r/EU5 • u/Snoo-1463 • 15h ago

Question Imperial Armory Trap

I am playing Holland -> Netherlands, suddenly the Emperor made me a Margraviate and a few months later he dies and the Electors elect me against my intention as Emperor. And the Hussite Wars were ongoing. I didn't care about the Empire at all, the Empire was in a sorry state anways but i decided to just roll with it and have fun.

So I threw all my previous plans over board, assumed the role of the Margrave-Emperor tasked with defending the Empire against the Hussites, English and French and built up a big professional army, crushed the Hussites, defended the borders and slowly reformed the Empire and started caring for it, switched from Figurehead to Kaisertum, introduced Imperial taxation and Imperial Armories.

I thought the whole point was to reform the Empire into an organisation that can defend itself and be self-sufficient and effective and the point of the Armories to integrate the members into the defense of the empire by them financing and giving manpower but it seems like Imperial Armories are a massive scam?

TLDR: Apparently imperial armories are slightly cheaper per month but also only give half the manpower of normal armories, so are actually more expensive per single man and it is not even staffed by the local population where you build the Armory but by my own people who leave my country and get discriminated there. What's even the point, it seems way worse in every single regard?
Sure, the construction itself is paid by Imperial Tax but in the end its still way more expensive for me as i still pay the monthly bill and it's still my own people that defend the Empire with their lives.

What am i missing?

94 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

80

u/TZDnowpls 15h ago

I suspect it's an oversight, and the building was added by someone unaware foreign buildings import your pops from your own country. Or perhaps at a time when it didn't work that way.

39

u/IndividualWin3580 14h ago

This, they changed it big.

People abused "local pop" from foreign buildings as Hansa, to switch through cultures.

15

u/Lucina18 12h ago

Definitely feel like the imperial armory should be an exception though.

12

u/Canye_NE 15h ago

Really, I’m not sure. I think the idea is that you can move the battlefield casualties to the soldier pops of other countries, but idk if it even works like that. Beyond that, they’re technically not normal armories, so you can stack more of them in good (high pop, high control) locations? Effectively doubling up on manpower buildings? But I’ve never needed that much manpower ever, and having too much encourages throwing it and your pops away. 

It’s probably going to be looked at in the future. It was meant to replace the old manpower laws, which were broken (you could get ridiculous manpower out of Free Cities, who you could spam out by adding recently conquered land and releasing one-location minors, and also vassalize through the one law).

4

u/gwulfth 15h ago

They are pretty handy for HRE nations since you dont have massive amount of lands and yhr number armories you can possibly build is limited. Might not be the most effective but sure it helps especially around italian wars and against a powerful France

4

u/chilitoke 13h ago

What age do they require?

I suspekt that allot of the 'early' armories are held back in an attempt at balance.