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The original was posted on /r/eu4 by /u/Joseon1 on 2024-10-17 20:42:47+00:00.

EU3 was my first Paradox game back in the day, that game doesn’t explain jack shit to you, most tooltips are useless, and playing it could be a massive grind. But even with that game in mind, the zones of control in EU4 are just bizarre, when I first encountered them I kept trying to discover how they work by trial and error but just gave up since it seemed totally arbitrary where my armies were allowed to move.

Having looked it up on the wiki, I’m still not totally clear, about 50% of the article is incomprehensible like the following:

Each province can be thought to have a distance from the Return Province corresponding to the number of provinces in the shortest among the paths starting from it and visiting non-ZoC land provinces you have military access to, regardless of blocked straits, and then ending with either a non-ZoC province, a ZoC province or a ZoC province without a fort controlled by an enemy followed by a ZoC province with a fort controlled by an enemy (if there are no such paths, assign an infinite distance).

I get the gist that entering a zone of control creates a ‘return province’ for an army that it can go back to, and this determines where it can go in the zone of control. But the specifics are still confusing, it looks like you can’t move further into a zone of control than one province away from the ‘return province’, aside from exceptions like moving out into friendly territory or a sea and back into the zone of control again (maybe?) I’m at a loss as to what this this meant to represent, a magical force-field that stops armies dead in their tracks because there’s a castle 50 miles away? Something like doubled attrition or blocking sieges without a neighbouring friendly province would be so much more intuitive, what is going on with this fort system?