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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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I saw the answer about mercenaries being somewhat offmap in nature while also being able to offer mercenaries as a country. So my question is:

Are the losses that mercenary companies suffer still felt somewhere by initially being detracted from a localized pop?
Like pops deciding they have a better fortune offering their services leaving their home to become a "merc pop".
 
If you still have a manpower pool then some..

BUT you can't reinforce anyway if not in friendly locations.
Maybe if you are in a province of your main culture but cure owned by the country you are fighting, some of that provinces population might reinforce your army? Not at same rate as if you own the province but some of the people living there may be keen to fight for you in the hope of being ‘liberated’?
 
Is there a drawback to doing genocides by recruiting only from non accepted culture provinces?

Well, you can't build any manpower producing buildings where the dominant culture is not accepted.
 
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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?

Still be 3000, but it takes forever to regen
 
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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?

What natives are you talking about?
 
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Will the new Combat Speed modifier along with Flanking Ability impact significantly the duration of battles? I'm asking if you will get rid of the 1.5 year long (ww1 style) battles past 1600+ like currently in EU4 single/Multiplayer.

Combat should not last for months
 
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What natives are you talking about?
I didn't have a specific one in mind, but for instance New World ones, including North, Central, and South American. Or sub-Saharan ones. Groups which historically were not able to field artillery with their armies.

More generally, I am wondering if the game will have any way to model the different style of warfare many native groups used, which did not involve fixed formations or artillery, in a way that they can be modernized and remain competitive with European warfare into the late game.
 
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Well, you can't build any manpower producing buildings where the dominant culture is not accepted.
Very interesting idea, but I gotta ask, won't this be a massive nerf to multicultural empires like historical Austria?
 
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Hello Johan, another question.
You said we'll be able to mix-match unit types in an earlier reply so will we also be able to assign different generals for different regiments in an army? Or each army will have just one general?
 
I hope mercenaries will in some cases work like "nations not tied to owning land" much like the banking nations mentioned a few weeks ago. Maybe we'll see the Condottieri lords of northern Italy play a big role, the late 14th century was their golden age with captains like John Hawkwood and the Sforza.
 
Little bit complicated question but will hussies/Bohemia get some nice Wagon forts and early artillery so they can masacre German crusaders and will hussites will be tied to Bohemia or will it be all depended on seat of the Holly Roman emperor.

But generally how much scripted will be Charles IV, rise of Bohemian dominance in HRE and then following hussites wars ?

Thank you
 
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Well, you can't build any manpower producing buildings where the dominant culture is not accepted.
While I understand the gameplay logic, how historical is that ?
I don't know about the early game, but by Napoleonic times, soldiers came more often from fringe regions than from the core (for example, in the Napoleonic defeat in Waterloo, both sides had huge contingents of lowland farmers)
 
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As far as I am aware there were two types of peasants during mediaeval times (Here mostly speaking of the realms of Germany and France as I am quite sure that at least there it was the case). One who were free and once who were not. The ones who were free having the burden of having to serve in his lord’s army in return for their freedom. This had the effect of many fleeing into serfdom to not have to serve in the army. Coming ever closer to modern times the line between the two vanished more and more until almost vanishing. So, I do not know how the recruitments of levy armies actually worked. Where they recruited out of free peasants or did all abled man need to serve later in medieval times? I know at least of there being militias of free peasants in the thirty years war that were called upon from there liege.

Are there any planes on representing this in game or referencing this? Will there e.g. be a privilege to grant to your peasant’s estate, giving out the status of free man and land to your peasants to increase the amount levies you can raise?
 
And if the launch goes well, I can ask the team to start the map feedback posts later this week!
Please set a specialized section in this sub-forum. Let’s put and merge all Byz vs E. R. things into it.
 
the building is saying "+50 manpower monthly" is that +50 coming from the pops? so its converting 50 pops to 50 manpower? if so what happens if there's no pop to convert into manpower or is there a limit?
 
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