Involvement in others' wars
Subsidies, recruiting rights, arms and auxiliaries: ways to back a side without declaring war, raised or lowered as the war goes.
- Area
- War and diplomacy
- Stage
- In design
- Kind of change
- Rebuilds a system
- Dev diaries
- #1
States rarely backed a side only by declaring war themselves. They paid subsidies, let one side recruit on their land, supplied arms, or sent auxiliary contingents under treaty, and raised or lowered that commitment as the war developed. Britain financed continental allies for much of the eighteenth century without always committing its own army.
The design replaces the yes-or-no call to arms with that ladder of involvement, weighed by cost, distance, risk, and what each state stands to gain or lose.