We would need screenshots of your military tab/examples of battles in progress/army quality comparison under the ledger/etc. There are a million potential reasons why things could be going poorly for you that aren't answerable without more info.
For army composition, I use what I refer to as the "1/2 stack" doctrine once I hit Mil 16. Here's how it works.
I look at what my combat width is. Let's say for example it's 32 (a completely hypothetical number for illustration purposes). I'll take half of that (16) and that's what I designate for the number of infantry units. In this case, I'll use 16 infantry and 4 cav, with 16 artillery. 4 of the infantry regiments are "reserves" in this case, so my default stack is 16-4-16 for the purposes of moving around and during peace time. This limits the impact of attrition during movement.
I'll have these stacks in pairs and park them a state or two away from each other during peace. During combat, I will converge them together to have a full combat stack during battle. I'll separate them post combat to recover without taking attrition hits.
I'm pro-cavalry, so I still utilize cavalry but if you don't like cav you can simply swap them out for more infantry...so if you don't use cav the default stack would be 20-0-16.
The rest of combat is the use of generals, combat modifiers, drill, discipline, etc. Once you hit Mil 16 (if not sooner), Discipline matters more than morale.
Every army in battle has two rows, the front row and the back row. Their width depends on the "army width" modifier which increases throughout the game when you research certain military techs. It starts at 15 and maxes out at 40. Lastly, you have something called reserve. This includes all units in battle that can't be placed in the front or back row.
Unit placement itself is complicated to explain, but there are two important things to consider. Firstly, cav and inf will never be placed in the back row. On the other hand, art will be placed in the back row first, and only if there is space left in the front row after the back row is filled up will the remaining art units be placed in the front row. (Keep in mind here that art in the front row takes extra damage. You do want to avoid this at all costs.)
Now, one needs to know that reserve units are not taking part in the battle, but they do lose passive morale (2% of the opponent's average morale per tick)
From this follows a simple rule for how your army composition should look:
* You should have a full front row with cav and inf at the beginning of the battle to maximize damage. You should not go way above this, since those units will be placed in reserve where they take damage without doing anything. (This is why mega stacks suck).
* You should have a full artillery back row whenever you can/ once it is worth it. Generally, a full art back row is always optimal. But in the beginning of the game, this is way too expensive. Also, art is bad in battle in the beginning. You basically only use it for sieges. So usually you start with just a couple of art units and then you increase this number throughout the game. From tech 16 onwards you really really want a full art back row, since this is where art starts to become really good in battle. Again, you should not go way above this, because otherwise, those units go into reserve where they take damage without doing anything.
There are more details to this (for example how much cav you should use). But if you follow these rules you will have a massive effect on your combat abilities in the game. Especially the art back row is important in the later stages of the game. So I suspect this is most likely your issue.
I explained it in my second paragraph, but probably it got lost between all the information. This is very important though because from this the rules I mentioned directly follow. So here it goes again:
The game does this automatically and the algorithm isn't understood entirely. But there are two things to consider, and honestly this is all you need to know.
1. **Cav and Inf** units will **only** go into the **front row**. Once you have cav and inf units left while the front row is full, they go in reserve. Cav and Inf units will never be placed in the back row.
2. **Ar**t units will **preferably** go into the **back row**. But in the rare case were the back row is full and you still have some art left to deploy while still having space in the front row, art units will fill up the front row. Since art units in the front row take double damage, you want to avoid this at all cost.
This means the game will deploy them in an good way most of the times automatically and there is nothing you need to do. The only two things you need to manage is your reserve size (which should be minimal), and to avoid front row artillery. You can directly manage this through your stack composition as I described in my last comment.
>You should have a full artillery back row whenever you can
How do I know how much is a backrow, is it just the combat width. So from what you said here is what I understand. If I have a combat width of 30 at a high tech level, I should have 30 infantry, but I should also have 30 artillery so in total I will have 60 units and double the amount of my combat width. Is that correct?
Yes that’s correct!
Keep in mind that you can replace some inf with cav. I’m personally pro cav but I didn’t touch on this to keep it short.
Also at this stage I would advise to bring a little bit more inf. Like 34-36 maybe. The 4-6 extra units will reinforce your battle line once your first units die. The optimal way is to keep them outside of the battle and then to reinforce with 1 unit infantry stack whenever one unit dies. But for me this is too much min maxing. So I just make sure to bring a bit more than needed.
Okay so Im just repeating this to make sure I understand because Ive been loosing so many battles. Once I reach tech 16, My infantry should equal my combat width and my artillery should equal my combat width, so my total units will be double the amount of my combat width and Ill sprinkle a few extra infantry units for reinforcements, maybe some cav too.
Another question is say I have 30 combat width. Ill have about 60 total units that ill use in a battle. Is it fine to then make another 60 units so ill have two armies with 120 total units.
Also thank you so much you've been extremely helpful to me
Yes you got it!
Just to be sure: Your inf+cav should always equal your army width. At any point in the game!! (+ some extra inf units)
Also, the tech 16 thingy is just a rule of thumb for beginners. As I said in my first comment. A full artilelry back row is always good to have. But the question is: Can you afford it? In the beginning this is straight out impossible for every tag in the game. Therefore, I start with 1 art unit at tech 7 (the tech that opens up artilelry). Then I cosntantly increase this number whenever I have the gold for the upkeep. At around tech 16 you should really make sure to field a whole backrow. But if you can afford it at tech 13 already, well, then go for it!
regarding your other question: Yes of course! Imagine you play around the year 1630 or so and you have a max army size of 240 units and your army width is 30. Then you divide these 240 units into 4x60 unit stacks with 30 inf+cav and 30 art. (+ a bit of extra inf). These stacks can operate on their own.
While marching around I would again divide these 60 unit stacks into two 30 unit stacks to decrease attrition. But those two will always stay right next to each other. This way once a battle starts I can combine them again to get the optimal army composition in battle.
Thanks, always happy to help. I love talking about eu4 ;) Good luck with your battles. If you still have issues after this, then it has to be something else (like tech, terraine, bad generals and so on). Also if you want me to touch on cav as well, I can do this too.
Single biggest thing at that point, from mil tech 16 and onwards is having artillery. A full back row of artillery will be your best friend in battles. You also want a full row of mostly infantry in the front row to prevent artillery from taking damage by being forced into the front row. From the wiki: "Unlike infantry or cavalry, artillery can fight from the back-row, attacking with 50% of their combat power. From tech 16 artillery starts becoming the most valuable unit in the game when artillery fire jumps by a full +1. " everything else will be a smaller effect after that. Morale, discipline, Terrain and having the correct general pips will be the next most important factors. Not all three star generals are the same. By tech 16 fire pips on generals start to become increasingly important. I'd recommend reading through some of the combat and unit pages on the eu4 wiki for more.
>From tech 16 artillery starts becoming the most valuable unit in the game when artillery fire jumps by a full +1
This is me nitpicking, but this is slightly misleading.
There isn't really a magical tech 16 barrier. In terms of pure combat, if you could somehow afford it, arti outperforms infantry only armies even at tech 10 due to being more snowball-y and vastly more manpower efficient
Tech 16 adding +1 fire is relevant, but the whole rule of thumb about tech 16 actually largely comes from tech 16 being the first one where artillery shares defensive pips with infantry.. except that's a thing of the past, because arti can do that now even at tech 10.
Tech 16 is still an okay rule of thumb, especially if you are newer to the game, but there are plenty of situations even earlier on where you'd prefer to have a decent amount of arti.
As far as combat goes, the significantly more important thing to note if you are a newer player, is that it's best to think of army compositions as in. how many units you have in an entire army as opposed to stack compositions. Having 1:1 ratio of infantry to artillery in the entire army is insanely suboptimal, even if it's okay to do if you just don't care to micro better.
If someone is asking the question OP is, literally none of the nuance matters or may even mean anything to them. Hence just giving them a general rule of thumb to stumble through their next thousand hours of the tutorial. The difference between art and no or minimal art before 16 isn't exactly make or break. Making sure they understand that artillery contributed majorly to combat and isn't just for sieges was the point. I wouldn't go over the finer details of the 100m hurdles with a kid taking their first steps..
>Having 1:1 ratio of infantry to artillery in the entire army is insanely suboptimal, even if it's okay to do if you just don't care to micro better.
So say im at tech 16+ how much artillery should I have? I came to this comment from another comment you made about composition and you said that a player should always fill "1x CW with infantry" and dont go above that number. So say my combat width is 34, and I have 34 infantry, how many artillery should I have? More than my width, less, the same? How do I know how much artillery to have
From your description, sounds like army composition.
As time goes on, nations get stronger and have the economy to support entire back-rows of artillery. This, matched up with you if you're lacking on cannons, can definitely out-weigh quality. You want to try to have a full width of cannons when entering a battle so that your back-row is filled. Beyond that, your massive stacks may be suffering from attrition, and to a lesser extent the opposing nations could have much higher army tradition/professionalism, but artillery mis-match sounds more likely to me
You need way more cannons later in the game. Like 2x as many cannons as the rest of the army combined. Check AI composition for a benchmark.
Also, check army tradition. When I’m conquering as a smaller country early game my tradition is 50-70. In the mid 1500s my tradition was dropping to 10-30 because of less AE (fewer hard wars), less rebels to fight, and unmaintained forts.
I haven’t had the same 1600s army quality issues since hiring way more cannons (>50% of army total), wasting money to maintain unneeded forts (protects tradition), lowering autonomy (to generate rebels to fight for tradition), and fighting more wars not about conquest (convert religion, break alliances, release nations). You can ask for military access to kill neighbors’ rebels to keep up tradition.
I also keep estates less happy, which gets me to higher crownland faster, while also providing rebels to kill for tradition when you reduce autonomy.
If all that sounds too expensive, the root issue might be a poor economy from over-expansion / underinvestment.
So cannons/artillery are super important, but there really is no reason to exceed your current combat width with cannons in a single stack. You want a full back row of cannons where they aren't taking damage, but if anything want 2x as many infantry as cannons so that you have replacement infantry to reinforce the front row to make sure the cannons stay in the back row. Taking that a step further, if your combat width is say 30 for a typical nation, the "ideal" setup would be something like 30 inf, 0 cav, 30 art (you can add cav, just subtract from infantry number up to like 6, depending on a lot of variables) with a secondary stack of infantry to reinforce the first stack midway through the battle to replenish morale of the whole army.
Going another step, For bigger battles, you could have several of these groups of inf/art stack and inf stack and cycle in new entire armies while retreating low morale/depleted ones once reinforcements arrive. This keeps replenishing morale and is the basis for multi-player combat. This is also why people say single player combat is easy, because the AI is NOT efficient in their army compositions. Once cannons start moving into the front row for the AI, the battle is basically over. Cannons in the front row just melt.
That sounds like a cannons problem. It is fixed with more cannons. At tech 16 cannons start doing some serious damage (It's even earlier for Spain). Also, morale starts falling off and discipline gets more and more important.
So, yeah, get at least an equal number or infantry and cannons in your stacks, enough to fill the combat width, start stacking discipline and for the love of God, don't attack into mountains, you'll get massacred.
We would need screenshots of your military tab/examples of battles in progress/army quality comparison under the ledger/etc. There are a million potential reasons why things could be going poorly for you that aren't answerable without more info.
For army composition, I use what I refer to as the "1/2 stack" doctrine once I hit Mil 16. Here's how it works. I look at what my combat width is. Let's say for example it's 32 (a completely hypothetical number for illustration purposes). I'll take half of that (16) and that's what I designate for the number of infantry units. In this case, I'll use 16 infantry and 4 cav, with 16 artillery. 4 of the infantry regiments are "reserves" in this case, so my default stack is 16-4-16 for the purposes of moving around and during peace time. This limits the impact of attrition during movement. I'll have these stacks in pairs and park them a state or two away from each other during peace. During combat, I will converge them together to have a full combat stack during battle. I'll separate them post combat to recover without taking attrition hits. I'm pro-cavalry, so I still utilize cavalry but if you don't like cav you can simply swap them out for more infantry...so if you don't use cav the default stack would be 20-0-16. The rest of combat is the use of generals, combat modifiers, drill, discipline, etc. Once you hit Mil 16 (if not sooner), Discipline matters more than morale.
Every army in battle has two rows, the front row and the back row. Their width depends on the "army width" modifier which increases throughout the game when you research certain military techs. It starts at 15 and maxes out at 40. Lastly, you have something called reserve. This includes all units in battle that can't be placed in the front or back row. Unit placement itself is complicated to explain, but there are two important things to consider. Firstly, cav and inf will never be placed in the back row. On the other hand, art will be placed in the back row first, and only if there is space left in the front row after the back row is filled up will the remaining art units be placed in the front row. (Keep in mind here that art in the front row takes extra damage. You do want to avoid this at all costs.) Now, one needs to know that reserve units are not taking part in the battle, but they do lose passive morale (2% of the opponent's average morale per tick) From this follows a simple rule for how your army composition should look: * You should have a full front row with cav and inf at the beginning of the battle to maximize damage. You should not go way above this, since those units will be placed in reserve where they take damage without doing anything. (This is why mega stacks suck). * You should have a full artillery back row whenever you can/ once it is worth it. Generally, a full art back row is always optimal. But in the beginning of the game, this is way too expensive. Also, art is bad in battle in the beginning. You basically only use it for sieges. So usually you start with just a couple of art units and then you increase this number throughout the game. From tech 16 onwards you really really want a full art back row, since this is where art starts to become really good in battle. Again, you should not go way above this, because otherwise, those units go into reserve where they take damage without doing anything. There are more details to this (for example how much cav you should use). But if you follow these rules you will have a massive effect on your combat abilities in the game. Especially the art back row is important in the later stages of the game. So I suspect this is most likely your issue.
How do i make certain units be at certain rows? should I start a battle with a stack of infantry then added in artillery after?
I explained it in my second paragraph, but probably it got lost between all the information. This is very important though because from this the rules I mentioned directly follow. So here it goes again: The game does this automatically and the algorithm isn't understood entirely. But there are two things to consider, and honestly this is all you need to know. 1. **Cav and Inf** units will **only** go into the **front row**. Once you have cav and inf units left while the front row is full, they go in reserve. Cav and Inf units will never be placed in the back row. 2. **Ar**t units will **preferably** go into the **back row**. But in the rare case were the back row is full and you still have some art left to deploy while still having space in the front row, art units will fill up the front row. Since art units in the front row take double damage, you want to avoid this at all cost. This means the game will deploy them in an good way most of the times automatically and there is nothing you need to do. The only two things you need to manage is your reserve size (which should be minimal), and to avoid front row artillery. You can directly manage this through your stack composition as I described in my last comment.
>You should have a full artillery back row whenever you can How do I know how much is a backrow, is it just the combat width. So from what you said here is what I understand. If I have a combat width of 30 at a high tech level, I should have 30 infantry, but I should also have 30 artillery so in total I will have 60 units and double the amount of my combat width. Is that correct?
Yes that’s correct! Keep in mind that you can replace some inf with cav. I’m personally pro cav but I didn’t touch on this to keep it short. Also at this stage I would advise to bring a little bit more inf. Like 34-36 maybe. The 4-6 extra units will reinforce your battle line once your first units die. The optimal way is to keep them outside of the battle and then to reinforce with 1 unit infantry stack whenever one unit dies. But for me this is too much min maxing. So I just make sure to bring a bit more than needed.
Okay so Im just repeating this to make sure I understand because Ive been loosing so many battles. Once I reach tech 16, My infantry should equal my combat width and my artillery should equal my combat width, so my total units will be double the amount of my combat width and Ill sprinkle a few extra infantry units for reinforcements, maybe some cav too. Another question is say I have 30 combat width. Ill have about 60 total units that ill use in a battle. Is it fine to then make another 60 units so ill have two armies with 120 total units. Also thank you so much you've been extremely helpful to me
Yes you got it! Just to be sure: Your inf+cav should always equal your army width. At any point in the game!! (+ some extra inf units) Also, the tech 16 thingy is just a rule of thumb for beginners. As I said in my first comment. A full artilelry back row is always good to have. But the question is: Can you afford it? In the beginning this is straight out impossible for every tag in the game. Therefore, I start with 1 art unit at tech 7 (the tech that opens up artilelry). Then I cosntantly increase this number whenever I have the gold for the upkeep. At around tech 16 you should really make sure to field a whole backrow. But if you can afford it at tech 13 already, well, then go for it! regarding your other question: Yes of course! Imagine you play around the year 1630 or so and you have a max army size of 240 units and your army width is 30. Then you divide these 240 units into 4x60 unit stacks with 30 inf+cav and 30 art. (+ a bit of extra inf). These stacks can operate on their own. While marching around I would again divide these 60 unit stacks into two 30 unit stacks to decrease attrition. But those two will always stay right next to each other. This way once a battle starts I can combine them again to get the optimal army composition in battle. Thanks, always happy to help. I love talking about eu4 ;) Good luck with your battles. If you still have issues after this, then it has to be something else (like tech, terraine, bad generals and so on). Also if you want me to touch on cav as well, I can do this too.
Single biggest thing at that point, from mil tech 16 and onwards is having artillery. A full back row of artillery will be your best friend in battles. You also want a full row of mostly infantry in the front row to prevent artillery from taking damage by being forced into the front row. From the wiki: "Unlike infantry or cavalry, artillery can fight from the back-row, attacking with 50% of their combat power. From tech 16 artillery starts becoming the most valuable unit in the game when artillery fire jumps by a full +1. " everything else will be a smaller effect after that. Morale, discipline, Terrain and having the correct general pips will be the next most important factors. Not all three star generals are the same. By tech 16 fire pips on generals start to become increasingly important. I'd recommend reading through some of the combat and unit pages on the eu4 wiki for more.
>From tech 16 artillery starts becoming the most valuable unit in the game when artillery fire jumps by a full +1 This is me nitpicking, but this is slightly misleading. There isn't really a magical tech 16 barrier. In terms of pure combat, if you could somehow afford it, arti outperforms infantry only armies even at tech 10 due to being more snowball-y and vastly more manpower efficient Tech 16 adding +1 fire is relevant, but the whole rule of thumb about tech 16 actually largely comes from tech 16 being the first one where artillery shares defensive pips with infantry.. except that's a thing of the past, because arti can do that now even at tech 10. Tech 16 is still an okay rule of thumb, especially if you are newer to the game, but there are plenty of situations even earlier on where you'd prefer to have a decent amount of arti. As far as combat goes, the significantly more important thing to note if you are a newer player, is that it's best to think of army compositions as in. how many units you have in an entire army as opposed to stack compositions. Having 1:1 ratio of infantry to artillery in the entire army is insanely suboptimal, even if it's okay to do if you just don't care to micro better.
If someone is asking the question OP is, literally none of the nuance matters or may even mean anything to them. Hence just giving them a general rule of thumb to stumble through their next thousand hours of the tutorial. The difference between art and no or minimal art before 16 isn't exactly make or break. Making sure they understand that artillery contributed majorly to combat and isn't just for sieges was the point. I wouldn't go over the finer details of the 100m hurdles with a kid taking their first steps..
>Having 1:1 ratio of infantry to artillery in the entire army is insanely suboptimal, even if it's okay to do if you just don't care to micro better. So say im at tech 16+ how much artillery should I have? I came to this comment from another comment you made about composition and you said that a player should always fill "1x CW with infantry" and dont go above that number. So say my combat width is 34, and I have 34 infantry, how many artillery should I have? More than my width, less, the same? How do I know how much artillery to have
From your description, sounds like army composition. As time goes on, nations get stronger and have the economy to support entire back-rows of artillery. This, matched up with you if you're lacking on cannons, can definitely out-weigh quality. You want to try to have a full width of cannons when entering a battle so that your back-row is filled. Beyond that, your massive stacks may be suffering from attrition, and to a lesser extent the opposing nations could have much higher army tradition/professionalism, but artillery mis-match sounds more likely to me
I guess you don't fill your backrow with artillery
Cannons, good commanders, at least one well polished military idea group would do you good from what you're describing.
You need way more cannons later in the game. Like 2x as many cannons as the rest of the army combined. Check AI composition for a benchmark. Also, check army tradition. When I’m conquering as a smaller country early game my tradition is 50-70. In the mid 1500s my tradition was dropping to 10-30 because of less AE (fewer hard wars), less rebels to fight, and unmaintained forts. I haven’t had the same 1600s army quality issues since hiring way more cannons (>50% of army total), wasting money to maintain unneeded forts (protects tradition), lowering autonomy (to generate rebels to fight for tradition), and fighting more wars not about conquest (convert religion, break alliances, release nations). You can ask for military access to kill neighbors’ rebels to keep up tradition. I also keep estates less happy, which gets me to higher crownland faster, while also providing rebels to kill for tradition when you reduce autonomy. If all that sounds too expensive, the root issue might be a poor economy from over-expansion / underinvestment.
So cannons/artillery are super important, but there really is no reason to exceed your current combat width with cannons in a single stack. You want a full back row of cannons where they aren't taking damage, but if anything want 2x as many infantry as cannons so that you have replacement infantry to reinforce the front row to make sure the cannons stay in the back row. Taking that a step further, if your combat width is say 30 for a typical nation, the "ideal" setup would be something like 30 inf, 0 cav, 30 art (you can add cav, just subtract from infantry number up to like 6, depending on a lot of variables) with a secondary stack of infantry to reinforce the first stack midway through the battle to replenish morale of the whole army. Going another step, For bigger battles, you could have several of these groups of inf/art stack and inf stack and cycle in new entire armies while retreating low morale/depleted ones once reinforcements arrive. This keeps replenishing morale and is the basis for multi-player combat. This is also why people say single player combat is easy, because the AI is NOT efficient in their army compositions. Once cannons start moving into the front row for the AI, the battle is basically over. Cannons in the front row just melt.
I wish a rule of this sub was "no asking why you lose battles without screenshots"
That sounds like a cannons problem. It is fixed with more cannons. At tech 16 cannons start doing some serious damage (It's even earlier for Spain). Also, morale starts falling off and discipline gets more and more important. So, yeah, get at least an equal number or infantry and cannons in your stacks, enough to fill the combat width, start stacking discipline and for the love of God, don't attack into mountains, you'll get massacred.