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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.

All good and understandable here.

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.

5 MP? You meant 25, right? The building gives +50, you need 25 upkeep, 50-25 = 25.

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.

Ok I need some clarification here. My initial understanding is that, as the 25 MP upkeep is for 25 full regiments (representing retirements etc), then if you lose 30% of the army after a war, then the upkeep should also decrease by 30%, while the depleted regiments are refilled. But now I realize I'm probably thinking with a EU4 brain.

So, just to be sure: If you have a 2,500 army with a 25 MP upkeep, and 30% of the army dies (and thus now you have 1,750 surviving soldiers), 17.5 MP will be used as upkeep for those still-standing regiments, and the remainder 7.5 MP will slowly replace the 750 dead soldiers? So, it will take 100 months to replenish an army? If so, is there a way to speed up this reinforcement, be it decrees, Estate privileges, national ideas (lmao), sliders etc?

Disregarding the fact that losing pops is BAD for you, losing manpower is not quickly regained either.
Regardless, this is a good change, yeah.

What natives are you talking about?

I believe he's talking about the guys in the Americas, which didn't even have cavalry by the 15th century, much less cannons (you are implementing them in v1.0, right???)
 
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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 farmer levies)
Well, it's specifically a matter of culture difference, so if those farmers are an accepted culture, you have no problems here. It's just so that you can't conquer large swathes of territory and "mine the population for armies" without making some sort of concessions. Either turning them into subjects that can raise their own levies, accepting the culture, or probably some flavor of slavery.
 
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So, just to be sure: If you have a 2,500 army with a 25 MP upkeep, and 30% of the army dies (and thus now you have 1,750 surviving soldiers), 17.5 MP will be used as upkeep for those still-standing regiments, and the remainder 7.5 MP will slowly replace the 750 dead soldiers? So, it will take 100 months to replenish an army? If so, is there a way to speed up this reinforcement, be it decrees, Estate privileges, national ideas (lmao), sliders etc?
I had a similar question, and his reply for reinforcement was that it takes a full manpower to reinforce a regiment. So a 100 size regiment will take 30 MP to reinforce if it takes 30% casualties. So if you have a pool of 3000 MP, you build an army of 2500 MP, you are left with 500 MP (but the pool can replenish over time if you don't take casualties. Your building generates 50 MP/month, 25 of that instantly goes to maintenance, the other 25 will get added to the pool until you reach the maximum of 3000 again. But say right after you built your army of 2500 MP you take a battle, lose 30% of it so you'd need 750 MP to fully reinforce it, but you only have 500 remaining in your pool.
 
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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.
I am just a peasant oh mighty Johan, but isnt 50(production)-25(upkeep)=25 MP?
 
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Oh nonono it was going so well and then I read "...you can only raise them when you are at war...".
Why? Why add such a gamey mechanic? Of course I would raise my levies first if I planned to go to war as a king. And why shouldn't I be able to?

I really dislike when a game physically limits something where in reality nothing would be stopping me from doing it. There might be negative consequences from raising levies if you're not actually going to war, but this could easily be simulated e.g. if you don't dec war 3 months after raising levies, there will be certain negative effects or simply negative effects scaling with the amount of time passed since raising the levies while at peace (in combination with severe negative modifiers if you try to disband-raise-disband-raise levies in quick succession). But please don't make something physically impossible that really shouldn't be.
 
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About scripted rulers from events...
yeah, that will happen

yes, timur will be in.
Can we get a gamerule to disable them?

Sometimes they can be fun, it's nice to see the person from history books and to have runs close to real history, but it can get boring the more scripted rulers there are and the more you see them almost on every run. In the end, I get tired of seeing the same rulers with the same stats in the same nation because the year is in that century or because a nation did something it tends to do anyways. Also it does not make sense to have a dinasty changed or a ruler gone because an event says there is this important person in history.

For that reason, I would like to control if they appear in my runs or not.

On a similar topic, I don't know if dinasties are simulated or not, it would be nice to avoid some randomness we had in EUIV and also not depend too much on historical events.
 
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Oh nonono it was going so well and then I read "...you can only raise them when you are at war...".
Why? Why add such a gamey mechanic? Of course I would raise my levies first if I planned to go to war as a king. And why shouldn't I be able to?

I really dislike when a game physically limits something where in reality nothing would be stopping me from doing it. There might be negative consequences from raising levies if you're not actually going to war, but this could easily be simulated e.g. if you don't dec war 3 months after raising levies, there will be certain negative effects or simply negative effects scaling with the amount of time passed since raising the levies while at peace (in combination with severe negative modifiers if you try to disband-raise-disband-raise levies in quick succession). But please don't make something physically impossible that really shouldn't be.

read his comments - it was because you could explout the ai somehow - didnt explain how though.

(i suspect this could change after alpha/beta testing)
 
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I mean, we're talking levies here; you're going to replace them with a more permanent army over time anyway, which won't have this restriction (being a permanent army and all).
 
About scripted rulers from events...



Can we get a gamerule to disable them?

he only confirmed Timur, and he was already born 1336. if that is "scripted" then everything before 1337 is also scripted (the way 1337 start), might as well disable it and play stellaris or something.
 
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To be pedantic, more likely that Timur was born in the 1320's and then had a fabricated birthdate in order to further legitimize his rule.

Regardless, still born by the start date.
 
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Well, you can't build any manpower producing buildings where the dominant culture is not accepted.
Sounds to me like there should be potential for special historical buildings that allow you to recruit from non-accepted cultures, or how else would the Janissaries be represented, elite troops made from forcibly recruited children of non-accepted pops?
 
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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?
We know there is a serfdom vs. free peasants value for you country that gives certain modifiers.

Also worth noting that by the time the game starts, those peasants had already chosen to become unfree, that was more something that happened over the previous centuries. The game starts in a period where societal hierarchies are very entrenched.
 
Sounds to me like there should be potential for special historical buildings that allow you to recruit from non-accepted cultures, or how else would the Janissaries be represented, elite troops made from forcibly recruited children of non-accepted pops?
I think probably some flavor of enslavement, and then a building or some other mechanism for converting slaves into manpower?
 
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And if the launch goes well, I can ask the team to start the map feedback posts later this week!

Any chance we can get a list of raw materials, climates, vegetations and terrains before those posts start? Basically every characteristic of locations that could be included in historical feedback.
 
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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.

Is there any intention to scale manpower maintenance costs with strength?

As an example, 25 cav regiments of total strength 2500MP are reduced in strength by 99.9% to 25. Instead of 25 flat MP maintenance, maintenance is scaled -99.9% to .025 MP allowing for more rapid replenishment of troops based on deployed vs manpower pool/income as opposed to regiment count vs manpower pool/income.

The justification being to reduce weird micro behaviors where you're incentivized to consolidate, delete regiments, build up manpower, and then rehire depleted troops one by one as opposed to just letting your troops replenish naturally.
 
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