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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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You have a manpower pool.

A horse archer regimemt reduces the pool by 1 MP each month. (this is just natural "getting too old and retire etc))

A Kurultai (if fully supplied etc), will add 50 MP each month, and allow a pool of 3000 MP (of 5 years, sorry 10 is eu4),

Building a single horse archers regiment of 100 men will cost 100 MP.

So you build 25 horse archers regiment, that will cost you 2500MP, and have a monthly upkeep of 25MP.

That means you will only regain 5MP each month, making restoring the MP pool much slower, which makes it take 50 years to maximise your manpower pool with that regular army raised.

And if you fight a battle with your 2,500 horse archers, and lost 30%.. you now need to regain 750 manpower from the pool, while still maintaing the 25 MP.

Disregarding the fact that losing pops is BAD for you, losing manpower is not quickly regained either.
Will the deployed armies affect your max manpower pool? Like, those 2500 horse archers will have your max manpower pool now be 500, or will it still be 3000?
 
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Will we see countries given appropriate manpower reflecting their situation in 1337? Things like the Bulgarians having lost their army in the Battle of Velbazhd only 7 years prior to the start date, having their entire levies wiped out in the process?
 
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Will there be alternative unit paths for indigenous natives, meaning auxiliaries which are not artillery but somehow still able to seriously compete with artillery armies? Or will artillery become a universal necessity by the mid-to-endgame, including for natives?
 
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1. Are there any religion or culture based modifiers for armies?
2. Do all military modifiers effect entire army or some culture and religion based modifiers effect only it's own recruited soldiers. For example let's say muslims gain +5 morale damage. But I recruited my army from my Orthodox provinces. Do they got that modifier as well?
 
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Currently its "guns" and "weaponry", but its one of these things that are relatively easy to rework, and we keep iterating upon goods/buildings constantly
I'm assuming weaponry is non-gunpowder weapons. Maybe split that into projectile and melee weapons, and guns into firearms (handheld) and cannons?
 
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Also, unrelated to this TT but to the last TT, how will Genoa's collection of trade tolls in Constantinople be handled given that Genoa doesn't obviously own Constantinople? Will trade power be the mechanism in which sound tolls are distributed? Will Genoa have a building built in Constantinople for this effect? Will it be represented at all?
 
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This sounds great, I really love the addition of levies as it reminds me of the CK2 feature where you raise levies from each of your locations, and regiments too, I can't wait to see just how combat works exactly, which reminds me, how exactly will generals/commanders work? Will I be able to assign 3 commanders to a regiments if we assume they have three flanks, or will this be discussed later down the line? Oh and can you assign a general to levies or do they spawn with their own commander?
 
Will many troops dying in a location contribute to the spread of disease, or any other aftereffects of a battle on a location?
 
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What's really interesting is that this effectively means that, say, getting stackwiped would absolutely devastate your country. It'd take decades even to get back to parity with your fighting force, to say nothing of your economy.

Exactly as it should.
 
Will the deployed armies affect your max manpower pool? Like, those 2500 horse archers will have your max manpower pool now be 500, or will it still be 3000?
How I understood it is it will still be 3000, but replenish really slow due to the monthly manpower upkeep. So you could stockpile manpower if you can afford to build and maintain your standing army before the war, but take too many casualties and you'll run out quickly even then. It's gonna be a fine balancing act for sure.
 
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ponta_delgada
angra_do_heroism
santa_cruz_flores

Thank you so much!

I humbly request that, even if the code says angra_do_heroism (possible typo there?) that the name show up as just plain “Angra” for the reason I mentioned previously. “Do Heroismo” was added to the name in the 1830s.
 
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I always felt like EU4 had too many modifiers creating a lot of complexity with very little depth.

Looks like we have even more modifiers now?
 
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Ah, the downside of pops. They die if they are killed.

I agree there should be some differentiation between weapons like firearms, cannon and simple weapons, but nothing overly complex.

Locking raising levies behind conditions because of AI abuse is too bad. Maybe AI could sometimes use the same tricks? It remains to be seen how it will work in practice, but I bet people will find ways around it regardless.
 
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