Europa Fucking Universalis: Is the dice loaded?

[Captain Shrek]

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[Raapys]

Yes, you're quite likely doing something wrong. Is there a significant tech level or unit level difference between the armies? Are you, by chance, running bankrupt and taking up loans? Are you using decent generals?

 

[MetalCraze]

If you are playing on hard difficulty AI gets bonuses to combat.

Then of course stuff like quality/quantity and serfdom/free subjects comes into play which affects your army's discipline/morale.

So if, say, your army policy is more to the quantity side while enemy's army policy is to the quality side and you have 10k of your people fighting 10k of his people you will always lose (however you can have a bigger army overall and can win a war of attrition by simply making his reserves run empty)

Have you also put your military expenditure to the max? Because you won't win any battles with it to the minimum (but I'm sure you know that, right?)

 

[Raapys]

That's a bit odd. Even on hard difficulty the differences shouldn't be this big.

Does your armies have morale? I.e. are you funding your ground troops properly? Where's your Land - Naval policy slider at? Are you trying to attack provinces with rivers?

You can hire generals in one of the screens, it costs 'Land Tradition'.

There might be several things working against you. They could have better slider positions than you in addition to having (possibly good) generals and any bonuses gained from the difficulty setting.

 

[MetalCraze]

Yup the expenditure is up to max. I think its the problem with the difficulty setting and/or the quality/quantity slider. But that takes 10 years to change!! And I start with 75% towards the quantity option .

Well if he has his slider to the quality side
and another slider to Land side
and another one to Free Subjects side and you have the opposite - then his army will beat your ass always.

With quality+free subjects+land focus an army of 10k can beat an army of up to 30k with the opposite focus.

However another important thing there is the tech. school. Now I don't think I know where those shitholes are, but if you have an eastern tech. school and he has a western tech. school that adds to you being screwed.

EDIT: I forgot about offensive/defensive focuses. Those influence the dice as well.

 

[Raapys]

No, when you hover over the slider you see the effects you're currently getting. When you hover over the arrow buttons to the side, you see how those effects will change.

Never bothered much with the difficulty setting myself, but isn't it in the options menu?

 

[MetalCraze]

No sliders affect things gradually. What you get in a pop up of each side of the slider is the max. effect you will get when you put the slider there.

What you have right now you see when you move your mouse pointer at a slider itself.

There are difficulty settings. On the screen where you choose a country there's an options button. When you click it there are difficulty settings.

As you haven't touched them you are playing on 'normal' which doesn't give any bonuses or penalties to anyone.


EU3 may only seem confusing at a first look but indeed the mechanics are pretty simple once you understand them.

There should be some manuals in PDF in Chronicles. Other than that I would also recommend you to google for EU3Wiki. There is a lot of good stuff to help you understand what the fuck is going on.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Yeah, the other difficulty levels suck in EU3. I don't think it makes the AI any better, just screws you.

 

[MetalCraze]

And screws you hard

http://www.paradoxian.org/eu3wiki/Game_difficulty

The major bad thing about EU3 AI is that it lacks organisation in combat. Won't be noticeable until the late game but then you will start to notice that it never tries to really gang up on you.

 

[Destroid]

I sure noticed 60k strong Russian armies O_O

In Magna Mundi that is.

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

Well the dice roll part has already been explained, but for the whole casualties suffered from rolls how does your army composition compared to Ais? In low tech levels cavalry is pretty much the only thing that actually kills stuff while infantry is mostly useless except for sieges. This will be even more increased if he is ahead you in military tech even one lvel can be enough if it unlocks a new unit type.

 

[Destroid]

http://www.paradoxian.org/eu3wiki/Military

This explains the rather obtuse system used.

 

[kasmas]

He is Vij fighting Deccan , at worst they will be 1 land tech ahead or so .
I 'd say use more Hill Cavalry

 

[MetalCraze]

Try playing HoI3. It has "ololo look Hitler" instead of tutorial. So EU3's non-existant tutorial is perfection compared to that.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

No sliders affect things gradually. What you get in a pop up of each side of the slider is the max. effect you will get when you put the slider there.

What you have right now you see when you move your mouse pointer at a slider itself.

Though to be fair, there is little reason (few random events mean nothing in the long run) to not max out one slider at a time. Then again, there's no reason to max out Quantity of Serfdom, since they just generally suck ass and Quality (and arguably Free Subjects as well, no need to even mention Centralized being vastly superior to Decentralized) is ridiculously overpowered compared to the general sucktitude of Quantity. I don't think anyone except purely island nations have use for Naval focus either, seeing how land battles ultimately decide the war (which is what caused MM mod to make the ridiculously over-the-top "balancing" for Naval Ideas methinks).

Also, as people have said before, if you ever find yourself ahead of your neighbours in Land tech and get a new unit type, attack IMMEDIATELY even without a casus belli. You will almost certainly win with your hands tied behind your back.

EDIT:

Try playing HoI3. It has "ololo look Hitler" instead of tutorial. So EU3's non-existant tutorial is perfection compared to that.

Anyway, I will be skipping Hearts. Its supposed to be low on Economy/technology development and high on combat as compared to Europa. Will try Vicky though.

HoI as a series has probably the most detailed technology system used by Paradox strategy games. HoI3 has the most detailed tech system hands down, by a large margin. Economy is also more detailed than EU's.

 

[Destroid]

He is Vij fighting Deccan , at worst they will be 1 land tech ahead or so .
I 'd say use more Hill Cavalry

YUP. THAT was the fucking issue. It seems that cavalry is *VERY* effective against infantry. A decent in game help section would be very appreciated. But no, we have got to do faggotry, no?

In one of the tabs you can see some fire and shock values for them (not how many blocks they have, a decimal number) this is the casualty multiplier. For inf it starts at about 0.1 and cav at about 0.5.

 

[Pony King]

More specifically: you will find numbers for all kinds of things in the ledger and I'd strongly recommend getting intimate with it.