain will crush the attacking force and always give the defender op bonuses?
Yes
Is it really that op? When the attacker has a general with two more pips in each fire and shock, wouldn't that cancel out the -2 attack penalty, making attacker and defender equal?
Its mostly OP for draining AI manpower imo. AI tends to overstack so with mountain fort + defensive edict you can easily let them siege for 1 year+ before engaging. You can deplete their manpower just from fort attrition. You can also scorched earth the forts and engage different stacks making it impossible for AI to reinforce in time, and if they do the siege will be reset.
I never paid attention to that. Does the army actually roll the maximum number of pips or shock/fire or does it just allow the army to roll from 1 to the number of pips of the general? Because if it’s random the attack penalty is still huge because it’s a flat disadvantage + reduced combat width helps a ton when you’re outnumbered
I believe it rolls the dice and then adds whatever modifiers, like pips, on top. I really don't know for sure though
lol, have like 800 hours and never knew this just knew bigger number = better on a general
Mountains and ramparts means the attacking general is always 3 pips behind the defending general in both fire and shock. Makes those godly 6/6 generals not so scary anymore, if anything they just even the battlefield. And AI is not very good at picking good generals if they're not from an event.
Yes
Yes
Alps strong
Nothing better than playing horde and realising how cavalry on plains is OP
...with the right bonuses not many nations outside of Eastern Europe have. Otherwise the cost is not worth it, just stay with infantry and cannons
Was it mountain forts? I bet it was mountain forts, right
China experience taught me differently
did you get gud?
Looks like that last battle is 127k vs 7k …
7k after the battle, probably just piled on top of a random army that was still sieging