TREATY POINT DISTRIBUTION THREAD

[Marshal Villars]

This thread is intended to provide a separate forum for the discussion of how treaty points should be distributed among victors following peace.

Just a quick background:

Mus, a strong and regular contributor to the CoG:EE forum, has indicated that he feels that if a nation surrenders to two or more nations, that the treaty points should be distributed purely on the basis of casualties inflicted. At first I thought that this had significant merit, but I came up with a couple of scenarios which lead me to believe otherwise.

1) If you besiege an important city with few defenders you should be rewarded for that--even though you may not gain as many "kills" as someone who is engaging in large field battles. If treaty points were distributed on the basis of kills, then you would rather be taking on field armies for the points--even though the "grunt work" of besieging key cities (requiring over 40k-50k of men!) to control lines of communications or depriving an enemy of an area of operations could be considered as important. If you took a province with an important supply hub in it, you could actually indirectly kill ten thousand men (or even tens of thousands of men) if bad weather hits--doing more damage than any army would have!.

2) Another example: Let's take a look at a possible Austria vs. Russia-Ottomans-France war as an example. If Austria suddenly were to find herself at war with these three nations, and wanted to prevent the Ottomans from making the largest gains, it would seem that the logical thing to do would be to throw all of the Austrian forces into an effort to prevent the Ottomans from gaining lands (and the 1000 VP bonus which accrues for control of each province!). If Austria withdrew from the French and Russian fronts and sent all of his units to fight the Ottomans, then in effect he would be doing the opposite of what he wanted to do because the Ottomans would, in such a situation, kill many many more Austrians than either the Russians or French. In this scenario, it is entirely likely that the Russians and the French might kill a tiny fraction of the men that the Ottomans would. In effect, the Austrian would have made his situation with the Ottomans worse by fighting them--which lies entirely counter to what most of us would expect should be the case. Which is why I am for the occupation of provinces being the key factor in determining your treaty points. Perhaps then, the base treaty points should be calculated (perhaps with casualties inflicted being the chief determining factor and then on top of that each player gets a number of points equal to the number of provinces he has occupied times 1000).

TREATY POINT TRANSFER POSSIBILITIES
One thing I might like to see is a two month treaty process. That is, when the surrender is put in, on the first following turn, players who won would be notified that they had been surrendered to and how many treaty points they had gained according to the method of calculation used. In that turn they would be able to give any portion of these points to any player they desired (whether they had been involved or not I guess)--however, I am assuming in 99% of cases this would be used for giving them to another player in the coalition which had won the war. On the following turn the treaty could finally be drafted by the various parties. Perhaps players could wait to draft the treaty until the second turn if they know other players are going to be assigning them treaty points. Or, if they don't expect it to happen they could draft treaties immediately as they do now. Allowing for the transfer of points would allow players winning a war to reward participants for work which a program simply can't calculate.

[Mus]

Siege operations directed at truly important places will be most likely to draw out the enemy army for a decisive battle, so in my mind casualties caused remains the best bar for determining contribution to an allied war effort. Allowing cities taken to play a major part would allow a minor contributor to siege strategic backwaters and receive a disproportionate amount of VPs.

A game example of this is like your Austria vs France/Russia/Turkey example. Russia and Turkey can both occupy a bunch of cities of literally no importance in Eastern Austria while Austria is forced to defend its capital from France in the more important western theater and then France would get the fewest VPs even if they won all the decisive battles if too much emphasis is placed on taking relatively unimportant cities vs destroying your opponents army.

In regards to forced surrenders through morale loss, losing decisive battles is MASSIVELY more damaging to your morale than losing some cities, as is sieging truly important cities like a Capital (and thus threatening the Capital often forces a battle) so it would make sense for the person winning those battles and forcing the surrender to get the majority of the VPs.

Perhaps doubling siege casualties would make sense to make taking places have a slightly greater effect than if you only received 1x the amount of points for killing off defending militia, but care should be taken not to make taking places too important. I think too much emphasis is already on that, and not enough on destroying enemy armies.

Bear in mind we are talking about SPLITTING VPs, not generating them. If taking cities still adds to the total pool of allied VPs it still has value for the alliance, but the bulk of the win is always due to whoever wins the decisive battles, and because of that they should get proportionally more VPs.