• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

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.


PY1i0QRMAuYEsej-5zpt_7lZMxXLLCCBPTddUNCRR9GQ3qDpT2Eta_rsPp1z80rKS4IG-Mtn4NJ5RlX9wOnuLziEx6j4XoD4CNCoiWuo8uO6vGEWtXnFSnPBqaQpg_-0E_qhfpPpLmwWngETkCafyhU

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.

lwc36qKfMap3fnpoARbRdADpd8skxjGquMLJCP0dAWPJYJN1yQSuqzwvosm7_KOrblhYUzs8DKJmdaZDNBaD3d8mr9JG--0FZIRoYX67JGbUWbTi7sok6qUUVNGFEWJ1Cd8Pcg9E7N-GY8J_mknwuq8

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.

qk_-5EwQtnABoUMucSmUNjHMQp9Tx-5GU5-rJxVpAvnycVXmoZ98GxRoRbTg5oeaDXxB-zYf5U2wvZfQ0xY3rxC9o4pEuXLn1-eMEntbS4raoALAdTzlGXhi2UMk04gnB48g6s15eDc88VcngS2NmBU

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.,
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • 256Like
  • 163Love
  • 11
  • 7
Reactions:
I am going to take the risk and say something that may get me downvoted, but I think it is something important to mention, especially to the MP community, so I hope the SP community can have some mercy.


All of this sounds interesting and realistic, but I want to ask if there is a mechanic that helps you recover from a war. This is a problem that I see in vic3, where 90% of the time it isn't worth it to go to war, so you stay all game afk building buildings and attacking undeveloped countries that can't do anything against you while avoiding any war that may be challenging. So you can avoid losing half of your population in a war and is going to stop you from snowball since population is what limits you at the end.


I hope you can add something like a "baby boom" mechanic so even if you lose half of your male population in a war, in 20 years your population can recover thacks to not losing your female population, this dosnt mane war isnt going to hearts since you are still going to suffer 20 years of less income and military weakness. but at least the others countries aren't going to snowball outside of your reach.


I hate when in eu4 you fight a war against another player for 20 years and after a pirric victory you get attacked by someone who was 20 years afk developing and building their country, and now you have to surrender and he makes a horrible peace asking for all your tradenodes... I just want to mention this so you can try to create a system where balance and interesting wars are encouraged and unilateral wars are not. I think the priority should be to make the gameplay fun, not necessarily realistic. Obviously, if it can be both, the better.
There are some factors there yeah
From a thread asking about this a few weeks back.
 
  • 1
Reactions:
I guess mercenaries will recruit from pop working in a building built by estates rather than states?
Or is their manpower generated out of thin air?
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
yes, you can do it per province

is it possible to turn off the raising of levies for a province were you know you will not want to use them bc the production is too important until turned back on?
I know its more a QoL feature but I imaging its much easier to just "turn off levy raising" for specific provinces and then click "raise all non turned off provinces" far simpler as to go through every province war by war just bc you dont want the levies from 2 provinces in your empire.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
I don't mind them being abstracted into a single good, representing them as different goods would add very little to the game overall, while leaving you with the extra chore of managing different types of weapon production/procurement.
In that case you could play as a North American tribe that didn't have access to guns yet and be able to make money selling weapons to Europeans because according to your logic differentiating between wooden spears and rifles is an "extra chore".
 
  • 2
Reactions:
If you still have a manpower pool then some..

BUT you can't reinforce anyway if not in friendly locations.
Could you clarify what counts as friendly territory? occupation, owned and allied territory, etc
And are we getting more than 2 combat rows? I'd imagine that archers and artillery would be in separate rows unless it works as an auxiliary
 
  • 1
Reactions:
@Johan, one meta question: how far in advance do you write these Tinto Talks? It always amazes me how much content you have ready to present every week here in the forums, and it's the kind of thing that I have seen at work how hard it is to do. Did you spend the last few months drafting most of these, or are you just good at writing down a lot of concepts into a medium size forum post every week consistently week after week?
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Will plague, natural disasters, famine, etc affect your standing army? Such as killing off an equal percentage of your soldiers compared to your total population. I think it could be an easy exploit to raise a bigger army before the plague and disband them to save a larger portion of your total population.
 
  • 3Like
Reactions:
Wouldn't it make sense to enable a "privilege" like peasant levie, or trained levies, which reduces peasent output but gives them a bit of experience and makes them a bit better?

Someone mentioned longbows which I could see as a levy, but also something which requires a lot of training as well.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
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.
Would a good reason for canons to be its own good is that you can have production methods locked behind tech that makes copper more importan for cannon manufacturing further into the game? Stora kopparberget was one of the reaons Sweden was one of the few coutries making enough canons to export them after all.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
The slave pops of this game wouldn't accurately represent jannisaries, since they don't have political power and are poor. Jannisaries were slaves but were extremely influential.
I suppose they would be their own estate, I just used them for my example, but good point. i’d say Mamluks then, but these also became their own estate.

You know thinking about this, pops should be able to gain power from being in an army (when they mutiny/rebel).
 
But why not just implement soldier pops and make it so that military buildings increase soldier pop conversion? It doesn't really make sense to me as to why fielding a huge standing army but not incurring any military losses would mean the nation has the same number of people working in buildings/farms/mines etc. With soldier pops, I feel like it would make a lot more sense and be simulated better in this regard. The manpower number could simply be a total count of soldier pops and how many regiments you can field.
I think this should be the case for professional soldiers, but definitely not for levies and nobility and the like. Those would return to their daily lives after a war.

It is a little strange if a standing army is also contributing to the economy. If they are disbanded, wouldn’t a large part of them retain their trade and become mercenaries/bandits? I feel that the longer a peasant pop is in the army they would become a soldier pop over time, but that might be one level of complexion that is unnecessary for the game.
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Please keep it like that. The game already has an insane amount of goods, we dont need different PM and buildings for different type of weapons. The AI will struggle enough as it is.

I think handheld guns and cannons should be separated as their own goods leaving the types of military goods at three, primarily because the manufacuing was different and copper (well, bronze) was important for a long time for canons. Matchlocks/muskets switched to iron early, but getting good cast iron canon manufacturing took a much longer time.
 
Last edited:
  • 8Like
Reactions: