How to deal with enemies bypassing your forces in Europa Universalis 4?
I was trying to take Egypt down a peg because they are obsessed with sowing discontent in my empire. From a military point of view I had no problem with it--I took 6 provinces and won every battle. However, I couldn't get any settlement out of them because my warscore was too low--as far as I can tell the problem is he would keep sending a small force to siege one of my provinces. I would have to pull an army off siege duty to take care of it. I'm not sure if it was the sieges or the abandoning of my own sieges but I only had an 8% warscore at that point.
The AI seems to have a basically perfect ability to avoid unwanted combat while moving, short of blocking every path (for which I didn't have the forces) I see no way to stop what he was doing.
Best Answer
Based on the problem I assume you were playing someone large with a big land border with Egypt like Ottomans or Persia or something.
While I don't have all the information I am pretty sure what your problem is. Basically, provinces with high base tax are worth much more warscore than those with low base tax. My guess is that you seized a bunch of crappy border provinces, but didn't take Alexandria or the other critical provinces by the Suez, which is why your warscore gains were so low. Instead, you need to go for the wealthy capital and its adjacent cities. Taking the capital has the added bonus of making the enemy more willing to make peace.
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Answer 2
When the enemy plays a game of cat-and-mouse with you like that, where he has a small force in your country evading your troops, you basically have two choices:
Ignore him. Just capture his provinces, spread out your troops so you are able to siege multiple provinces at once. He might get one or two of your provinces, but if you have more troops, you should make enough warscore to enforce your demands. Remember to focus on the wargoal. Most of the time holding a certain province or the enemy capital will give you a ticking warscore, i.e. it increases over time.
Hunt him down. If you really want to destroy those annoying troops in your provinces, it is tedious but possible. This is how you do it:
- Set the game speed to low.
- Move your troops into the province the enemy is in.
- He will move out once he sees you coming, but don't change your path!
- The second your troops reach the province, stop the time and give order to move to the new location of the enemy.
- Repeat this and you will reach him after a few provinces, because the travel time between provinces is not constant, but based on the terrain. Sooner or later he will move to a position where you can move into his location quicker than he needs to get out of it, so he will be trapped. Make sure you have enough troops following him to destroy him, or he will simply retreat after battle and you will have to go over it again.
The hunting strategy works, but can be tedious, so often it's best to just do your thing instead of following the enemy guerrilla troops.
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