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[Greenbane]

When you reach a certain threshold of troop number difference in EU4 battles always will be won by the side with the larger number. Look at the defines, I'll show you why EU4 combat consists of doomstacking:

OVERRUN_FACTOR = 10,   -- How much stronger one side of a battle must be to cause the other side to be overrun (integer)

And that's why you get doomstacks. Because if you get a certain number higher than theirs, you'll always win.

The others have dealt with the force ratio issue well enough.

The overrun factor doesn't mechanically guarantee victory (though losing outnumbering the enemy 10 to 1 would be exceedingly rare in any game), as you imply: it's merely a ratio which, if met when the battle ends, means the losing army is wiped out instead of given a chance to retreat. Armies can be more even at the start of the battle, but if combat tips numbers that much, a wipe can happen. It's likely not something you'll see often in battles between European nations, but it's more common when fighting technologically disparate opponents.

Oh, and CK2 has it too, as does Victoria II as well. There's a clever but more difficult way to eliminate armies completely, which involves keeping forces in neighbouring provinces so that the enemy army can't retreat when defeated.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

A majority of my battles are overrun and insta-wipe battles because doing otherwise costs your resources due to ridiculous casualties/morale loss during actual combat phases if you don't. That's the issue with EU4's combat. It's incredibly boring.

[Sindain]

A majority of my battles are overrun and insta-wipe battles because doing otherwise costs your resources due to ridiculous casualties/morale loss during actual combat phases if you don't. That's the issue with EU4's combat. It's incredibly boring.

Yeah and moving my retinue to the border and then glomping over split levies and 0 morale mercs is so much more exciting. N' the only reason your costs aren't ridiculous in CK2 is because there are no costs to combat in CK2, unless you lose retinues, because levies just sprout out of the ground.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Yeah, but CK2 actually has something other than combat as well. Do you prefer combat being 'hope you don't roll a 0' [if you're not like me and go for insta-wipes], instead of CK2s version? I can't find a real improvement in EU4. You can port discipline, morale, tactics, pips, everything to CK2s combat system and have an actual satisfying and enjoyable time while you're slogging through war after war to blob to the Netherlands instead of the total mess that it is currently.

[Elfeater]

Wars should cost. And blobbing is fairly well countered by AE and coalitions.
I would hate having CK2's combat in EU4. France would be even more powerful.
And in CK2, tech one is almost as good as the highest tech. A basic percentage change.
When I play CK2 I can fight a battle and pretty much tell who wins from the get go. Reinforcements are the only thing which might change that.
CK2 is much blobbier than EU, with nearly cost less units, dumbed down combat, and a "Bigger country = bigger army = always wins" kind of game play.
In EU4 I have been playing as a small nation with a few medium or small allies, and we can stop a country from simply stomping all over us, if we play our cards right. In CK2 I have never seen this.

[Sindain]

Yeah, but CK2 actually has something other than combat as well. Do you prefer combat being 'hope you don't roll a 0' [if you're not like me and go for insta-wipes], instead of CK2s version? I can't find a real improvement in EU4. You can port discipline, morale, tactics, pips, everything to CK2s combat system and have an actual satisfying and enjoyable time while you're slogging through war after war to blob to the Netherlands instead of the total mess that it is currently.

I've personally never had that much of a problem with the dicerolls in EU4. I generally find that they matter a bit less than most people on this board make it out to be, If I expect to win a battle I usually win it, and if I don't I usually don't. But overall if I had to pick out actual improvements in EU4 its that they're are actual cost to war. In CK2 I don't care if they siege out a few provinces, while in EU4 that's something I must try to avoid. In CK2 a destroyed army means farting some mercs out to win the war and recovering all my levies in a year, in EU4 it means a decade of weakness as all my neighbors dogpile on me.

Anyway, I'm getting a bit tired of this argument, so I'm going to end my part with this: I think we can both agree that CK2 is pretty great, but I don't play it to face-roll people with my retinues for the umpteenth time.

[WealthyRadish]

Yeah, you need commanders for all the 0 rolls you'll always be getting. That's the neat part of the dice system. No reliability. So you rely on insta-wipe battles. That's the part that irks me so badly about EU4. The combat is not consistent. You can have the best military across the board and still be losing 1k troops a day in every shock phase because the AI has a +1 advantage in the random number roll that combat consists of.

I think you've got a lot of complaints that aren't related (or at least in the way you think they are) that are more the result of playing the game too much (and noticing minor quibbles) than the game itself being terrible. If I were to make the mistake of summarizing them, it'd be that combat is simplistic because numerical superiority is always the best, dice rolls make the game too random to bother with anything but instant wipes, the AI gets undisclosed bonuses to combat and dice rolls, and that fighting battles results in too many casualties.

What I would recommend doing is loading up the vanilla game from the normal 1444 or whatever start, and play as France. You'll be at war with England, they'll have 9 regiments daydreaming in Normandy while a 30 regiment doomstack led by your pick of excellent general sits right next to them. Load this up several times, and share the results of the battles.

Now do it with COMBAT_DICE_SIDE set to 1. No insta-wipe.

If France gets a really minor advantage, like +1 to fire and +2 to shock in the first few phases, France totally annihilates that army. With no influence from dice rolls, they fight it out until England runs out of morale and retreats.

You don't need to get instant wipes to avoid bad dicerolls, you get them in the first place because of good ones. You seem to be saying that you'd rather not have insta-wipes, since it makes things boring, but you feel forced to because dicerolls make the rest of the game unfair. So, play it without dice rolls. See how fun it is. ^{_{(it's not)}}

This is the Dwarf Fortress forum for god's sake. If you think DF is too easy when you just seal yourself off and grow all the food you'll ever need, do something else. If you think something would be better tweaked, mod it yourself. The same applies with EUIV. So, find a balance you like with the combat, with the phase length, dice range, retreat limits, and so on. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of core problems with EUIV, but what you're mentioning has more to do with the playstyle you settled in being boring than the game being bad. It's the worst kind of complaining. You have the tools! You've even quoted defines.lua!

I dunno, I feel like this is going to be one of those aggressively toned posts I regret later, but I'm really not trying to be antagonistic. I just think it's an argument that is misguided, is all.

Edit:
If I were to offer constructive advice, it'd be to increase OVERRUN_FACTOR_CANNOT_LEAVE to something like 4 (you were incorrect in quoting OVERRUN_FACTOR, that's what determines out of combat surrenders), reduce COMBAT_DICE_SIDE to 6-8, and tweak CANNOT_RETREAT_DAYS and DAYS_PER_PHASE to your liking. Increasing OVERRUN_FACTOR_CANNOT_LEAVE will make wipes impossible until that ratio is met, and CANNOT_RETREAT_DAYS will give you more or fewer opportunities to hit it. I'd also lower SHATTERED_RETREAT_SPEED_MODIFIER, since you'll be chasing down more retreating armies.

[Sheb]

Out of curiosity, how come the 2000 men army I leave on my colony to protect them don't get insta-wiped by the overrun mechanic?

[Sergarr]

Out of curiosity, how come the 2000 men army I leave on my colony to protect them don't get insta-wiped by the overrun mechanic?

Probably because of "native troops are 10 times worse than the european ones even on a same technological level" bullshit?

[WealthyRadish]

Out of curiosity, how come the 2000 men army I leave on my colony to protect them don't get insta-wiped by the overrun mechanic?

I think OVERRUN_FACTOR_CANNOT_LEAVE only applies when the larger force is "winning" an attack phase (I don't think it ever happens during a defending phase). Even with a +9 to your 0 dice roll, the natives probably can't get a higher combat calculation once you've gotten a few military tech levels, so while they may still force your units to retreat (or kill them to last man if you don't have them retreat and the AI doesn't order one), they won't get wiped.

[EnigmaticHat]

EU IV... it's "more balanced" than CK 2, in the sense that the outcome of fights is biased towards blocking expansion, sure.  But its done in a very hamfisted way.  For example, a running problem with Paradox GSG AIs is that they only know how to prey on weaker civilizations, they don't know how to unite against a common, more powerful enemy.  So EU IV "fixes" the problem by adding the coalition system, which achieves the end result of wanting the AI to gang up a powerful enemy.  But it does it by basically giving the AI leave to completely ignore all the in-game rules of waging war.  Joining members don't need CBs even for an offensive war, don't need to spend established relationships on alliances, have 0 risk that their coalition buddies won't join the war, and (last I was actually in a war with a coalition, which was admittedly a long time ago) its the only type of war in EU that limits what the other side can ask for peace.

This sort of "results first, simulation/logic/genuine balance second" approach is all over EU IV.  Focusing on land war tech/ideas gave too much of an advantage in EU 3?  Ok, let's make military tech and military ideas draw from the same pool of resources, and give the player only very limited control over the flow of said resource.  Or for example the peasant's War.  Triggers on any number of things that happen to someone who's been at war, triggers a devastating series of events that drops stability to min and fills the country with rebels, PLUS gives all sorts of negative modifiers.  It achieves the result of adding an extra layer of punishment to warmongering expansion, and presumably adding in something that happened in RL.  But its completely fucking stupid from a game perspective because it hides this huge effect behind an invisible event, hits struggling nations while they're down, and it bypasses the systems that are supposed to cause that sort of thing to happen naturally.

What EU IV really needs is a domestic game like what CK 2 or Vicky 2 has.  The gamey substitutes that EU 3 has have all been moved over to the MP system, which has had the side effect of making them all basically the same three part choice*.  CK 2 (while being, yes, more of a simulation than an actual balanced game) has this interesting ebb and flow to a realm's power as marriage alliances and rulers come and go.  Its very possible to win wars simply by attacking when you are strong and the enemy is weak, most recently I did this as Nubia (who ate Ethiopia) fighting Egypt and Arabia at the same time and winning.  Its also very possible in those two games to become more powerful than a rival without attacking them, in CK 2 by gaining more land and in Vicky 2 by improving your industrial base.  In EU IV because the game in its current state basically boils down to a series of choices balanced to be zero-sum (even expansion slows down your progress along other lines), its very hard to do that without knowing the game well.

*The three part choice of MPs: You can choose to improve your tech, gain whatever bonuses ideas would give you, or avoid negative consequences of your actions.  Choosing between these three things is honestly about 60% of EU IV's gameplay at present.  Its frustrating because things that were once interesting like coring and stability now just slow down your regular "level ups".

[WealthyRadish]

*The three part choice of MPs: You can choose to improve your tech, gain whatever bonuses ideas would give you, or avoid negative consequences of your actions.  Choosing between these three things is honestly about 60% of EU IV's gameplay at present.  Its frustrating because things that were once interesting like coring and stability now just slow down your regular "level ups".

So much this. This is really what I think is wrong with the game, is that MP just ends up being a catch all for things that should've been simulated better, and the actual choices end up boiling down to those 3 choices. For me it's always that war -> blob, blob -> money, money -> advisors, and now you're France.

[pedrito]

A lot of the complaints about how unbalanced the EUIV combat system is seems to stem from a lack of knowledge about how the system actually works.

There are quite a lot of factors to consider in a battle, and failure to do so will lead to complaints of the "AI-is-cheating-it-doesnt-matter-what-I-do-EUIV-is-broken" type.

The AI does cheat in a few ways, but land combat is not one of them!. You are losing battles because you fail to take into account all of the factors involved, that's all there is to it.

In a nutshell: Morale, Discipline, Unit type (pips, technology, tech group), Tactics, Combat width, Army composition, Excessive cavalry penalty, General stats, Unit combat ability, Terrain penalty, River crossing... and if that wasn't enough all of these influence eachother and in turn are modified by other stats.   

See this post for more info:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?713856-AI-Cheats-Facts-and-misunderstandings

[Sergarr]

A lot of the complaints about how unbalanced the EUIV combat system is seems to stem from a lack of knowledge about how the system actually works.

There are quite a lot of factors to consider in a battle, and failure to do so will lead to complaints of the "AI-is-cheating-it-doesnt-matter-what-I-do-EUIV-is-broken" type.

The AI does cheat in a few ways, but land combat is not one of them!. You are losing battles because you fail to take into account all of the factors involved, that's all there is to it.

In a nutshell: Morale, Discipline, Unit type (pips, technology, tech group), Tactics, Combat width, Army composition, Excessive cavalry penalty, General stats, Unit combat ability, Terrain penalty, River crossing... and if that wasn't enough all of these influence eachother and in turn are modified by other stats.   

See this post for more info:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?713856-AI-Cheats-Facts-and-misunderstandings

I counter it with:

Well, it's more like the issue with EU4's combat system is it's so opaque and you're bound to lose most battles anyway unless you get together doomstacks for warring. Because the only reliable way to actually play the game and win battles is to get the insta-wipe battles and nothing else. If you don't get into an insta-wipe battle you'll always lose a disproportionate amount of forces and/or morale in the first shock phase no matter the rolls, it's actually pretty neat to see. EU4 combat is more whack a mole than ever thanks to the useless [for you] and broken [for AI] shattered retreat, as well. Which is why you always want to instantly wipe, because 'battles' in EU consist of the AI getting ridiculous damage numbers and near-null damage without a 6+ advantage on rolls.

And don't lie to me about discipline/morale/tactics being the most important factors. I've been the one with the most discipline/morale/tactics since launch because EU4s combat system consists of rushing for discipline and morale bonuses, and yet despite this Nubian nationalists in mountains outnumbered 10-1 can still inflict significant casualties despite general bonuses *if* they get to actual combat. It's the fact that you're basically forced into doomstacking everything to combat that makes EU4 combat such a boring, boring slog, honestly.

I'm actually getting significant morale losses lately attacking shattered armies with .01 morale. That's something that's bound to make you delete the game.

Making a complicated battle system is not good when you combine it with the fact that you can only learn about these things after you lose and go to wiki to find out what's going on.

Games in general should not rely on some external sources of information.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

A lot of the complaints about how unbalanced the EUIV combat system is seems to stem from a lack of knowledge about how the system actually works.

There are quite a lot of factors to consider in a battle, and failure to do so will lead to complaints of the "AI-is-cheating-it-doesnt-matter-what-I-do-EUIV-is-broken" type.

The AI does cheat in a few ways, but land combat is not one of them!. You are losing battles because you fail to take into account all of the factors involved, that's all there is to it.

In a nutshell: Morale, Discipline, Unit type (pips, technology, tech group), Tactics, Combat width, Army composition, Excessive cavalry penalty, General stats, Unit combat ability, Terrain penalty, River crossing... and if that wasn't enough all of these influence eachother and in turn are modified by other stats.   

See this post for more info:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?713856-AI-Cheats-Facts-and-misunderstandings

Alright then.

Being forced into rushing for army/discipline ideas and tech doesn't make EU4s combat system complicated, it just shows how broken and lopsided all the calculations are to the AI side if your high-tech highly disciplined tactically advanced military can and does take massive morale and casualty damage in every shock battle phase, as is totally historical, right? That superior formation, tactics, morale, etc militaries are forced to outnumber weaker foes simply because 1:1 is an easy way to get your stack wiped.

That's what you don't understand. That's why you don't see an issue with EU4s incredibly boring battle system where numbers are the most important factor. Because you play it straight and probably get huge casualties. And wonder why I do things like make every battle insta-wipe to save the always-retreating ping pong [then getting morale damage attacking a shattered retreating army who has .01 morale because they aren't allowed to insta-wipe for some reason].

Because the battle system is broken and heavily favors AI getting no damage.

So you are forced to doomstack.

So all battles are insta-wipes [or atleast you hope].

Because even with superior pips, morale, discipline, techs, ideas, you will get ridiculous casualties and morale damage against even a pitiful nation with 1:1 ratios of soldiers on flat lands.

So you make a huge doomstack and no longer have to worry about these fucked up, stupid calculations.

Do you understand why EU4 has a bad war system? Because numbers are the entirety of the calculation outside of horseshit dice rolls that the player needs to game in order to get anything useful out of.

Can we please stop pretending EU4 has a complicated battle system? It's build a huge stack or build more huge stacks to combat according to actual rules because the calculations are heavily against you. Also, the extent of 'flanking' in EU4 consists of.. building 6-8 mounted units and putting them in a doomstack. Man, that's some high strategy.