The Big Issues that need to be resolved

[vaalen]

As far as the armies are concerned, my point is that there should be both a political and economic cost for building up your army. The starting Armies seem to be about right, but adding to that massively should be punished.

Especially in the democracies, I just can't see the people of the UK or US in that period accepting a massive buildup of the military.

Just finished reading a book about the presidency of James K. Polk and the Mexican war, and he had immense trouble in the middle of the war in adding even a few regiments to the regular army.

Britain had similar issues.

The dictatorships would have less political issues. (Although there are always internal political issues that must be kept in mind.)

And I'm still waiting for firm word from the developers that the diplomatic system will be fixed.

This, in my mind, is the last major issue.

Everything else can be resolved by modding the game.

Now that I understand your point better, I agree completely about the standing armies. There is already a limit on the number of a particular unit you can build. Perhaps this should be revised downward, with the limit lifted in wartime.

I agree completely that the diplomatic system needs improvement. The event system for historical wars, like the Crimean War, is clumsy and confusing to use, in addition to the problems you have mentioned.

[yellow ribbon]

no, not a limit of the number of a certain unit.

it should be a more simple solution.

in the moment you can build numberless brigades for colonial wars, if you run out of brigades, build divisions, than if you run out of divisions, corps...

there could be implemented a threshold of regiments per nationality bound to population... the rest is history, who used better war machinery first.

a second thing:

recruits... good to have a reserve and this has a ceiling to a certain upper limit (bound to population already as i understood the system).

however, it can be exploited to easy:

build a corps, or a couple of smaller units, recruits go down to zero and now start to recover REALLY FAST... as lower the number of recruits as more you get per turn...
i never lacked recruits, only officers.

I do only see one problem in my minds about it, there does appear to be already a effect in wartime.
In USA GC ACW i do have moments where i get about 56 and even 60 recruits per turn (means in five turn you can build a corps), in peacetime about 15 (20-25 turns for a corps)...

tricky, but one day i will use a weekend to mod this. maybe after i finished the first GC

but as the game is new, i would like to play it pure and enjoy improvements by patches first, to get a better insight

[SonOfAGhost]

I'm going to disagree on military build up having a negative impact on contentment/militancy. Even in the democracies of the time, they could have conscripted the disaffected and ship them overseas. Presto! No more discontent.

This wasn't done for 3 reasons.

The first 2 are economic.
The cost to the state of training, equipping and maintaining a large force.
The negative impact that would be experienced in the economy by decimating the workforce.

Third was the impact on foreign relations. See the arms and alliance races leading up to WWI

So yes, it should have a high cost, just not on the domestic politics front.

[montgomeryjlion]

With all due respect, that's so much BS.

If the president of the US decided to raise the US Army to 6 corps, first of all Congress would never have approved it. No chance. Without them, it couldn't happen. Second of all, the US people would never have agreed. Read some history.

Same issue in the UK. Parliament would have gone ballistic at any such idea.
Do some reading on something like the Sudan expedition or the First Transvaal war and see how many problems the Government had convincing the Parliament to even send out small forces, much less raising large forces.

Never would happen.

To use your analogy, can you say the Canadian Government today could raise the army to 6 Corps, and "simply conscript... the disaffected and ship them overseas?". Presto, no more issue?
No chance.

Even in countries like Austria or Prussia, I can't imagine them trying to massively raise the size of their armies without immense internal tumult.

[yellow ribbon]

gentlemen, i think you are talking about two different points of view!


the first objective as mont. writes is, to get a variable that includes a number of troops bound to the actual state of policy in a country.

"BOUND IT TO / MAKE IT DEPENDING OF"

a professional army is a professional army and, to stay with the example of UK, may be only extended by events in case of war.

UK always recruited the scum from the streets in case of war, some most disloyay were used in India, while not seen fit/loyal enough to serve in Flanders and at the spanish peninsula

AGEOD has a lot of experience with this for instance the AACW game and its implemented already in the game.
so we need only a clear ceiling not to expand troops over this certain point, simulating the difference from using the army (the fleet can be excluded from this point of view, techs and resources are the key here)

extending the event base might be a way later (in case of modding) i.e. GERMAN , not Prussian, general military service and so one makes this historically correct possible, while UKs professionalism is restricting it.

or like US ACW, when Union starts with plenty of militia
(if you want to have fun, compare the rate of recruits in the american-mexican war, to the rate of deserters. even the CSA did better some 20 years later )

everything we would need therefore is in the database and only a question of how and when, not if it is possible.


****************
the second is:

IS SUCH A LIMIT ENOUGH / feasible?

if we cannot implement a limit while paying many troops and raising all this recruits does not damage the economy,

how do we prevent it, make it, lets say, uninteresting.

the question of penalty effects can be avoided at all, if someone would decide to bound recruits / number of military units to certain given database of every country (like information from the F1 ledger) or even to the population in a certain decade of the game.

************

as i say, an ad hoc solution would be to cut the total number of regiments available for a nation, to fix it to a further variable.

the hard way would simply be, as we are talking about a time women still were wearing skirts only and had to look lovely aside the men, as more troops, as lower the efficiency of production.

why is this the hard way? it would probably kill the poor fellow who has to balance it, for the negative effects would surely be outclassed by progressive research and so one.... we would have to put him into a asylum afterwards

[SonOfAGhost]

I think you're projecting today's attitudes on war and democracy on the past.

It would be more accurate to say that parliament and congress were restraints on the public desires for military action. There's a reason the African expeditions were such a hodge-podge of regiments. Far more volunteers than the government authorized to go. Even the navy had men marching through the desert to relieve Khartoum!

Exaggerating a distant crisis to inflame public passions was not unheard of or difficult to say the least. The public was consistently more war-like than the government. This continued through the Crimean, right into the beginning of WWI. It just wasn't the government doing the inflaming. My point is that it just as easily could have been government and that would have been more efficient and effective because then there would have been no restraint whatsoever.

As I said, a large military should absolutely come at a high cost. I'm merely suggesting a different cost. I think this cost is more in keeping with why governments were consistently the restraint on the public historically, as well as the effects when they changed posture leading up to WWI. The carnage of which is the reason for our modern-day reversal of historical roles where the public is now the restraint on (democratic) government's use of the military.

[Rafiki]

With all due respect, that's so much BS.

[color="Blue"]The second half of that sentence kinda cancels out the first half; care to try again? [/color]

[montgomeryjlion]

[color="Blue"]The second half of that sentence kinda cancels out the first half; care to try again? [/color]

Apologies for getting carried away

My apologies also to Son of a Ghost.

No offense meant.

[Rafiki]

No worries; just wanted to make sure things didn't get carried away any further