total war against AustriaÉ

[henri51]

As France, at one point after beating Austria, Sweden, Prussia and Russia ansd getting 0-2 territories from the surrender treaty, I decided to try to beat Austria in a total war. This means that I had to win every Austrian province, and there are a LOT of them. Tp get to the point, it is impossible, even at the easier levels.

After a half-dozen victories, I noticed that the provinces I had conquered were reverting back to Austria, so one must garrison conquered provinces. Since militia units seem to refuse to move to conquered provinces, it means that each time one gains a province, one must remove an infantry unit from the army; so after a dozen victories, your armies have a dozen fewer units, not to mention units lost to combat.

Replacements are much slower to come and more expensive, and the result is that when I had conquered more than 2é3 of Austrian provinces, my large armies had dwindled to less than half their original size, with units that were down to less than half of their original numbers of soldiers.To make things worse, despite having only a few provinces left, Austria seemed to be able to make more units than I cold destroy every move. I was killing between 7500-30,000 Austrians per move, but Austria had no trouble producing more than I could kill. Is the AI cheating here? Even if Britain and others were giving the Austrians money, how do they produce so many units so fast? At one point both Russia and Prussia were also at war with Austria, but still they resisted the onslaught.

If you lose ONE major battle, that whole army becomes essentially useless for the rest of the war, unless you waste many moves moving it back to friendly territory to refit. When I succombed to the temptation to split my large armies, the Austrians would show up with a large army of their own and defeat my former Grande Armee, and one or two such losses means the failure of the whole campaign. And those small Austrian units keep attacking the conquered provinces where I have a single infantry in garrison, who tend to fall in one or two moves whereas it usually takes me three or more with a large army to get them to fall.Apparently the Austrians eentujally got a traty with the Prussians allowing them to move through Prussian territory, so Austrian armies with one or two infantry units would station themselves on the Prussian side of the border until I would move away, then assault the border provinces I had previously conquered, forcing me to backtrack to recapture the province, while the Austrians recaptured the provinces in the othr direction.

Here I was playing at the easier level, with all opponents down one slot in power; I hate to think of the whalloping I would take at normal or difficult levels.

After five hours of play, and now stalled with Austria down to a half-dozen provinces and all of my armies whittled down and getting worse, I finally gave up and pulled all of my units back to France and went to bed. (I was unable to get a response from my cease-fire proposal). Maybe I will just surrender to get the experience, temporarily have to give away a couple of provinces, and go back to the normal victory conditions of one or two proninces from each campaign.

The problem is that without total war, one can NEVER conquer all of Austria (not to mentkion getting to Moscow), because after each surrender that gives one at most two provinces, one has to wait at least a year before one can declare war again, so even neglecting the time it takes to win a campaign, to get 24 provinces would take more than 12 years, and I thnk Austria has more than 24 provinces.

In sum, from this experience, gaining all of Austria as Napoleon did seems utterly impossible, as the game seems programmed to prevent any one nation from getting very much more than its original provinces. But Napoleon conquered not only Austria, he had his brothers and marshalls sitting on the thrones of Austria, Sweden, Italy and others.

Henri

And please don't reply "I know Napoleon, and you, sir are no Napoleon!..."[:'(]

Of course unless one wants to spend a year playing the campaign, one has to go to simple combat. So I was fighting most of the time at odds of 5/1 to 10/1, for the reasons mentioned above.

[Hard Sarge]

LOL

you just did it wrong is all, you need to wear them down some, before going for total war, and if you know you are going to go for total war, you need to have the side troops ready, for the drop off

the idea from the designer is, Total War is not something to be taken lightly

try to take Spain, from the start with Total War

it is doable and doable with the higher diff levels in effect, you just have to plan for it better

[barbarossa2]

Henri, sounds like an interesting war.

But Napoleon did not "conquer" all of Austria in the way you might mean it here.  He forced her to sign a treaty in 1805 and again in 1809.  Stripping her of lands. 

I do like the sound of it being very difficult to win a war of extermination against your opponent. That's the way it should be.  I wonder if WCS considered the campaign waged by Napoleon in Spain historically to have been a "total war".

I have to admit, it does seem a bit, "gimmicky" that one is not allowed to escalate from a normal war to a total war (I believe), but one must make this choice as soon as the war is declared. I do understand the point A LITTLE. But I think what is more realistic is allowing escalation. Should total war be declared, massive revolts and rebellions in the target nation would occur (a la Paris Commune of 1871). Also a massive loss in Glory or International Standing for the attacker--much as Prussia began to suffer during the 1870-71 war as Berlin made it clear that they wanted not only a peace from France, but also regions of France and that they would not accept a simple surrender. Britain, who was initially pro-Prussia in 1870, almost switched sides as it became more and more obvious that the Prussians would not stop and as the suffering in Paris continued during the seige. I think we have a lot to learn about how these situaitons can play out by looking at that situation. And what is interesting is that Prussia didn't even want ALL of France. Just a little tiny piece, and there was the rise of the Commune, and hundreds of thousands of extra men were raised to kick the Prussians out.

Imagine the unrest and internaitonal opposition if the Prussians would have announced their sudden desire to annex ALL of France.

There are major costs to chopping up countries wholesale, and I do not believe that CoG:EE has really scratched the surface.

[ptan54]

None of the great powers in the game were ever totally annexed during this timeline.

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: ptan54

None of the great powers in the game were ever totally annexed during this timeline.

No kidding . . . well that right there tells me that the difficulties recounted are totally reasonable.

Unlike some other recent games that cover the same period and in which it seems it is virtually impossible NOT to conquer everything on the map, it sounds like COGEE is more true to real history.

So far, I'm up to about early 1794 in my own Difficult/Difficult game as France. Will keep you guys posted on what happens, but so far I seem to be doing okay just basicaly sitting back in France, building up infrastructure economy military, and fighting defensively as everyone sequentially jumps on the bandwagon to war against me.

[Mus]

I have successfully conquered Prussia in Total war.  It took about a year, and about 75% of my French army to do it.  I think I had 4 Corps that werent involved, 12 or so that were.  1 was sitting on Brest to guard against an English descent on the coast to seize my blockaded fleets there.  2 on the Rhine and 1 in the vicinity of Venice, all 3 of those intended to guard my protectorates from any sudden attack by Austria while I was busy with Prussia.  I ended up having to replay the last 6 months or so of that Prussian campaign because a bug caused me to be unable to demand back a province Austria conquered before surrendering.

I found garrisoning conquered provinces with a single infantry insufficient.  Because of guerilla activity you need larger detachments to permanently hold the territory.  I would detach 2-4 divisions of troops per province.

ORIGINAL: ptan54

None of the great powers in the game were ever totally annexed during this timeline.

Not annexed, but Prussia was pretty much a French puppet state from 1807 to the end of 1812.

The only way Ive been able to do the things that Napoleon historically made the Prussians do is after wiping them out through total war, something that maybe should be addressed as once you wipe them out they arent there to "rebel" later on if things go badly for France, as they did historically.