I'm Sick Of The "Rampaging Retreating Armies"

**Sir Winston Churchill** · September 17, 2011, 08:40 PM

It's the most retarded thing I've seen, I have to spend an entire year chasing down an enemy force that has decided to get stuck in my lands.

An enemy nation naval invades my province, and due to a lack of a fort takes it. However their ships that landed them are shortly crushed thereafter, effectively stranding them there. On top of which, I send a superior force to deal with them, and are easily defeated. But instead of being put with their backs against the sea, a la Dunkirk minus the ability to evacuate, and being annihilated, they decide to retreat further into my territory. It's as if they are retreating through my force, which makes no sense. So i have to spend years following these bozo's around trying to pin them down because apparently i can't outrun them to my provinces either.

I know this has been a long-standing complaint, but you'd think they fix it by now.

**IZob** · September 17, 2011, 08:45 PM

Well which way are you gona retreat? Towards the sea, or inland where the enemy have no military presence?

**Sir Winston Churchill** · September 17, 2011, 09:50 PM

Originally Posted by IZob

Well which way are you gona retreat? Towards the sea, or inland where the enemy have no military presence?

How is it possible for them to retreat anywhere through an army? If they have no where to go, that means annilation. Routing. Surrender. Not warping through an army to access deeper territories. When the Brits were beaten into the sea at Dunkirk, they didn't retreat into Germany. When the Russians were beaten back, they didn't retreat further into Finland. Had American forces been defeated at D-Day, would they have retreated into France?

No, they would have been picked off, massacred. They'd either find a way back to the ships or surrender. There may be some pockets of resistance, but essentially, they'd have been screwed. There would not have been an entire army retreating into Paris right past the German lines as if they didn't exist.

**IZob** · September 18, 2011, 12:10 AM

Originally Posted by The Royal Tart Toter

How is it possible for them to retreat anywhere through an army?...

You didn't say anything about retreating through an army.

they decide to retreat further into my territory

**Sir Winston Churchill** · September 18, 2011, 12:27 AM

Originally Posted by IZob

You didn't say anything about retreating through an army.

Originally Posted by The Royal Tart Toter

It's as if they are retreating through my force, which makes no sense.

**Selukon** · September 17, 2011, 09:26 PM

Yeah, it's a bit annoying, but really nothing major

**IZob** · September 18, 2011, 01:27 AM

You retreat to a place where you can survive. If that means running further into enemy territory, so be it.

**cfmonkey45** · September 18, 2011, 01:37 AM

Did you have an army there, or did you merely own it?

Because encircling an enemy army is a sure way to destroy it.

**ivan_the_terrible** · September 19, 2011, 07:08 AM

You must be imagining it as a continuous front line, when really what is being simulated is two rather small armies engaging in a pitched battle at some abstract point of a rather large province. If your advantage is not decisive enough to kill/scatter their force completely (simulated by them losing all their men and the army ceasing to exist), then what is there to stop them from retreating following a limited defeat?

**Poach** · September 20, 2011, 07:48 AM

Ways to prevent this:

1. Attack with great superiority in numbers. A 10 to 1 advantage will annihilate the enemy (as in, it's a hardcoded rule that if you lose a battle to an army with more than 10 times your own in number your army will entirely die).

2. Station armies in the provinces they retreat to so they have no time to breathe.

3. Recruit a general with high maneuver so you can outpace the retreating enemies.

4. Let the enemy army sit for 3 months in the province they retreat to, they will regain a lot of morale but not many soldiers, meaning they will stand and fight for much longer, leading to higher casualties. Use these 3 months to station troops in the provinces they're likely to retreat to. Simply leaving 1k in each province is sufficient, as they must only hold the line until your main army arrives.

**Nutsack** · September 22, 2011, 04:13 PM

Your army attacks from an inland province to defeat the enemy who are sieging your coastal province, and you seem to think somehow they are retreating through your army when they are simply in fact moving further inland to another province. This game is province based, you have to imagine that every single province has it's own hills, mountains, rivers, islands and what else that will allow armies to maneuver within the borders of just that single province. They'res no army big enough to cover all the terrains in a province.

**ivan_the_terrible** · September 25, 2011, 05:48 AM

^Exactly. It's not a frontline.

**Mangalore** · October 12, 2011, 09:09 AM

With HTTT one should see considerably more deceisive battles. They either had a tech edge or an insane leader helping them from getting destroyed.

Otherwise it is a problem of this kind of game (quasi board game like). Building pockets and annihilating armies that way is kind of an art form in paradox titles. I was struggling a long while in a Franco Prussian war in Vicky2 to goad the French so deep into the rhineland to annihilate 300k troops. It's the problem of abstracted game rules vs. simulation models.