Transcription
Hello guys, and welcome to Real Politics. Today, I'm going to teach you how war works. And for this war tutorial, I have decided to play Russia, because they have something to do with war, right? And for this war tutorial, I'm going to demonstrate on the neighboring country known as Ukraine. We will declare a special military—I mean, a war.
When you go to declare war, you will see the war declaration costs, or de—they misspelled it—effects, including essentially your relation hit with the country and a warmonger rating. Every game needs a way to limit warmongering, as well as effects of the actual war separate to the declaration, such as on population growth, army maintenance, and war losses, and the costs for you to actually perform this action. It will show you a brief overview of your block—not just you—and the total army power between your block versus it. It will show you the enemy block and the total army power of the enemy block. Wars in this game do not happen between nations; they happen between blocks, unless there are no blocks involved, in which case then it is between nations. We will hit yes.
Once you start a war, you will get to assign what units you want to go between your infantry, armor, aircraft, and navy, the quality of which depends on differing factors that we will cover in this video. You can either click on these and assign a hyper-specific amount by using the slider or using these buttons here, or just quickly assign 50% of your entire military, or click it again, and you can assign your whole military. The reason why you might not want to assign your entire military to something is because you might have multiple wars going on, different nations that you are fighting, different blocks. You might also be dealing with terrorists or rebels somewhere, and you don't want your entire military committed. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will be assigning all. We hit start, and then we just have to wait.
Right here, we have a high warmonger level because we're declaring war; we're being a warmonger, which, by the way, you need to be. I might as well clarify this right now: you must be either an authoritarianism or a totalitarianism to even do what I just did. If you are a democracy, you play by different rules; you are not able to declare wars unless you have both very low relations with someone and either claims to a core province or permission from the UN to invade. Authoritarians have less rules; they can request any provinces during peace negotiations; they're not limited like democracies, which are limited to core territories that they have claims on, and they need low relations; they don't need permission from the UN. Totalitarians, like Russia, can declare whatever wars they want, obviously, because totalitarian equals more free, and you don't have to listen to what the global World Order tells you, right? Regardless, we're going to unpause, and you see, since the war is local, this bar filled up instantaneously in one day. If the war is further away, if a battle is further away, then this will take longer to charge up and start.
Wars work like thus: you have the units you have committed to the war; the enemy has the units they have committed towards the war. You assign an operation. Now, this can be automated if you do wish to automate. You must go to your military tab and hit right here, the automatic theater, and this will enable it for every war that you are in. You can also click it on the war right here to essentially achieve the same effect. The computer will handle it for you. I highly suggest controlling it yourself, because it's really not that difficult. At the bottom here, we have modifier operations like Ambush activities, which is what our opponent is taking on, and Elastic Defense. Ambush operations gives an attack modifier, because every unit has stats; this gives an attack modifier and so an increase in stats, global stats, all stats versus all enemy types, to infantry of a plus two and a plus one to armor. Elastic defense gives it to armor and aircraft. These are your modifying operations. The rest are more actionable; these are what you'd pick in a defensive situation when the enemy is making things difficult for you. So we have, for example, after that, the Clear Skies and Air Strike operations. Both of these are air-based, as you can tell; one is to actually clear the air, and the other is to use your air superiority—hopefully you have cleared the air before then. As you see what we have versus what we're going up against, to specifically target enemy armor that you wish to kill. The rest of the operations here have to do with actually pushing the front, generating war score. You'll see how much war score you get for winning every operation. You'll see those kill-based ones only—well, they don't give you any—and then those modifying ones don't even show the button at all. The time is the amount of days that must pass for an operation to start, and this skull shows a rating of the deadliness; the lighter green, the less deadly the operation will be. It's how you can get the war score without actually having massive casualties while you're pushing your offensive. And then if it's darker red, that means it will be deadlier. You may want to kill enemy units, enemy air support, enemy tanks if you can, or start with the things that are less deadly for you before resorting to these deadlier things, such as brute frontal advances and securing the front.
Separate to seeing how many of each of your units are versing how many of the enemy units, you can also see if there are any active modifiers going in favor of either side. So more pluses on your side is a good thing; more pluses on the enemy side is a bad thing. You can see the initial advantage or disadvantage. This means, as of right now, if nothing else changes, how likely are you to win this, essentially based on the number of units and their modifiers. Once the Ukrainians would set up their Ambush actions, then my chances here would actually go down—equal may stay equal, but the bar would be more in their favor; it may even go to low. High may go to equal thereon and so forth. Low would be even less reasonable. You wish to go for things that you have more of a chance to win when pushing the front, for example, a Breakthrough operation. If I go ahead and unpause, it said it would take 20 days to set up. The Breakthrough operation takes them 30 days to set up their ambush, so I'm going to go ahead and speed up so we can get 20 days in so that you could see how this works. I can resign this whenever I please, but you see this bar right here was filling up very quickly; it's because we have a very high chance to achieve this. You can see things that are affecting what we're going up against: grassland, snow, grassland, and what kind of operation it is; these all grant different modifiers that you can account for. Hovering over my armor, you can see that they have a plus eight attack against enemy armor and they have a plus 13 attack against enemy infantry. Their units don't have nearly as good of an armor attack, so that puts me at a great advantage in this situation; that's why I'm winning it so well. The terrain modifiers are not really working in their favor, so we're going to go ahead and hit—there you go—play, and we have won the operation because it was a grassland; they got a debuff to defending—you know, that was on the right there—but because it was snowing on the left, I got a debuff by, but I did get a buff at the same time for it having been on a grassland. It kind of just simulates where you're attacking; it takes kind of randomly the locations that you're fighting over. We have won that operation, and now we have war score. We need to get this to the max if we wish to win the war. Certain things like terrorist attacks might have timers attached, and also some event battles as well might have timers attached that you need to win the war within. This particular one does not have such a timer.
Now that I have completed the Breakthrough, you see I cannot do another breakthrough. All of these are not repeatable, as you might guess. The ones that are the most repeatable are the most deadly ones that give the most war score. Now here's a good example of how you could take advantage of these war differences right here. You see the Ukrainians don't have enough of an Air Force to defend against an Air Supremacy operation. This is really, really important, and if you're not extremely ahead of your opponent technologically—which we'll talk about in this guide as well, how to get to that point—then what you're going to need is to whittle away at their forces, and that is why someone being in multiple wars can be so important; that is why killing as many of their aircraft and their tanks is so important. Infantry or infantry—there's a lot of infantry—and I can make more infantry while we're in this war. I could take units out of this front and put new units in this front when I make them, if—if I want—while the operations go. My units can die; the enemy units can die; they will not replace automatically. I will need to replace them by going into my military tab and, just like I wish to recruit anything, all I have to do is click on any of these different types of units, hit buy, so long as I am under my army limit—which I actually started out over my army limit, which is weird—then I just buy it, and that's it. It will cost some money; it will cost some action points and take a little bit of time. There will be a maintenance cost of money for infantry, but also natural resources for literally everything else, especially for transports, which are only needed if you plan on attacking things that do not border you, and you are going to need a certain project, a technology that you could click on—helpfully it will bring you right to it in case you wish to unlock it. You will work your way towards here, but we'll talk about how the projects tie into this later.
Whenever you're not in an active war screen, you can get to your wars in the war notification tab of over here, running war, and assign an operation, and then you'll just have to kind of min-max this as time goes on. So I would assign, say, the Air Supremacy, because I know the Ukrainians can't do anything about it, and especially now I know they won't really benefit much from their Ambush operations they're about to get, which is going to give them a buff separately. I can also view all the wars that anybody is in by clicking over the capitals of the blocks involved. So Ukraine, Russia—it's—it's the same war. There is also, helpfully, a war between MHRI and Iraq, so I can click on MHRI or Iraq's little war pop-up to see how their war is going. As you see, MHRI has the advantage now. Wars generating warmonger is bad, because as your warmonger goes up, then the UN can pass resolutions in order to have an intervention against you, giving democracies like America the ability to attack you. Now, they cannot intervene in Ukraine—not that they ever would—you know, this is all just a made-up situation, of course. But if the UN passed the charter, which they very easily could, and they will quite a bit, either permission to attack—that's separate—but anti-warmonger that is specifically above 45—we had 60 from the war declaration; now we have 59. If we have above 45, then they could just declare war on us; it would open another war separate to this war. They can't actually join an active war, but they can declare their own war and attack us, and then we'd have to fight another war, causing us to split our army in half, or maybe even send more towards them. And as more democracies attack this or opportunistic totalitarians—China, for example—then we would have to split our army up even more. So you have to be very careful with when you decide to go to war. In case you need a sudden decrease, it does decrease over time, and there's projects that can improve—prove—the decrease ratio. You could actually just release a province that you own, for example—it could really be anything, Kenrad, for example—to immediately lose a bunch of warmonger points. It may be more worthwhile to release Kenrad, for example, or something else that we own, to lose 40 warmonger points and avoid being the target of an impending anti-warmonger resolution than it is to actually be attacked by multiple democracies, forcing all kinds of war reparations from us, such as making us get rid of our nukes, stopping us from making nukes, making us limit our military by a gigantic amount, thus nerfing us dramatically, or any other kind of whims they have, like maybe seizing a territory that they have a claim on, using the opportunity to see something from us, liberating entire nations that are way more than one province in size. You have to take this all into account when you choose to attack someone.
Now, in relation to other military stats, we have militarism, which affects a lot of things. It can affect your max unit capacity here; it can affect your military maintenance. You see it's almost having our military maintenance. You could find militarism under your internal politics. Scroll down here; you'll see our militarism is almost maxed, and it's about to be maxed. It's affected by a lot of things, including being at war; will immediately raise it by almost half the total value. Having claims on other countries and other countries having claims on yours affects it, as well as tons of projects, such as getting military projects in general. Now let's look at the military projects and see what this is. So if you're unfamiliar, projects are tech trees in a way, although not all of them are permanent things that affect military can be spread out, but most of them are under military, and others that are of a temporary nature you might want can be found under ad hoc. These are ones that you activate temporarily, for example, Women and Children Mobilization. This will really harm your population growth, which is very, very bad for a number of things, like your well, your population for one, but also your score, and you need score. Score is very important in this game; it's extremely important, but it will give you more unit max capacity. No Step Back will change your military values; it can give you some more infantry power. The Great Offensive will give your—your whole army—some power, but it comes with costs—very expensive costs. The actual military tab, however, has more permanent things, for example, the tank line here, going down to Universal Tanks, can add a unit attack modifier, basically making tanks plus two better of a value at attacking everything. And now what is that mean? Well, if we go to military, we hover over our tanks, we see that our tanks can do plus 13 of a value; that's their attack value, also their defense value against enemy infantry, plus eight against enemy armor, plus seven against enemy air aircraft, and plus three against enemy navy, but that's not—you won't see a lot of use out of that; they won't really be fighting navy very often. Anybody that is in your block, such as how Belarus is in my block, can have their own militaries. We can't actually really see them right now because they're deployed in my war, but anybody that has a military—we can look at Finland as an example. If I got Finland to join my block—they won't right now, but if I did get them to join it—then I would get access to their military—not the current values of how strong it is, but the actual amounts. Their infantry will deploy in my wars; their armor, aircraft will deploy in my wars with my stats. So getting a nation in your block is equivalent to just expanding your own military; you don't get their taxes or anything, but you do get to use their units essentially free of charge. Free of charge meaning whatever you have set up to maintain and do for your block, but that's a whole other topic—a topic one of which in many I go over in my beginner's guide in a lesser yet still comprehensive depth that you could find in the playlist in the description below if you wish to see more.
Enemy blocks will work much the same; if you go after the block, you'll probably be going after its leader, but the whole block will be fighting together at the same time. When upgrading your military with these projects, you do want to be careful, because not everything here is better. While some things clearly are, like going down the aircraft line, this just clearly gets better and better for your aircraft, it is not going to be better and better for your budget. Every single one of these that you activate, if they are not a permanent thing and they could be cancelled, such as right here, the little x button, if they can be cancelled, then they'll also have associated maintenance costs, and this will scale and become rather bad. Some things are definitely not better; for example, if we push down to becoming an Army State, then we actually make our infantry weaker and make everyone dislike us more and permanently push up that militarism, which also makes others dislike us even more, along with paying a bunch of maintenance. We could pay some more maintenance in order to get that infantry modifier back, but our relations will not be being solved. Anything that is not solely beneficial and a one-off research like this, Battlefield Support Systems—this is just a one-off research; you get some score for it; there's no cost associated, so you cannot deactivate it, which is good—cu that would be bad. You can get rid of the thing that comes after because it makes your armor more expensive, but it makes them stronger, and you have to pay a maintenance on just having this to begin with. There is also this bottom row right here, which is dedicated to unlocking nukes essentially, and you don't have to get to MAD to unlock them; you just have to get to the atom bomb, but MAD will just make everybody dislike you a little; you pay half the maintenance on all your warheads, and your chance of succeeding at nuclear attack, which is quite common in this game, goes way the hell up. And in fact, I could go to my own nuclear management and see how these nukes work. I can easily buy warheads, but they do have a very high natural resource cost, which comes from your territories, for example. Other actions in the projects can give you more—mostly in trade; you can choose to import them as an example. But going back to the nukes, I could buy them; they take the same amount of time no matter how many I want to build; the costs just scale with the total amount. I could discard them. When I'm at war, I can use them; however, do note my type of government restricts when I can use them. As a totalitarian that everybody hates, I don't really have much restrictions; I can go after their army, a direct attack, destroy 8 to 40% of their forces; success is 85%; I get warmonger points just for doing this, and it uses a certain amount of warheads. Now, not only do I get some warmonger points, I will also up the global environment. Everybody's wars and warmongering thus is bad because if it leads to nukes flying, and that's why you can actually just try to get rid of nukes in a country altogether, in addition to going for maybe trying to limit their warmongering through other means. You might need to find yourself intervening in wars just to try to stop the nukes from flying, just to stop nations from having nukes to begin with, because if everything gets up, the population, the economy is all going to die; it's going to completely die off; you won't be able to afford your warmongering or even staying alive at that point, and then—well, that's just not a very pretty world. And again, nukes are common. You can also do civil attacks, attacking major cities and key factories, lowering enemy GDP by 5 to 20%—that is huge; their population will be lowered by 5 to 10%—huge, by the way, absolutely awful thing to do—but yeah, you can really up somebody's development like this. Useful, I suppose, if you wish to take them out of being a service economy and downgrade them, leaving yourself as one of a lesser amount of service economies, just as an example. Could also target their HQs as opposed to civil attacks, taking 12 for—for army—it's only two warheads for an HQ attack. This just gives a minus two attack modifier to enemy units for 180 days; makes it a lot easier to win the war, but it is the hardest nuclear attack to pull off. And do note that this is with the 15% modifier of MAD; keep that in mind. The two military target nuclear attacks give the same amount, 15 warmonger points, whereas 20 for the civil attack. So using nukes at all can be very dangerous; if there's an anti-warmonger UN resolution, you may want to be careful about using nukes thus. If the top 12 GDP countries running the UN are not mostly authoritarian or totalitarian, it's worth noting.
Related to war, that you might want to monitor the separatism tab down here, because that shows where your cultures and civilizations do not match up with your own in places you've conquered. Converge in these as a very important part of war and conquest, because they will prevent rebellions and you having to fight little internal wars, potentially distracting you from the greater wars that exist. If you're ever trying to figure out what to warmonger for, then I suggest looking at the statistics, and you can actually sort the provinces. One of the best things to sort by is score, because high-score provinces, whether it's because they're upgraded with certain buildings or not—better if they are not yet, cuz that means you can raise it even higher—especially with high natural resources attached. Both of these are very important, but a combination is best—is very important for you, especially if there's low population. So Central China is pretty high score, but it has insane population; the east coast is way better because it has a fraction of the population yet it has the same score. This is, in fact, rather amazing, because the score will generate action points that you need to do everything in the game, so this is a very good way to determine what you go after. You can also sort by culture, in case you're trying to look at things that have compatible cultures with your own. That right there is what you need to know about war in Real Politics. You have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. If you want to see any other guides on Real Politics, feel free to leave that in the comments below as well. Once again, the playlist with the rest of my guys in this game will be found in the description below, and for now, thank you guys very much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one. [Music] n [Music]