Devastating Warfare
This is a small, lightweight mod that aims to make devastation more interesting. In vanilla, devastation is relatively binary, and attempts to devastate provinces are mostly limited to protracted carpet sieges and specific events. Likewise, war exhaustion is just a number that one can safely ignore until it’s time to core provinces.
This mod attempts to make these mechanics more interesting by combining them. War Exhaustion, along with some other debuffs, now inflicts a global devastation penalty that reflects resources being diverted to the war effort, civil discontent and the general cost of war. Furthermore, devastation is now generated by unaccepted cultures and religious intolerance.
The ways devastation can be reduced have also changed. Devastation now reduces itself, and revanchism provides slightly more global reduction to help prevent a death spiral from creating a Mad Max setpiece. Republican suffrage also grants a small reduction. However, forts now provide drastically less help.
Finally, devastation is drastically weaker at reducing Mandate, as otherwise China would be unplayable.
This mod was originally developed with Homebrew: An Anbennar Submod in mind, but is perfectly compatible with vanilla EU4.