Ottomans best army composition (2024)

- Late game is quite vague ; look at your combat width and make sure you have at least that much in infantry and cavalry combined. Add a little more if you want to avoid micromanagement.

- 4 cav per stack is fine, but you could go down to 2, or even 0. Cav doesn' t really matter in the late game.

- 2 choices with artillery. You can either put enough per stack to optimize your sieges, or you can put the same number as your combat width, to fill out the backrow. A full backrow of artillery is expensive both in terms of money and attrition, but it's very powerful.

- We can discuss composition at length, but ultimately, if you have enough manpower and attrition reduction that manpower is not an issue, the best stack is the one that's big enough to convince your enemies not to engage at all.

-At higher techs, filling out both front and backrow will almost always cause you to have stacks that far exceed the supply limit. Because of this, it's often a good idea to split your armies into pairs of half-stacks, and only combine them on a single province when you have to do some actual fighting. As an example, from tech 26 onward I usually use pairs of 20/2/20 stacks.

Army composition for every single country, with maybe like 3-5 exceptions, in the game is extremely simple:

1. Use your initial cav only till the first battle. Merge until you end up with 0. Never recruit more cavalry.
2. Always try to move with stacks of infantry equal to combat width. If combat width is 20, have a stack of 20 infantry.
You might want to add a single regiment. NEVER add more than one regiment above CW to your stacks.

3. When tech 7 rolls in, start rolling as much artillery, as it can help with sieging stuff. Good starter at tech 7 is 10.

If this was MP, tech 7 is also when you'd want to try to have a full backline of artillery (however, only a single one. Do not EVER try to match your number of cannons with your number of inf/cav in your entire army).
This is SP, so ideally you wanna siege stuff and not fight battles.
That said there might be a point where you'll likewise want to start fighting battles with a full backline.

Your total number of backlines should depend on your FL, manpower, money, how many fronts you are fighting on etc etc.
Generally speaking though, if you have more than 1 cannon per every 4 infantry regiments, you are probably doing something wrong.

Above all, have fun ^^

prior to

2 fire pip cannons, as many infantry as your combat width. Once you unlock 2 fire pip cannons, as many as you can afford to field up to combat width.
If you have forcelimit/positive balance remaining, a balance of overflow inf/cannons for reinforcing.

Honestly now that they've changed it to where infantry cannot deploy on the backline, its hard to screw up army composition.

Cavalry have the same flanking range as cannons at every tech level, so unless you're stacking cavalry combat ability and cavalry cost reduction, its almost always more cost effective to not use cavalry at all and instead wield more infantry for reinforcements/other optimally composed army groups

DannyTheBrit said:

Okay so currently left with combat width 36. Any suggestions? And as I understood cavalry is useless right?

Click to expand...

36/0/36
and then a bunch of 36/0/0s for idk, rebels, reinforcing
Note that at tech 24 you unlock fortresses. Fortresses require 40k cannons for full siege bonus.

Cavalry is useless in the vast majority of cases, yeah.
You'll have some peeps try to bring up Poland and the likes and say that they are an example of cav being useful
but you are not Poland

Your current tech actually has one of the best windows for cavalry (it's really not like "early game cav good", "late game cav bad") but still.. just don't bother.

Jarvin said:

36/0/36
and then a bunch of 36/0/0s for idk, rebels, reinforcing
Note that at tech 24 you unlock fortresses. Fortresses require 40k cannons for full siege bonus.

Cavalry is useless in the vast majority of cases, yeah.
You'll have some peeps try to bring up Poland and the likes and say that they are an example of cav being useful
but you are not Poland

Click to expand...

True mate I’m not Poland xd ty so much gonna enforce this. Reconquering Algeria and cavalry proved complete useless here.

Jarvin said:

36/0/36
and then a bunch of 36/0/0s for idk, rebels, reinforcing
Note that at tech 24 you unlock fortresses. Fortresses require 40k cannons for full siege bonus.

Cavalry is useless in the vast majority of cases, yeah.
You'll have some peeps try to bring up Poland and the likes and say that they are an example of cav being useful
but you are not Poland

Your current tech actually has one of the best windows for cavalry (it's really not like "early game cav good", "late game cav bad") but still.. just don't bother.

Click to expand...

I wasn't gonna engage because I know from previous posts of yours that army composition is something you're passionate about and I didn't fancy getting into a long-winded debate over it, but I really don't agree with you there.

OP is playing as Ottomans, he obviously has money. I'm sure there's merit to what you're saying in MP, but in single player, 90% of wars are siege races, so why would you ever cripple yourself by having a single stack of artillery when you can obviously afford more ?

On top of that, the whole point of having extra infantry only stacks is to be able to reinforce the main stack during tough battles, but that's just way more micro than you ever want to do in late game single player. In that scenario, you're not fighting another player where you need every bit of edge you can get, you're trying to get through the slog of endless wars in a reasonable amout of time. Both tasks require different tools.

Maxxie42 said:

OP is playing as Ottomans, he obviously has money. I'm sure there's merit to what you're saying in MP, but in single player, 90% of wars are siege races, so why would you ever cripple yourself by having a single stack of artillery when you can obviously afford more ?

Click to expand...

Read my first post.
You are arguing against a point I never made.

Maxxie42 said:

On top of that, the whole point of having extra infantry only stacks is to be able to reinforce the main stack during tough battles, but that's just way more micro than you ever want to do in late game single player. In that scenario, you're not fighting another player where you need every bit of edge you can get, you're trying to get through the slog of endless wars in a reasonable amout of time. Both tasks require different tools.

Click to expand...

Infantry-only stacks are also sufficient for carpet sieging, dealing with rebels etc.
I didn't make any suggestion as to the numbers of each type of stacks.. because well, you should go for whatever you feel you need and are comfy with. The answer will be different for every player

Most provinces can't support full combat width of front + back line, and you have to split the stack and try to get them onto the same province for combat around the same time. It's a micromanagement tax on the player.

The cost of disregarding it entirely is picking otherwise questionable SP groups (quantity + defensive combined) and running humanist, probably swapping to the government reform with another -15%. Even then, you'll still bleed some manpower, but you can finally full stack with ticking -WE and still gain manpower. It's a lot to pay in game terms, for QoL.

Edit: Cav costs too much for what it does. You can offset this using multiple idea group investments, or you can take actually useful idea groups and just run infantry instead, which should perform about as well (or better if you want to assault forts, which cav can't do). Note that mods like Anbennar (ex: orc religion giving a very temporary activation for huge +shock damage + foreign rec cav that has extra pips), or ridiculous stuff like +1 to fire or shock available very early in the game, can change this conclusion. But for *most* nations, cavalry is more or less junk.

DannyTheBrit said:

Well guys I took all of your advises and my armies r just getting defeated so easily now. Even when I have x2 larger armies. And still about cavalry, they look pretty effective in the hands of other countries so still curious about usage of it and my weird defeats. I mostly played CKII before switched to EU4 and in it combat is so easy, u basically just need larger army and a good terrain to win.

Click to expand...

You never did specify what you meant exactly by late game ; perhaps you're actually not so late into the game that cavalry is outclassed by infantry yet ?

More realistically, if you're getting defeated by similar or smaller armies, it probably means your troop quality is lacking, rather than your army composition. In particular, I would suggest going into the ledger and comparing your discipline and morale to that of your enemies. These modifiers have a very large impact on battle outcome, much more than marginal adjustments to army composition.

Lastly, I think it's important to understand why many people are suggesting using only enough infantry/cavalry to fill the combat width. If you have more infantry than that in your army, they will not be deployed, but they will still take morale damage - that's very inefficient. However, if you only have enough infantry to fill the combat width, once that first line suffers casualties, you absolutely need to have another stack of infantry ready to reinforce, otherwise you're left with a front line in shambles and your army gets destroyed ! So if you don't feel confident that you're gonna be able to handle the logistics of always reinforcing at the right time during battles, just make larger stacks - sure it's not efficient, but it's better than running out of a front line.

Maxxie42 said:

You never did specify what you meant exactly by late game ; perhaps you're actually not so late into the game that cavalry is outclassed by infantry yet ?

Click to expand...

Well, we know it's like tech 23 for him.
The best tech for cavalry in the entire game.

Lykus Cerebros said:

Is your enemy ahead of you in Military technology?

Click to expand...

Enemy is 24, I am 23 but soon will be 24. Fighting Spain maybe their ideas matter? Sorry for being quite dumb btw, new in a game xd. I’ll send a screen of my military later, but yes I got a little bit less discipline and morale.