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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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Its an "abstracted layer" of how many of your peasants are possible soliders
Does that mean you can affect your manpower rate with military training laws/buildings?

Or is the abstraction about how quickly you can enlist/register them so it would get better with burocratic reforms instead?

Or a mix of both?
 
From this and previous Talks I worry that India and China will have an unfair advantage in this game. Europe's population couldn't compare to them (Persia/Middle East too), especially after the Black Death. I wouldn't be surprised if China had cities beyond cities beyond cities. I am curious in how a low-pop country will function and if it is viable to fight. You can essentially play ANY nation in eu4, not that I would recommend it, but wouldn't the trade, production, tax, and rural-to-city system kneecap players who want to play the lesser (developed/populated) nations?

I am excited for this game but I am curious about game balance.
 
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Very exciting stuff here. As someone who never played CK, the levies sound pretty intuitive and I like the added risk you take to your whole economy. I understand that this is probably meant for a later DD, but I am concerned about how 'Caesar' will address the stale meta that developed especially in mid-low level play in EU4.

For the most part, the doctrine I heard while playing was 'cav are never worth it early game if you don't have horde bonuses' so I'd just make infantry till I could make cannons, then make half the amount of cannons I had infantry. I get that this was a template I choose to follow via my own research, but I never felt any problems with it - it reduced the whole process to 'ignore cav, try to make this amount of soldiers'. Are there plans in Caesar to change the combat meta, or better-yet, make it so any kind of comp is viable if it's a player's 'style', even without national bonuses? Will a logistics heavy army (and apologies, I didn't play much IR) actually be strong at whatever support units do to the point where they're viable militarily, or will that only ever be a meme? Will cav actually be a good proposition for an early-game player - perhaps the earlier start date will affect that? And with the increased focus on archers, will a concept of attack "range" be represented in some way to show how English longbowmen destroyed french cavalry and so on?

In short, is there a design ethos that will differentiate the new military comp meta from the EU4 meta (which didn't seem to incentivize creativity), and if so, what, generally is that ethos?
 
I've been really impressed with much of the mechanics and gameplay concepts that have been teased so far. However, I do want to ask if there will be additional mechanics or gameplay elements that will curtail snowballing? In history the rise and fall of empires is ubiquitous, yet many GSGs fail to model this and do not challenge the player once they have achieved great/hegemonic power status, and there is often little incentive to continue a playthrough at this point. Will there be any gameplay elements, mechanics, or events that will make holding an empire together both difficult and rewarding?
 
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no, your regulars need friendly territory to reinforce.

mercenaries can be bribed.

Will there be some sort of automated mechanism to detach depleted regiments and send them back to friendly territory for reinforcement? Sort of like the "detach damaged" on fleets in EU4 but at something like 60% MP. Otherwise this seems like a bit of a pain to micro.

And does "friendly territory" mean within core territory, or within occupied territory? It'd make sense if it was reinforcement of occupied territory, but only if there was a contiguous chain of occupation from your army to your own core territory (or through an ally/neutral with mil access).
 
Do regiments have their on supply bag, as in hoi4, vic2 and IR/ck3(whole regiment) ? Or it would work like in vic3 that they all take from the market and even if it comes to have no production they still fight, but with heavy debuffs?
 
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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.
Certainly agreed with that one split yes.
 
Probably the best DD so far!
Till the next one!
 
Its an abstraction to make the RGO's work, and not have a circular loop to crash all things

Would it be plausible to have a production method on the RGO that takes in input goods for greater efficiency, but if you have no goods you use a default, less efficient production method? Or does that cause the same kind of loop?
 
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If you still have a manpower pool then some..

BUT you can't reinforce anyway if not in friendly locations.

Would an occupied fort/location count as a friendly location?

Ie: could France undertake a spring campaign to secure a fort in the low countries, then use said fort as a base to winter in, to prepare for further campaigns in the following spring?
 
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