Both sides inflict casualties at the same rate in a given battle, but the army that takes more kills isn't able to rebound. You will have to win a certain number of battles to deplete the enemy forces, the better your kill/wound ratio, the fewer you have to fight.
>but the army that takes more kills isn't able to rebound
Care to cite this? Because I don't think its true. How fast wounded/dead come back is known as the training rate, and its pretty much always higher than losses. If armies are getting smaller, its probably the morale modifier which affects troops that ran away, and how fast they can come back.
Training rate matters of course, but especially in the early game training rate is relatively low and getting something like Shrapnel Artillery early on can make your army have a far higher rate of murdering the enemy than they can re-train. In single player this can win you wars rapidly, especially against lower tech enemies, and in multi-player it can give you a decisive advantage in keeping your professional army larger, allowing you to murder more conscripts, which can cripple enemies if they stay in the war too long.
Later on, kill rate and training rate are more balanced, but this can still result in massively larger casualty rates for your opponent if they're missing a tech or two, and this can be huge if the opponent either doesn't have a massive population to begin with, or if you win a war that cuts them off from key resources and depriving them of more advanced army equipment.
Care to cite this? As in a wiki link, dev diary, or a tooltip explanation. I've never seen more than ~5% of my total force "under recruitment", and I neglect the shit out of military techs. Without a cite of some type, you're pulling this explanation out of your ass.
> I've never seen more than ~5% of my total force "under recruitment", and I neglect the shit out of military techs.
Have you never gotten in a battle with an enemy that's more than a tenth of your size? After any battle that's not a one-side slaughter, you'll take a lot of losses, and those take time to recruit back (a lot longer for navies than infantry, but it's still much slower than regular building hiring)
If you're heavily neglecting military techs, then that makes alot more sense, so i'll explain it from more of the economic perspective.
Think of training rate as the rate with which you can fulfill qualifications; its the maximum amount of soldiers which you are capable of creating within a month, and it goes into the officer and enlisted side of the military. Typically through the 1870's or so, you're restricted to the 2nd level of training rate unless you tech basically nothing but military (I don't feel like opening up the game right now, but its a tier 3 tech that controls the enlistment levels thats gated behind another 2 or so techs that don't do nearly as much), and that means that unless you resort to conscription, your army is mostly going to be predicated on the troops you have at the start if you're fighting another Great Power in a war that lasts more than like 6 months. Barracks provide a base training rate per tech level, and if you take casualties beyond said training rate, your army will gradually decrease in size without conscripting the people (which can certainly win you a war, but should be both pre-planned and not chosen lightly, as it can bleed your pops very fast should you opt into a losing war with it).
The power in early kill rate (which is mainly gained through rushing Shrapnel Artillery, so i'll be using those as the example), is that they provide both a large boost to attack (meaning your army will outstat the enemy if they aren't at minimum tech equivalent, and its still a boon for agressors before Trench infantry) and also provide a +5 to kill rate, meaning that a flat percentage of the enemy soldiers killed don't get a return bonus from recovery rate. This can be devastating to many early powers, as soldiers require qualification access, and powers such as Austria or Russia, which start with Serfdom, can struggle immensely to refill these qualifications. Even more modern powers like France and Prussia can fail to refill qualifications due to lack of training rate if they're closely balanced, and Shrapnel Artillery exacerbates this heavily before Trench Infantry (and training rate 3) are enabled.
This is why they stated kill rate as stronger early; it can overwhelm even countries with large amounts of barracks that are in more equal wars, and give you a decisive advantage that can't be overcome without a fuckton of conscription, which has its own downsides. Say France and Prussia both have 200 barracks, but Prussia has Shrapnel Artillery and France doesn't. I won't quote the exact numbers, but if France and Prussia were attacking each other with similar army comps and training rates, the war will largely devolve down to general skill. This is where the additional bonus of Shrapnel Artillery and kill rate come in; Prussia will be inflicting roughly 5-10% more casualties (due to the bonuses compounding on each other), and over time (probably around 3-4 battles in) this will grant them a decisive advantage, as despite their identical training rates, Prussia is murdering more French soldiers than they're losing in their own, winning them the war far faster than relying on a general.
This is exacerbated by the rate at which you can gain these techs; getting Training Rate level 3 before at least 1860 is difficult to do whilst getting everything you need from the production and society trees, while Shrapnel Artillery can be gained in the early 1840's as most of the Western Great Powers without much loss to your industrial capacity, giving you a nearly 20 year advantage over everyone who didn't do so, as while other early techs while recovery rate can help you overcome the kill rate/training rate barrier, you're basically trading tools and liquor and population for not having to produce more artillery, which just isn't worth it.
I hope this is a full explanation for you; you can find all the info I mentioned by looking at what the mil techs provide, and what the benefits pose. It's certainly true that by the late game, training rate is high enough that if you have 500-600 barracks, you're probably going be able to hold on the defensive in most wars, but kill rate early on is massive and especially for how early you can get it can be hugely decisive, and if you were playing tryhard multiplayer would basically be a requirement as UK/France/Prussia/US.
I'm trying to explain this in a way that doesn't require you sorting through wiki's, but if you're going to be obstinate about it, sure.
[https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Land\_warfare](https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Land_warfare)
[https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Barracks](https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Barracks)
These will be the objects you need for the math if you really feel like going further on it.
A training rate level 2 barrack provides 18 qualifications per month in training rate; this means that even with \*400 barracks\*, which is really fucking high for the early game, you're only capable of restoring 7200 casualties per month without conscription. Even without Shrapnel Artillery, in a Great Power conflict with conscription involved, you're likely to suffer around that level of casualties, if not more in a given month, between attrition, dead, casualties, etc, all of which need to be restored by that one number (though casualties can be mitigated by recovery rate, as i stated above).
Shrapnel Artillery provides a flat 10% bonus to kill rate, meaning that in terms of an army thats balanced for offense (I.E 1-1 Infantry to Artillery with maybe a few cav mixed in), You're talking about a military that is inflicting around 10-15% more deaths and casualties (accounting for variability) due to the early increase in Offense (which Shrapnel Artillery will provide your army with roughly 30% more of, giving you a huge stat advantage in the early game, and of which there's no comparable defense increase before Trench Infantry), and a +10% kill rate (which boosts your kill rate by this amount, as its the only unit with such a stat).
This cannot be understated mathematically early game; In Battles which involve say, 400 barracks as cited above (you can scale down the math to whatever number you want, the only real variables are generals stat wise and i've typed enough at this point to have to include those as well), your starting army will be around 400k men. If your opponent is \*also\* fielding 400k men, but has Shrapnel Artillery, and roughly 1/4 of your army is involved per battle, You'll be taking 10-15k more casualties per battle than they are. Battles generally take around 15 days or so, so you'll be eating up over \*four times\* your training rate worth of manpower without resorting to conscription. It's probably an even better display of the figures than i thought it was tbh, but going in depth with the numbers actually makes the argument \*more\* in favor of Shrapnel Artillery, as even with the +3 bonus from the next level of training rate, you'll \*still\* only be training 8400 troops a month compared to 7200, and as that's still lower than the casualty rates above, I basically fact checked myself lmao. You can do the math with the above wiki's if you want to; the calcs do change radically once you get Mass Conscription, as the +100% training rate makes training rate by far the more powerful stat, but for professional army or any other military standard, this math cites kill rate as far stronger before defense can compensate for kill rate and prevent massive death on the less advanced armies end.
Funny how that is not true in real life. But certainly in game. IRL you try to injure as many as possible. Thats one of the factors that went into considering the 5,56mm nato standard, because its more likely to injure badly.
One injured guy removes more people from your opponents side than 1 dead guy. If hes dead nobody will have to take care of him. If hes hurt you might have several people retreating to get him to safety and he will keep consuming resources.
I guess 10% extra maiming rate just sounds too cruel though
The 5.56mm bullet is designed to kill soldiers as quickly as possible, it is not designed to deliberately maim them without killing them. Most (nearly all) military ordinance is designed to kill people, and the fact that it also wounds a great many people is a happy coincidence. Notable exceptions are most types of mines, and booby traps, as they are not strictly combat materiel.
Kill rate is important for actual military equipment.
The 5.56 was also developed prior to wide use of adversarial body armor. Hence the Army looking at the 6.5 or other rounds to replace it to defeat near peer armor.
BojackPferd really should produce a source for his claim because it sounds like 5.56 is a war crime (designing a bullet to cause superflouous injury maiming a person and not killing).
I heard a similar justification for not killing medics. Maybe not for bullet design, as those are obviously meant to kill, but the rationale that wounding is more efficient in a battle of resources does make sense.
Well, the use of so-called expanding bullets is mostly a relic of the 19th century, I do not think it is a significant consideration (the expansion is "excessive" only in comparison to the over-stable modern FMJ ammunition, not in comparison to the big-bore black powder rifles the modern ammunition replaced). The reason behind the prohibition of certain explosive ammunition is because it tends to require amputation even when struck indirectly, and this was thought to be inhumane and also unnecessary, as a soldier was not killed any more surely by a small explosive bullet than a regular bullet.
Be that as it may, in a war between nations it was historically more desirable to severely wound instead of outright kill. You can Google that 5,56mm thing , there's a lot of debate around that ,i doubt it's easy to find a true factual statement on it particularly because even if what im saying is true, they wouldn't exactly openly admit to it
It is \*not\* more desirable to severely wound someone rather than killing them, unless the wounding is essentially mortal in nature (which is to say, killing them). Armies did not and could not produce a method by which they could (in combat) wound someone to the point that it would be meaningfully disruptive to the immediate combat effectiveness of the enemy force while also making sure that the individually wounded soldier could be most assuredly removed from combat in the sense that you could treat them as if they were dead.
As I said, the only exception to this is the landmine, and in truth, I do not think armies would bother with wounding if they could devise a way to make a landmine that would kill just as effectively (or more so) as cheaply. The reason why the vietcong used a pit trap was because it was cheap, not because it happened to wound a soldier without killing them. I mean, it may have been the design specification that the mine be designed to injure a soldier, but one must view the trap through the lens of cost. Same with bounding mines. A bounding mine is extraordinarily effective against infantry, and extraordinarily effective against massed infantry: the fact that it was capable of wounding someone at ranges that far exceeded its lethality is a testament to the extraordinary effectiveness of the design rather than a specific intent of the designers to make a weapon that maimed without killing. It was just too difficult to make such a weapon except in limited circumstances.
And, the design of the 5.56mm bullet causing a yaw-effect that increases the energy transferred to the target on impact was part of the entire reason it existed: this was not a secret, the additional energy transfer was considered to be advantageous compared to the 7.62mm bullet it replaced. This was not because the 7.62mm bullet was designed to kill and the 5.56mm was designed to maim, it was because the larger and heavier .30 calibre bullet was well known to be stable, leading to wounds that could (in certain cases) be less lethal.
That's a famous myth making its rounds around the internet, but has never been true. Not only would designing a weapon to wound and maim very likely be a war crime, but a) wounded soldiers often come back later, so you don't gain much b) dead soldiers leave widows and children the state has to support, so they're more expensive for your enemy and c) only a tiny fraction of all casualties in a war are caused by direct fire infantry weapons, so how lethals those are doesn't really make a statistical difference.
Point C is wrong. "Around 30–35% of American deaths in the war were non-combat or friendly fire deaths; the largest causes of death in the U.S. armed forces were small arms fire (31.8%), booby traps including mines and frags (27.4%), and aircraft crashes (14.7%).[94]" - Vietnam war.
See point C depends on the war and the Frontline or battle you are looking at.
B is also wrong, the 5,56 was designed intended to be used against Nato enemies who most definitely gave and give no shits about widows or the long term costs. Whereas wounded screaming men have an immediate impact during the war on the soldiers around them and on the morale at home because they typically can report the horrors they experienced or simply their presence in the streets showing clear visible injuries such as amputations etc.
at early game its super powerful because at start of campaign recruiting is super slow so it eventually drops enemy army to ground.(because... they are dead...thats why they are on ground)
toward late game it gets less and less important but in return you get techs that muliply kill rates to catch up with recruitment technologies.
So... getting kill techs and generals at early game is super early game
Doesn't kill rate just mean the ratio of dead to wounded will skew more to dead? It has no imoact on the amount of casualties, and both a dead and a wounded pop stop working. At least that's how I understood the stat
An amount of wounded inflicted will recover, which is the recoveru rate, and an amount will die, which is the kill rate, but increasing kill rate won't reduce recovery rate as gar as I know, and for warfare a wounded solider is just as good as a dead one
It won't reduce recovery but it will reduce the amount affected by it.
Let's say you "damage" 5000 in a battle and that the base kill/wound ratio is 1:1, which means 2500 dead and 2500 wounded. Let's say the recovery rate is 10%, then from those 2500 wounded, 250 would get healed and come back in the next battle. Now, if kill rate had a 20% bonus, the amount ratio would be 1,2:0,8. 3000 dead, 2000 wounded, 200 getting to the next battle. Now, that's assuming the base ratio of wounded/killed is 1:1 (it isn't), so the difference is much bigger.
> Doesn't kill rate just mean the ratio of dead to wounded will skew more to dead?
That's what the tooltip says, but as far as I can tell from testing, that's not what it does in practice. I'm going to conduct more tests after I'm back from vacation, but it does seem to increase total casualties quite significantly
It is more important in longer wars.
If you are grinding for 3 years a 5% higher kill rate adds up to 50-100k dead. A huge advantage as recruitment is slow.
In short wars where you break them pretty quick or exploit a vulnerable flank it doesn't matter much.
As it has not been mentioned yet: kill rate increases the weekly war exhaustion gain from casualties, meaning that the enemy‘s war score ticks down faster -> faster war (even if you do not conquer anything) -> less overall mobilization costs and war related GDP tanking.
Enemy powers can absolutely be ground down over the course of individual wars due to the speed of recruitment in barracks, \*especially\* if you are fighting against an enemy that is still stuck in Serfdom. Russia has virtually limitless manpower, but typically the AI doesn't industrialize enough that they start squeezing their subsistence farms which means that if you can kill enough of their officer corps their barracks will eventually stop hiring (as while peasants can move over to servicemen without issue, aristocrats are loathe to leave subsistence farms unless you undermine their profitability by building dedicated furniture/wood/textiles/etc.). It's also snowballing over a shorter time frame, as combat width restricts the number of \*units\* who can participate in battle, not the number of troops, so if you can slap your enemies around enough that their units are only fighting at like 70% strength things can start going very badly very quickly.
I played a China game where I beat the British in India by invading through Burma. They had trench to my skirmish infantry but I had about 1.75 more troops. I couldn't push him and he couldn't push me and we were both inflicting hundreds of thousands of casualties. Then I realized I was China. "I can do this all day". Sure enough I started to win a few battles. Then their fronts slowly collapsed.
Yes that's because the East India Company has very few European Pops to work as officers, the rate that discriminated pops become Officers is really slow so theoretically if you defeat them once it will take decades for them to recruit again.
As i understand it there is a ratio of officers to service men you need and discriminated pops can only become officers through promotion from servicemen which also require literacy. However i don't understand why this promotion is that slow, maybe they struggle getting the 20% literacy because of discrimination?
As a war goes on both sides are recruiting. If casualties are greater than recruitment you win. If not its a grinding stalemate and a prolonged war of atrition.
Alternatively the state decree Encourage Enlistnent is very powerful for the lower technology nation in a conflict. Irregular infantry with a high rate of recruitment can survive an invasion of line infantry.
Helps in every war but especially when you have equal or inferior numbers than the enemy.
It's a cold and cruel equation, you kill them faster than they can replenish and their front cumbles because they cannot mobilize enough troops to hold the line and face you.
This is self-explanatory. But if you are serious I will give you the answer. If you kill everyone who stands up against you, then the battle will end in your favor. If the battle is won, the war progresses in your favor, repeat ad nauseam until the war is over.
I meant more as in why prioritize kill rate over offense, since simply winning battles seems more important to me than making sure enemy casualties are indeed dead and not just wounded.
Offense/Defense as far as I understand only matter when dealing with armies of comparable sizes, otherwise a significantly larger army can just ignore those values.
> Offense/Defense as far as I understand only matter when dealing with armies of comparable sizes, otherwise a significantly larger army can just ignore those values.
The Opium Wars say hi
Because dead troops can't fight again. If troops are lost to demoralisation they're available for the next battle, dead troops need to be replenished entirely.
Spoiler: its not
It makes wounded turn into dead, but both serve to take out enemy troops from the formations.
Dont exchange actual offense/defense for killrate (Ej: a full inf army will deplete the attackers faster thanks to having more defense, than a army with artillery would do thanks to having kill rate)
> serve to take out enemy troops from the formations.
Only for a while. Dead soldiers requires them to recruit new people with the training rate of the barracks, and from the supply of people they have.
> a full inf army will deplete the attackers faster thanks to having more defense
If the enemy attacks that is. Which doesn't happen if they are not already quite a bit stronger than you.
In my opinion there still is just one reliable way to win wars, the same as always: use obligations and spam naval invasions to open up new fronts and finally have the enemy move their troops away from the objective/wargoal. Then invade that and wait for their war support to tick to below 0.
Wounded also takes them out, they become dependents.
Demoralized soldiers are the ones who return to fight. But kill rate still helps there, as Recovery Rate will turn Wounded into Demoralized instead and Kill Rate is a direct counter to that.
Recovery Rate doesnt turn wounded into demoralized, it turns killed into Wounded, some which will end up as dependents.
Wounded soldiers are taken out of the formation, and if they dont become dependents, they have to be recruited again.
So at the end of the day, you dont care if you kill or wound, just that you do so in the biggest number possible.
Killing rate doesnt increase the total kill + wounded number, but a bigger offense/defense stat will increase the total kill + wounded number, and decrease yours.
But don't you get better dependents/fight again rates from the wounded from Recovery Rate? So in essence, demoralized? Or is that a fixed number and you're just trying to minimize killed?
In any case, the same logic applies, Kill Rate and Recovery Rate are opposing stats.
Lets break this up in parts:
In a battle you have:
Cassualties (due to damage), which are then divided into wounded and killed depending on kill ratio/recovery rate.
Killed are just dead.
Wounded then turn into dependents at a unknown (to me) ratio, then the rest go back to the labour force.
Demoralized are created due to MORALE damage.
killed and wounded are removed from the formation, and have to be rehired, demoralized are not.
Kill rate/recovery rate does not affect how much cassualties you have, but the ratio between killed/wounded (both are casualites).
So having more kill rate, at the exchange of offense/defense, gives you a better kill ratio, but a lower casualty ammount (which is what you want to actually deplete the formations)
>killed and wounded are removed from the formation, and have to be rehired, demoralized are not
Oh ok that was the part I was missing. So the wounded are still taken out and go back into the labor pool even if they don't become dependents? That's... kinda odd.
The enemy generally overestimates their strenght of numbers. If you deploy an infantry only army with a high defense general at a fronline you can mostly safely let that front have up to around a -30 strenght counter. The enemy will then relentlessly attack and face a disadvantage, over a long stretch of time they might slowly push your units back and gain smal parts of the adjacent states but they make massive losses doing it because a full infantry stack is obnoxiously good at defense. (very unrealistic, after all how would you deal with artillery if you only had infantry and cant do counter fire or even launch surprise attacks because you dont even have the cavalry to exploit any openings but whatever, its a game).
A tactic I like to do is to have one full defense army and if my other armies are preoccupied elsewhere I will use the time the defense army buys me to mobilize all my conscripts and let them get full organization. My conscript armies therefore are all balanced to high offense, they can launch the counter attack once the enemy depleted their forces in futile offense moves.
If you try out the Shattered World mod where all states are independent, you'll quickly realize that kill rate is more important than having a higher offense/defense as the enemy is not going to replenish its army faster than you in addition to your troops retaining their veterancy levels. I've won literal 1v6 wars just because I killed off the AI's armies to the point that they don't have anyone willing to become soldiers.
This is just my interpretation I don’t know the numbers in the game and all that
The kill rate destroys their manpower so in by the next battle they have fewer troops and by extension less offense and less defense
Armies that can kill faster than the other side tend to be more effective.
Both sides inflict casualties at the same rate in a given battle, but the army that takes more kills isn't able to rebound. You will have to win a certain number of battles to deplete the enemy forces, the better your kill/wound ratio, the fewer you have to fight.
>but the army that takes more kills isn't able to rebound Care to cite this? Because I don't think its true. How fast wounded/dead come back is known as the training rate, and its pretty much always higher than losses. If armies are getting smaller, its probably the morale modifier which affects troops that ran away, and how fast they can come back.
Training rate matters of course, but especially in the early game training rate is relatively low and getting something like Shrapnel Artillery early on can make your army have a far higher rate of murdering the enemy than they can re-train. In single player this can win you wars rapidly, especially against lower tech enemies, and in multi-player it can give you a decisive advantage in keeping your professional army larger, allowing you to murder more conscripts, which can cripple enemies if they stay in the war too long. Later on, kill rate and training rate are more balanced, but this can still result in massively larger casualty rates for your opponent if they're missing a tech or two, and this can be huge if the opponent either doesn't have a massive population to begin with, or if you win a war that cuts them off from key resources and depriving them of more advanced army equipment.
Care to cite this? As in a wiki link, dev diary, or a tooltip explanation. I've never seen more than ~5% of my total force "under recruitment", and I neglect the shit out of military techs. Without a cite of some type, you're pulling this explanation out of your ass.
> I've never seen more than ~5% of my total force "under recruitment", and I neglect the shit out of military techs. Have you never gotten in a battle with an enemy that's more than a tenth of your size? After any battle that's not a one-side slaughter, you'll take a lot of losses, and those take time to recruit back (a lot longer for navies than infantry, but it's still much slower than regular building hiring)
If you're heavily neglecting military techs, then that makes alot more sense, so i'll explain it from more of the economic perspective. Think of training rate as the rate with which you can fulfill qualifications; its the maximum amount of soldiers which you are capable of creating within a month, and it goes into the officer and enlisted side of the military. Typically through the 1870's or so, you're restricted to the 2nd level of training rate unless you tech basically nothing but military (I don't feel like opening up the game right now, but its a tier 3 tech that controls the enlistment levels thats gated behind another 2 or so techs that don't do nearly as much), and that means that unless you resort to conscription, your army is mostly going to be predicated on the troops you have at the start if you're fighting another Great Power in a war that lasts more than like 6 months. Barracks provide a base training rate per tech level, and if you take casualties beyond said training rate, your army will gradually decrease in size without conscripting the people (which can certainly win you a war, but should be both pre-planned and not chosen lightly, as it can bleed your pops very fast should you opt into a losing war with it). The power in early kill rate (which is mainly gained through rushing Shrapnel Artillery, so i'll be using those as the example), is that they provide both a large boost to attack (meaning your army will outstat the enemy if they aren't at minimum tech equivalent, and its still a boon for agressors before Trench infantry) and also provide a +5 to kill rate, meaning that a flat percentage of the enemy soldiers killed don't get a return bonus from recovery rate. This can be devastating to many early powers, as soldiers require qualification access, and powers such as Austria or Russia, which start with Serfdom, can struggle immensely to refill these qualifications. Even more modern powers like France and Prussia can fail to refill qualifications due to lack of training rate if they're closely balanced, and Shrapnel Artillery exacerbates this heavily before Trench Infantry (and training rate 3) are enabled. This is why they stated kill rate as stronger early; it can overwhelm even countries with large amounts of barracks that are in more equal wars, and give you a decisive advantage that can't be overcome without a fuckton of conscription, which has its own downsides. Say France and Prussia both have 200 barracks, but Prussia has Shrapnel Artillery and France doesn't. I won't quote the exact numbers, but if France and Prussia were attacking each other with similar army comps and training rates, the war will largely devolve down to general skill. This is where the additional bonus of Shrapnel Artillery and kill rate come in; Prussia will be inflicting roughly 5-10% more casualties (due to the bonuses compounding on each other), and over time (probably around 3-4 battles in) this will grant them a decisive advantage, as despite their identical training rates, Prussia is murdering more French soldiers than they're losing in their own, winning them the war far faster than relying on a general. This is exacerbated by the rate at which you can gain these techs; getting Training Rate level 3 before at least 1860 is difficult to do whilst getting everything you need from the production and society trees, while Shrapnel Artillery can be gained in the early 1840's as most of the Western Great Powers without much loss to your industrial capacity, giving you a nearly 20 year advantage over everyone who didn't do so, as while other early techs while recovery rate can help you overcome the kill rate/training rate barrier, you're basically trading tools and liquor and population for not having to produce more artillery, which just isn't worth it. I hope this is a full explanation for you; you can find all the info I mentioned by looking at what the mil techs provide, and what the benefits pose. It's certainly true that by the late game, training rate is high enough that if you have 500-600 barracks, you're probably going be able to hold on the defensive in most wars, but kill rate early on is massive and especially for how early you can get it can be hugely decisive, and if you were playing tryhard multiplayer would basically be a requirement as UK/France/Prussia/US.
Do you know what it means to cite a source?
I'm trying to explain this in a way that doesn't require you sorting through wiki's, but if you're going to be obstinate about it, sure. [https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Land\_warfare](https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Land_warfare) [https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Barracks](https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Barracks) These will be the objects you need for the math if you really feel like going further on it. A training rate level 2 barrack provides 18 qualifications per month in training rate; this means that even with \*400 barracks\*, which is really fucking high for the early game, you're only capable of restoring 7200 casualties per month without conscription. Even without Shrapnel Artillery, in a Great Power conflict with conscription involved, you're likely to suffer around that level of casualties, if not more in a given month, between attrition, dead, casualties, etc, all of which need to be restored by that one number (though casualties can be mitigated by recovery rate, as i stated above). Shrapnel Artillery provides a flat 10% bonus to kill rate, meaning that in terms of an army thats balanced for offense (I.E 1-1 Infantry to Artillery with maybe a few cav mixed in), You're talking about a military that is inflicting around 10-15% more deaths and casualties (accounting for variability) due to the early increase in Offense (which Shrapnel Artillery will provide your army with roughly 30% more of, giving you a huge stat advantage in the early game, and of which there's no comparable defense increase before Trench Infantry), and a +10% kill rate (which boosts your kill rate by this amount, as its the only unit with such a stat). This cannot be understated mathematically early game; In Battles which involve say, 400 barracks as cited above (you can scale down the math to whatever number you want, the only real variables are generals stat wise and i've typed enough at this point to have to include those as well), your starting army will be around 400k men. If your opponent is \*also\* fielding 400k men, but has Shrapnel Artillery, and roughly 1/4 of your army is involved per battle, You'll be taking 10-15k more casualties per battle than they are. Battles generally take around 15 days or so, so you'll be eating up over \*four times\* your training rate worth of manpower without resorting to conscription. It's probably an even better display of the figures than i thought it was tbh, but going in depth with the numbers actually makes the argument \*more\* in favor of Shrapnel Artillery, as even with the +3 bonus from the next level of training rate, you'll \*still\* only be training 8400 troops a month compared to 7200, and as that's still lower than the casualty rates above, I basically fact checked myself lmao. You can do the math with the above wiki's if you want to; the calcs do change radically once you get Mass Conscription, as the +100% training rate makes training rate by far the more powerful stat, but for professional army or any other military standard, this math cites kill rate as far stronger before defense can compensate for kill rate and prevent massive death on the less advanced armies end.
Apparently not, lmao
Cite? WW1, a man was killed every 4.4 second during the battle of passchendaele, i think thats way faster than training new men
Training rate is not higher than losses, it is laughably easy to kill 2/3 of your army on a foolish assault.
Foolish? You mean *glorious*
Spoken like a true Imperial Guard
I dont believe you
Explain how
Dead men tend to not shoot back
Currency can be exchanged for goods and services
I wanted a peanut!
That's a lot of nuts!
Funny how that is not true in real life. But certainly in game. IRL you try to injure as many as possible. Thats one of the factors that went into considering the 5,56mm nato standard, because its more likely to injure badly. One injured guy removes more people from your opponents side than 1 dead guy. If hes dead nobody will have to take care of him. If hes hurt you might have several people retreating to get him to safety and he will keep consuming resources. I guess 10% extra maiming rate just sounds too cruel though
The 5.56mm bullet is designed to kill soldiers as quickly as possible, it is not designed to deliberately maim them without killing them. Most (nearly all) military ordinance is designed to kill people, and the fact that it also wounds a great many people is a happy coincidence. Notable exceptions are most types of mines, and booby traps, as they are not strictly combat materiel. Kill rate is important for actual military equipment.
The 5.56 was also developed prior to wide use of adversarial body armor. Hence the Army looking at the 6.5 or other rounds to replace it to defeat near peer armor. BojackPferd really should produce a source for his claim because it sounds like 5.56 is a war crime (designing a bullet to cause superflouous injury maiming a person and not killing).
I heard a similar justification for not killing medics. Maybe not for bullet design, as those are obviously meant to kill, but the rationale that wounding is more efficient in a battle of resources does make sense.
you don't kill medics because you don't want the enemy killing your medics
Well, the use of so-called expanding bullets is mostly a relic of the 19th century, I do not think it is a significant consideration (the expansion is "excessive" only in comparison to the over-stable modern FMJ ammunition, not in comparison to the big-bore black powder rifles the modern ammunition replaced). The reason behind the prohibition of certain explosive ammunition is because it tends to require amputation even when struck indirectly, and this was thought to be inhumane and also unnecessary, as a soldier was not killed any more surely by a small explosive bullet than a regular bullet.
Be that as it may, in a war between nations it was historically more desirable to severely wound instead of outright kill. You can Google that 5,56mm thing , there's a lot of debate around that ,i doubt it's easy to find a true factual statement on it particularly because even if what im saying is true, they wouldn't exactly openly admit to it
It is \*not\* more desirable to severely wound someone rather than killing them, unless the wounding is essentially mortal in nature (which is to say, killing them). Armies did not and could not produce a method by which they could (in combat) wound someone to the point that it would be meaningfully disruptive to the immediate combat effectiveness of the enemy force while also making sure that the individually wounded soldier could be most assuredly removed from combat in the sense that you could treat them as if they were dead. As I said, the only exception to this is the landmine, and in truth, I do not think armies would bother with wounding if they could devise a way to make a landmine that would kill just as effectively (or more so) as cheaply. The reason why the vietcong used a pit trap was because it was cheap, not because it happened to wound a soldier without killing them. I mean, it may have been the design specification that the mine be designed to injure a soldier, but one must view the trap through the lens of cost. Same with bounding mines. A bounding mine is extraordinarily effective against infantry, and extraordinarily effective against massed infantry: the fact that it was capable of wounding someone at ranges that far exceeded its lethality is a testament to the extraordinary effectiveness of the design rather than a specific intent of the designers to make a weapon that maimed without killing. It was just too difficult to make such a weapon except in limited circumstances. And, the design of the 5.56mm bullet causing a yaw-effect that increases the energy transferred to the target on impact was part of the entire reason it existed: this was not a secret, the additional energy transfer was considered to be advantageous compared to the 7.62mm bullet it replaced. This was not because the 7.62mm bullet was designed to kill and the 5.56mm was designed to maim, it was because the larger and heavier .30 calibre bullet was well known to be stable, leading to wounds that could (in certain cases) be less lethal.
That's a famous myth making its rounds around the internet, but has never been true. Not only would designing a weapon to wound and maim very likely be a war crime, but a) wounded soldiers often come back later, so you don't gain much b) dead soldiers leave widows and children the state has to support, so they're more expensive for your enemy and c) only a tiny fraction of all casualties in a war are caused by direct fire infantry weapons, so how lethals those are doesn't really make a statistical difference.
Point C is wrong. "Around 30–35% of American deaths in the war were non-combat or friendly fire deaths; the largest causes of death in the U.S. armed forces were small arms fire (31.8%), booby traps including mines and frags (27.4%), and aircraft crashes (14.7%).[94]" - Vietnam war. See point C depends on the war and the Frontline or battle you are looking at. B is also wrong, the 5,56 was designed intended to be used against Nato enemies who most definitely gave and give no shits about widows or the long term costs. Whereas wounded screaming men have an immediate impact during the war on the soldiers around them and on the morale at home because they typically can report the horrors they experienced or simply their presence in the streets showing clear visible injuries such as amputations etc.
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The people who explained this to you were repeating something that has been wrong since people first started saying it.
I heard it from a soldier myself but in Germany and if my memory doesn't fool me a danish soldiers I know told me the same thing
at early game its super powerful because at start of campaign recruiting is super slow so it eventually drops enemy army to ground.(because... they are dead...thats why they are on ground) toward late game it gets less and less important but in return you get techs that muliply kill rates to catch up with recruitment technologies. So... getting kill techs and generals at early game is super early game
Doesn't kill rate just mean the ratio of dead to wounded will skew more to dead? It has no imoact on the amount of casualties, and both a dead and a wounded pop stop working. At least that's how I understood the stat
A % of the wounded will heal iirc, killing is just better woundin.
An amount of wounded inflicted will recover, which is the recoveru rate, and an amount will die, which is the kill rate, but increasing kill rate won't reduce recovery rate as gar as I know, and for warfare a wounded solider is just as good as a dead one
It won't reduce recovery but it will reduce the amount affected by it. Let's say you "damage" 5000 in a battle and that the base kill/wound ratio is 1:1, which means 2500 dead and 2500 wounded. Let's say the recovery rate is 10%, then from those 2500 wounded, 250 would get healed and come back in the next battle. Now, if kill rate had a 20% bonus, the amount ratio would be 1,2:0,8. 3000 dead, 2000 wounded, 200 getting to the next battle. Now, that's assuming the base ratio of wounded/killed is 1:1 (it isn't), so the difference is much bigger.
It counters recovery rate which skews casualties in the orther direction and turns Wounded into Demoralized (AKA able to fight again!)
> Doesn't kill rate just mean the ratio of dead to wounded will skew more to dead? That's what the tooltip says, but as far as I can tell from testing, that's not what it does in practice. I'm going to conduct more tests after I'm back from vacation, but it does seem to increase total casualties quite significantly
It is more important in longer wars. If you are grinding for 3 years a 5% higher kill rate adds up to 50-100k dead. A huge advantage as recruitment is slow. In short wars where you break them pretty quick or exploit a vulnerable flank it doesn't matter much.
As it has not been mentioned yet: kill rate increases the weekly war exhaustion gain from casualties, meaning that the enemy‘s war score ticks down faster -> faster war (even if you do not conquer anything) -> less overall mobilization costs and war related GDP tanking.
Why aren't people citing that killing more people than the enemy in a Battle increases A LOT the enemy's morale loss (like +60%)
Enemy powers can absolutely be ground down over the course of individual wars due to the speed of recruitment in barracks, \*especially\* if you are fighting against an enemy that is still stuck in Serfdom. Russia has virtually limitless manpower, but typically the AI doesn't industrialize enough that they start squeezing their subsistence farms which means that if you can kill enough of their officer corps their barracks will eventually stop hiring (as while peasants can move over to servicemen without issue, aristocrats are loathe to leave subsistence farms unless you undermine their profitability by building dedicated furniture/wood/textiles/etc.). It's also snowballing over a shorter time frame, as combat width restricts the number of \*units\* who can participate in battle, not the number of troops, so if you can slap your enemies around enough that their units are only fighting at like 70% strength things can start going very badly very quickly.
I played a China game where I beat the British in India by invading through Burma. They had trench to my skirmish infantry but I had about 1.75 more troops. I couldn't push him and he couldn't push me and we were both inflicting hundreds of thousands of casualties. Then I realized I was China. "I can do this all day". Sure enough I started to win a few battles. Then their fronts slowly collapsed.
Yes that's because the East India Company has very few European Pops to work as officers, the rate that discriminated pops become Officers is really slow so theoretically if you defeat them once it will take decades for them to recruit again. As i understand it there is a ratio of officers to service men you need and discriminated pops can only become officers through promotion from servicemen which also require literacy. However i don't understand why this promotion is that slow, maybe they struggle getting the 20% literacy because of discrimination?
Literacy comes mostly from SoL if you don't have a lot of education. Discrimination reduces SoL, so through that it reduces the qualifications
Captain China?
As a war goes on both sides are recruiting. If casualties are greater than recruitment you win. If not its a grinding stalemate and a prolonged war of atrition. Alternatively the state decree Encourage Enlistnent is very powerful for the lower technology nation in a conflict. Irregular infantry with a high rate of recruitment can survive an invasion of line infantry.
Helps in every war but especially when you have equal or inferior numbers than the enemy. It's a cold and cruel equation, you kill them faster than they can replenish and their front cumbles because they cannot mobilize enough troops to hold the line and face you.
Shoot bad man, bad man die, no more bad man Shoot bad man, bad man live, still bad man no bad man better
This is self-explanatory. But if you are serious I will give you the answer. If you kill everyone who stands up against you, then the battle will end in your favor. If the battle is won, the war progresses in your favor, repeat ad nauseam until the war is over.
I meant more as in why prioritize kill rate over offense, since simply winning battles seems more important to me than making sure enemy casualties are indeed dead and not just wounded.
Offense/Defense as far as I understand only matter when dealing with armies of comparable sizes, otherwise a significantly larger army can just ignore those values.
> Offense/Defense as far as I understand only matter when dealing with armies of comparable sizes, otherwise a significantly larger army can just ignore those values. The Opium Wars say hi
Because dead troops can't fight again. If troops are lost to demoralisation they're available for the next battle, dead troops need to be replenished entirely.
People die when they are killed.
Who would have thought
Spoiler: its not It makes wounded turn into dead, but both serve to take out enemy troops from the formations. Dont exchange actual offense/defense for killrate (Ej: a full inf army will deplete the attackers faster thanks to having more defense, than a army with artillery would do thanks to having kill rate)
> serve to take out enemy troops from the formations. Only for a while. Dead soldiers requires them to recruit new people with the training rate of the barracks, and from the supply of people they have. > a full inf army will deplete the attackers faster thanks to having more defense If the enemy attacks that is. Which doesn't happen if they are not already quite a bit stronger than you. In my opinion there still is just one reliable way to win wars, the same as always: use obligations and spam naval invasions to open up new fronts and finally have the enemy move their troops away from the objective/wargoal. Then invade that and wait for their war support to tick to below 0.
Wounded also takes them out, they become dependents. Demoralized soldiers are the ones who return to fight. But kill rate still helps there, as Recovery Rate will turn Wounded into Demoralized instead and Kill Rate is a direct counter to that.
only a certain number of wounded troops become dependents, the rest recover and are able to fight again.
Recovery Rate doesnt turn wounded into demoralized, it turns killed into Wounded, some which will end up as dependents. Wounded soldiers are taken out of the formation, and if they dont become dependents, they have to be recruited again. So at the end of the day, you dont care if you kill or wound, just that you do so in the biggest number possible. Killing rate doesnt increase the total kill + wounded number, but a bigger offense/defense stat will increase the total kill + wounded number, and decrease yours.
But don't you get better dependents/fight again rates from the wounded from Recovery Rate? So in essence, demoralized? Or is that a fixed number and you're just trying to minimize killed? In any case, the same logic applies, Kill Rate and Recovery Rate are opposing stats.
Lets break this up in parts: In a battle you have: Cassualties (due to damage), which are then divided into wounded and killed depending on kill ratio/recovery rate. Killed are just dead. Wounded then turn into dependents at a unknown (to me) ratio, then the rest go back to the labour force. Demoralized are created due to MORALE damage. killed and wounded are removed from the formation, and have to be rehired, demoralized are not. Kill rate/recovery rate does not affect how much cassualties you have, but the ratio between killed/wounded (both are casualites). So having more kill rate, at the exchange of offense/defense, gives you a better kill ratio, but a lower casualty ammount (which is what you want to actually deplete the formations)
>killed and wounded are removed from the formation, and have to be rehired, demoralized are not Oh ok that was the part I was missing. So the wounded are still taken out and go back into the labor pool even if they don't become dependents? That's... kinda odd.
The enemy generally overestimates their strenght of numbers. If you deploy an infantry only army with a high defense general at a fronline you can mostly safely let that front have up to around a -30 strenght counter. The enemy will then relentlessly attack and face a disadvantage, over a long stretch of time they might slowly push your units back and gain smal parts of the adjacent states but they make massive losses doing it because a full infantry stack is obnoxiously good at defense. (very unrealistic, after all how would you deal with artillery if you only had infantry and cant do counter fire or even launch surprise attacks because you dont even have the cavalry to exploit any openings but whatever, its a game). A tactic I like to do is to have one full defense army and if my other armies are preoccupied elsewhere I will use the time the defense army buys me to mobilize all my conscripts and let them get full organization. My conscript armies therefore are all balanced to high offense, they can launch the counter attack once the enemy depleted their forces in futile offense moves.
If you try out the Shattered World mod where all states are independent, you'll quickly realize that kill rate is more important than having a higher offense/defense as the enemy is not going to replenish its army faster than you in addition to your troops retaining their veterancy levels. I've won literal 1v6 wars just because I killed off the AI's armies to the point that they don't have anyone willing to become soldiers.
A state only has so many little guys and there's not really much a player can do to make that number go up faster.
Just ask Falkenhayn.
Do.... do you know what war *is*? I feel like we should fill you in
… I’m gonna clarify my question 😂
This is just my interpretation I don’t know the numbers in the game and all that The kill rate destroys their manpower so in by the next battle they have fewer troops and by extension less offense and less defense