Warfare

This guide describes the game mechanics of the combat system for land units. For strategy advice, visit the land combat strategy guide.

Normally armies can only enter combat if a war has been declared. The only exception is fighting rebels. The actual combat mechanics for wars and rebels are the same, but the composition of armies and the strategies involved are often very different.

A war is can be unilaterally declared when a country has a casus belli. A war is declared against a single other country. Afterwards both the attacker and defender can call in their allies, and great powers can intervene. A war is then fought between those two alliances until a peace treaty between the two alliances is signed.

Organization & Strength

Every individual brigade has two values describing its current state: organization and strength. Both of these values influence how much damage a unit caan do in combat.

• Organization: Represents how orderly the formation is. Organization is regained through morale (influenced by inventions in the military tactics chain and certain leaders) and supply. Different units have different "base organisation" levels: irregulars and cavalry have the lowest, while tanks have the highest. When a regiment runs out of organization, it can no longer engage in combat. Organization damage is influenced by the discipline value of a unit: as a unit's discipline increases, it takes less organization damage. A unit with 1% discipline would take 100 times the organization damage as a unit with 100% discipline.
• Morale (Organization Regain): increases a unit's organization by 0.01 * discipline for each % of morale.
• Strength: Represents how many soldiers are in the unit. The reinforcement rate is increased largely by culture technology, available supplies, and available soldier pops. Be aware that not every soldier who gets "killed" actually dies. How many of the casualties are removed from their respective soldier pops depends on the "war hospitals" modifier, which is commonly boosted by inventions in the "Chemistry / Electricity" line of the industry tech line. Since this also boosts Supply Limits, it is a highly important tech line. Each level of attack/defence adds 10% of the base damage to the total strength damage. A value of 10 attack means a unit would inflict twice as much damage on attack as a unit with 0 attack.

Combat Characteristics

• Attack & Defense: Base values that are used for combat die rolls. Attack is used when the unit is on the attacking side, Defense is used when the unit is on the defending side.
• Recon: Improves the speed of an occupation. Recon is also used by an attacker to reduce the dig in value of that defending army, which is DIVIDED by the recon of the unit with the highest recon in the attacking army. After the first round, every time the attacker rolls higher than the defender, the remaining dig-in value is reduced by one. So, for example, if an army that has just one unit with a recon of 2 attacks a defending army that has a dig-in value of 6, when the battle begins the penalty for the attackers' roll will be 3. After the first round, the attackers need to have a higher roll than the defenders for three rounds to completely remove the dig-in penalty.
• Width: This determines how much space a brigade occupies in combat. This is important because frontage is always limited: only so many units can participate in a battle at a time. Combat width can be negatively modified by terrain. Finally, width is reduced over the course of the game as technology is researched. Frontage in the early game is massive, while by the end of the game frontage will be limited to only 10 units in the front line. Each unit takes up 1 combat width.
• Maneuver: Flanking ability. A unit with 1 maneuver value can target the unit directly in front of it; if there's no such unit it can target units diagonal to it. Higher values increases maximum targeting distance by one for each point. Practically, this means that a cavalry unit with x maneuver value could engage any enemy within 2x+1 positions on the front (only one at a time).
• Support: Support is a percentage value and represents the percentage of damage a unit in the second row can do to enemy units. This means that units such as artillery can do more damage in support than they can on the front line. 3 support means that a unit would do 3 times the damage in the second row than they would if they were on the front-line.
• Terrain: Terrain gives a negative dice modifier to an attacker's dice roll. Effectively it reduces the amount of damage an attacker can do. The modifier is dependent on the type of terrain.
• Forts: Forts add a 10% military tactics and discipline bonus to a defending unit per level of fort. In other words, forts reduce the casualties taken by the defender. This value is not visible in the battle window.
• Military tactics: Reduces strength damage taken.
• Discipline: Reduces organization damage taken and regained.

Combat

Each round of combat lasts for five days:

1. Units identify their target: for infantry this will be the unit directly in front of them. If no one is in front, they are allowed to target diagonally. Cavalry can always target diagonally.
2. A random die (0 - 9) is rolled for both the attacker and the defender
3. Modifiers are applied: entrenchments (dig-in), leaders, terrain bonuses, and potential gas attacks
4. The net difference between the attacking and defending roll determines damage inflicted.
5. Modifiers are applied: military tactics reduce the damage taken, while organization and strength also modify damage
6. Damage impacts both strength and organization, and damage occurs simultaneously for both attacker and defender
   1. Organization damage inflicted = Base Damage From Roll * (1 + attack / 10) * (100 / Discipline of Enemy Unit)
   2. Strength damage inflicted = Base Kills From Roll * (1 + attack / 10) / (1 + Enemy's Tactics / 100)
7. Damage is inflicted to soldier POPs, after being reduced by the country's Military Hospitals modifier.

Retreat

Typically, organization will run out before strength. When this happens, the unit will attempt to retreat. Retreat is only possible into provinces with no enemy presence. This therefore excludes provinces with fights going on! If no avenues of retreat are possible, the unit surrenders and is lost.

War Score

War score is the game's way of keeping track of who is winning the war. It goes in a scale from 100% (total victory) in the attackers favour to 100% in the defenders. In simple terms it means that the attacker gaining war score is exactly the same as the defender losing war score. There is an overall warscore for both of the entire alliances and a separate war score between each involved country and the opposing alliance leader. The latter is used to negotiate separate peace deals. War score affects the likelyhood of the AI accepting a peace deal, but it also considers the political and military situation. Each Casus Belli has a certain war score attached to it. Declining a losing peace deal worth less than the current actual war score will increase militancy and War exhaustion.

A positive war score is achieved through four primary ways: winning battles, completing war goals from casus belli (or preventing the opponent from doing so), blockades and occupying provinces. The maximum war score that can be achieved through winning battles is 50% in Heart of Darkness and 25% in earlier versions, thus for wars with ambitious war goals such as state acquisition it is necessary to be offensive and occupy territories. The maximum war score that can be achieved from blockades are 25%. Blockades also affects war exhaustion.

If a country signs a separate peace deal and thus exits the war their part of the war score (both positive and negative) from occupations and blockades are immidiately removed.

Note that war score should not be confused with military score which is a measure of the total army and navy of a country.

References

• Battle Calculations Explained
• A Complete Army Casualty Guide and Comparative Performance for Tech