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Tinto Talks #11 - 8th of May 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, and now we are up to the eleventh of these about this super secret game! This time we talk about military matters, and the differences between levies, mercenaries, and regular regiments.

But first..

Today, we at Paradox Tinto are releasing our Winds of Change expansion for EU4! Check out the video my team made at

And if the launch goes well, I can ask the team to start the map feedback posts later this week!


Military Organization
While there is a very large number of different types of units, they all belong to one of four different categories: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, or Auxiliary. Infantry is usually the bulk of most armies, and the other categories have specific roles in a campaign.

The size of a regiment varies over time, with the earliest Infantry Regiments using 100 men, while at the end of the game, there are around 3,200 men in each infantry regiment. Cavalry, Artillery, and Auxiliary units have different sizes.

We also categorize a regiment as either a levy, a mercenary, or a regular regiment. Any army can freely rearrange those into any stack they want, and split up their regiments as the player sees fit. So if you want to have half of a mercenary company in one army and the other in another army, then that is perfectly fine in this game.


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This is a unique cavalry unit from the first age that some cultures have access to.

Levies
First of all, we have levies, where you can raise your able-bodied fighting men into a fighting force. This provides you with a lot of people who can fight for you, but the levies have a few slight drawbacks. First of all, you can only raise them when you are at war or facing rebels. Secondly, when you raise your levies those pops you raise them from are decreased in size to represent the pops going off to war, and any dead men in a levy is population permanently lost.. Speaking of that, levies do not spawn with any experience to speak of, and you have no direct control over the type of units you get. Another slight drawback is that levies do not reinforce during a campaign either. A province where the levies have been raised will also produce less food and raw materials.

You can either raise all your levies, or from any province individually.

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Raising all able-bodied men in the Kingdom of Sweden will get us 12,000 men!

Mercenaries
There are many mercenary companies available in the world, and each area has at least a few possible to recruit. However, these are not endless free manpower, as other nations may be recruiting them before you can. A Mercenary Company signs up for at least a 2-year contract, but you can extend the contract if you so desire. More on how mercenaries can be recruited in a later talk.


Regular Regiments
Your regular army consists of the regiments that you do not want to disband and they require manpower to recruit. This recruitment can not be done everywhere though, as you need special buildings to allow recruitment of military units. Usually, these are the same type of buildings that also provide you with manpower. As the ages go by, you go from only some special buildings providing a minuscule amount of manpower to being able to build Conscription Centers in your core culture locations.

Manpower
Speaking of manpower, in Project Caesar this is primarily generated by buildings. Now you may ask, why do we need manpower when we have pops? Well, for us, manpower represents the more or less semi-trained men that can be used in a military force. And what is important, whenever a regiment loses strength, be it from attrition or combat, you will lose pops as well.

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This is a unique building for Mongol steppe hordes.

One other aspect to take into account when it comes to manpower is that Project Caesar does not have force limits, but instead, you are limited by how many regiments you can maintain. Every regiment requires some manpower each month to maintain the current level of troops.

It also requires a fair amount of goods each month, and if it does not have access to it, morale will drop, and it will not be able to reinforce or maintain its current strength.


As you may have noticed in some of the screenshots above, units do have a fair bit of unique attributes. There are some common ones for your entire country.
  • Discipline, which impacts damage taken and damage done.
  • Military Tactics, which impacts damage taken.
  • Army Morale, which impacts how long your armies are willing to fight before breaking.
  • Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery & Auxiliary power, which impacts damage done for that category.

There is also the Army Tradition, which is gained primarily from the average experience of your armies, which can be increased by drilling them, and impacts the morale & siege ability of your armies, while also slowly pushing you towards land on the land vs naval societal values.

This is not everything related to military, as we have a talk about the navies, a talk about logistics and a talk about our combat system planned as well.

Next week, however, we will be back with something completely different, and rather new and unique features.,
 
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So I know you mentioned that you're gonna have a talk specifically dedicated to logistics, but does that mean that "supply limits" are gone? Will providing goods to your troops requires apply lines, and by extension, do you have to defend those supply lines?

One of my biggest pet peeves with most other Paradox games is how poorly logistics is modeled considering how unbelievably important it was in history.
 
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Sorry if it has been already talked but is there any end game date or age that we can expect?
End date will be 2146

Code:
a_autonomous_laser_tank = {
    category = ultimate_death_machines

    copy_from = a_age_23_traditions_killer_ai
    max_strength = 0.1

    morale_damage_done = 5000
    initiative = 89
    
    movement_speed = 45.0
    
        
    combat = {
        urban = 0.5
    }
    
    maintenance_demand =  monthly_production_fleshling_slaves
    construction_demand = gdp_of_a_small_nation
    

    gfx_tags = { tank_tag ai_overlord_tag }
}
 
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Are unique units tied to the culture of pops or is it country based? For example if I conquer a large Mongol population, can I now recruit horse archers from the locations with that population?
 
Combat width is famous in eu4 for being completely useless after armies fill their width, with cavalry not being able to flank due to all slots being filled.

Will flanking in EU5 Project Tinto take a more relevant role even when full sized armies fight?
 
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Is army xp going to become sort of mana what you can spend on army tradition like imperator:rome ?

no. its just values on each regiment
 
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My first response to this TT was that it was kind of underwhelming but then I realized I just had to many questions spinning around in my head but the actual content of the TT is actually great and mechanically just what I was looking for.

Still a question will unemployed pops (that are part of your manpower as levies) seek employment as mercenaries so you have no real control over who and when they join a fight as they are looking for coin to support there families or do you have some control or is there a different mechanic for these mercenaries? Also can you send your regulars out as mercenaries (so you always have direct control)?
 
Hi Johan, if we hire mercenaries do we also need to supply them with weapons, food etc. or will they supply those themselves from the wages we give them?
 
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Code:
a_steppe_horse_archers = {
    category = army_cavalry

    copy_from = a_age_1_traditions_cavalry
    max_strength = 0.1

    morale_damage_done = 0.2
    initiative = 5
   
    movement_speed = 1.0
   
       
    combat = {
        grasslands = 0.2
        sparse = 0.2
    }
   
    maintenance_demand =  steppe_horse_archers_maintenance
    construction_demand = steppe_horse_archers_construction
   

    gfx_tags = { archer_tag light_tag }
}


How will units represent graphically? What does gfx_tags = { archer_tag light_tag } here refer to?
 
To confirm, armies don't reinforce in enemy territory, only friendly- does occupied territory count as "friendly" for this? If it doesn't it will make map painting harder (which I would approve of), but I worry the AI wouldn't handle it well.

You said the goods needed for army upkeep are purchased from the Market the army is stationed in. This somewhat simulates the logistics constraints of operating far abroad (where is that Army you send to conquer the Inca going to get new muskets now eh?). What about manpower? Even if your army can scrounge up muskets and cannons from occupied India, if you don't own many provinces there realistically it would take a very long time for new cannon fodder to ship over to replace casualties?
 
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Can you tell us the three locations for the Azores? Is it Terceira, Sao Miguel, and then the rest, or Eastern, Western, and Central? Or perhaps three major towns of the islands? If its named after towns, I'm going to assume that either Angra or Praia would be one of the names. In which case, please name it just Angra or Praia - the names of Angra do Heroismo and Praia Da Vitoria date to the 1830s.

Kind of a passion of mine, I married an Azorean girl.

ponta_delgada
angra_do_heroism
santa_cruz_flores
 
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Johan, the Kingdom of Sweden's levies screen states that levies will gather in all Region capitals. Can you explain what a Region capital is, and say whether they serve any purpose beyond being where levies gather?

Region Capital = biggest and most important place you own in a region.
 
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I also had a question as to whether or not Regulars or Levies have a gold upkeep, or if the upkeep is only the goods and manpower?

And gold.
 
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Oh and while Johan is here I'm going to ask something related to two previous TTs, not expecting an answer but I was wondering:

A stone quarry building was shown that produces 1 stone with 1000 workers and a bunch of input goods. Kalmar was shown to produce 1 stone with 1000 workers, but no input goods were in the tooltip.
Does that mean that RGOs don't ever need input goods? It makes sense that a generic building wouldn't be as efficient than an RGO, but having thousands of workers mining stone without any sort of input good looks very strange considering all the machinery they had in the time period. I'd expect the difference to be in output instead.

Or would the potential of feedback loops be too much of an issue if even basic RGO production needed goods to function?

Its an abstraction to make the RGO's work, and not have a circular loop to crash all things
 
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