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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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There is also the Army Tradition, which is gained primarily from the average experience of your armies
Suppose a late-game mega-blob empire has their army composed of 100% regular regiments. Highly experienced soldiers so their Army Tradition is high. Suppose an unspeakable military tragedy happens and all those soldiers are killed in action, to the last man. Is Army Tradition now 0? If the mega-blob panics and levies en masse, will their Army Tradition still be 0? Do 0 strength regiments get deleted or can "the regiment banner" be brought back to the homeland to be replenished from the manpower pool?

I'm assuming starting experience of mercenaries will be discussed in a later TT. Very curious if they'll earn experience while fighting in wars you aren't involved in.


Oh and a UX question: can the player sort a selection of regiments by experience? HoI 4 took years to add that QoL feature which I consider core to my gameplay.
 
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Do auxiliary troops represent support units like supply trains and other not combat related units? Or does it represent irregulars like frontier rangers?
 
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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 }
}
that's exactly what I'd like to see
 
I really have not understood how manpower works.

Is it a pool of men you use to recruit and reinforce like in EU4, or something new, like a capacity, say you have +600 a month from buildings, and your standing armies require 500 a month to keep them?

I believe it’s the latter, you build buildings to raise your manpower capacity to let’s say 600. Then you build units that consume 550 so you’re left with a remaining capacity of 50 to fill up with units.

It was not stated whether you’re able to build more units that go beyond your capacity however. I’m assuming you can but that these units will basically come out as barely better than levies. Soldiers rushed through basic training with little grasp over what they were taught and suffering shortages of equipment.
 
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.
Is this to be understood in the way that 'you lose pops as well as manpower' when reinforcing a regular regiment, or does this mean that you only lose pops when 'levies as well as regular regiments' when losing men to either attrition or combat?
 
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How are Tercios represented in the game? Are they their own unit, or do you "recreate" a tercio by using different ratios of musketeers and pikemen (and swordsmen)?

I think it should be one unit but requiring both weapon and firearm goods input.

I also hope the military units are not a direct copy of EU4, which were a copy of EU3 including flavour text. Thinking of that, does something like tech groups exist, or are all national units tied to something else, like tags, geography or culture?
 
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You said, that when a regiment loses strength, POPs die too. Does that mean, that buildings that generate manpower turn POPs into manpower, and as manpower depletes new POPs are turned into manpower and are thus "killed"?
 
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I’m very much liking what’s being done with the military so far. Levies being their own separate type of unit and the units themselves being based on population are fascinating. But I do have some questions.

Will there specifically be officers and if so, will the nobility represent them? It would be interesting to see if a defeat in a major battle, that leads to the deaths of a number of officers, has an adverse effect on a nation’s political stability. It maybe too small of a scope for Project Caesar however.

The other is that, if during a rebellion, will we see our standing army diminish as they side with the rebellion? I can see it being exploitable if we’re told which units will side with the rebels and disband them prior to it. Or how it might affect gameplay if 70% of your standing army sides with a rebellious faction.
 
I really hope we could have control over the battle. For example tactical view of battlefield where you can navigate and give other orders to regiments. So far game is looking great, for me the cherry on top is that battle control system.
 
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Will we be getting a new and improved colonization mechanic? I think that this is a real opportunity for growth from EU4 and can really have some dynamic gameplay by simulating a 'motley crew' of conquistadors who kind of can be hired like mercenaries or something of the sort.

Since I see that this game is making the distinction between levies, standing armies, and mercenaries, I think that the distinction with chartered companies could be equally as interesting and add a lot of new and interesting depth to colonization. Historically chartered companies/conquistadors were not professional soldiers, and were moreover expeditions of people who were seeking some kind of glory (gold, title, land, etc) in the new world. If instead of just sending a colonist to a province, you would instead have to charter a company (which requires something like supplies) and which automatically expands a colony I think that would be far more interesting and add some real risk factors in colonization. Further, allowing the player to hire conquistador units as some kind of 'autonomous mercenaries' would simulate real life, as the Spanish crown had little direct control over their actions on account of being separated by a long journey across an ocean. Plus, I think it would add some depth to the subject/overlord interaction if colonies are semi-autonomous from their founding - though I am sure that there are some interesting vassal/overlord mechanics for this new game that might intertwine with this.

I'm excited for the game!
 
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A post I'm not sure I've seen anywhere:

With the idea of levies being directly related to pops and professional armies being loosely related to pops, would the idea of total war be a terrible idea? Say you could annex a whole nation at once but it takes many battles to make that happen. The flip side of this being you can do a many smaller wars to make sure you and your opponent don't lose too many people so that you aren't left trying to recover pop in your newly conquered land? Would make death wars in multiplayer and singleplayer (when player is the one employing the death war tactic) highly ineffective.
 
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