Hello all, as the title says, I have recently been thinking about the merits of slowing down army movement on the campaign map. And I mean pretty drastically.

Here goes the reasoning:

At current marching ranges, it is very hard to make geographical barriers, count as formidable defensive positions or even critical lines of communication for offensives (to get reinforcements). For example Pella, if you want to head south into greece, there is narrow coastal route and there is another via mountains slightly west. Both would make excellent defensive positions to block invasions from the north, unfortunately, it is so easy to circumvent the position because usually a defender can field one stack only, leaving the other opening clear. A defender could risk dividing a stack in two or engage in an economically unfavourable buildup and field two stacks (could probably be done with cheapo units IMO). Anyway, it is usually the case that in one turn, you can just walk in and besiege Demetria without having to worry about the "blocking" stack.... you just move around it.

There are countless other positions, like rivers with multiple crossings withing 1/4 or 1/2 march of each other. The defender canīt hold all of them so the attacker is free to manouvre past the obstacles.

If marches were slowed, a defender could reposition its single stack to another blocking point quite easily. No more easy circumventions. An invasion would be risky because a defender could continuously block your advance, so if you donīt engange in an unfavorable position to dislodge them, youīll just let time slip by, losing supplies and allowing the defender to call up reserves. For me its pretty cool because decisions become very important: even if you do storm some crucial bridge, battle attrition would mean that the future siege would be harder because all your precious assault troops were wasted in the crossing. So do you force the crossing? Do you then hold and wait for reinforcements or do you press on? This would be hard mode.

For the invader, long march distances are also great because you never really deal with the problem of logistics, supplies never go critical to the point where your would consider falling back, which means weak leaders can keep army cohesion very easily. Its not hard to be the conqueror. So there is no real advantage to having a capable general in the stack, just someone with a minimum of perks and youīre good.

But if you know you will have to storm a mountain gap, spend 3, 4 5 or more turns in enemy land, to reach and besiege a city with huge walls, a noob general will not cut it. Even a hardened general would struggle, but isnīt that a more glorious victory when you win?

And then comes the counter attack. Could you hold the new conquest? Reinforcements would come slowly and regional recruitment wonīt be online for a loooooong time. Tough.

Talking about regional recruitment: now every regions military capability becomes more critical because you need to be able to raise defenders (which some governments canīt do!) and replenish those that take attrition, all done in the region under attack. Why? because getting that supa special unit stack from across your empire to respond is no longer possible (they just will never get there in time). The emphasis on local defence becomes greater which is terrible hard because a newly conquered region sitting next to a royal domain capable of producing elite units will be tough to hold.

It would be cool also because logistics based traits or army movement speed traits would become very very important as they would mean a huge edge in outmanouevering defenders....or the reverse! Right now... so what if you can march 10% more, you still get to the goal city in 2 turns, with or without that perk! But if an 8 turn march became a 4 turn march? thats huge.

Raiding would also be more useful as a resupply tool, but theres a tradeoff because if you conquer the province, it will be useless to you economically for quite a while.

Anyway, I was wondering if there is a master switch that will allow for this change of pace pretty easily? A setting in the main file or something so we can tinker....

Iīd love to give it a try and see how it affects game mechanics, but what do you guys think of this idea?