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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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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?
I mean if they want to blow up star fortress some artillery wouldn't hurt and be expected
 
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.
Oh I definitely agree, the soldier pops idea should only be utilised for standing armies.
 
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Will calvary provide any other benefits outside of pure combat ability? Can calvary assist in other areas that it was normally utilized for?
Ex:
  • Scouting
  • Screening
  • Requisitioning of supplies
  • Providing lines of communication
 
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next week is not part of the military ones i mentioned.

non-accepted culture pops sure, volume is likely to be far less though
Hi Johan. What do you think of levies/recruits from non-accepted cultures being disloyal and with the possibility of them switching sides if they fight against their own culture?
 
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Hi Johan. What do you think of levies/recruits from non-accepted cultures being disloyal and with the possibility of them switching sides if they fight against their own culture?
Evidently you can't build manpower-creating buildings in places without a majority accepted culture pop.

The problem I see with your idea to counter that is that if you manage to just... conquer the whole culture, then you can just build up levies in the territory you just acquired without issue, since their disloyalty will never kick in.
 
yes.

but not more "combat width"
How does this work? Is this an abstraction of improving operational organization? Because until the 1860's, presumably outside this game's timeframe, you're looking at close order formations of infantry 2-10 ranks deep, so the actual frontage of a unit relative to its size wont decrease. In fact it will increase when pike formations are dropped in favor of line infantry.
 
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Besides the economy tanking ?
I read that at that time, if more than 5% of those in the cities were conscripted, the economy collapsed irreversibly, but hordes could conscript more than half of the population without such a disadvantage. I hope this distinction can be recognized.
 
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Will we have the ability to control the % of experienced soldiers in regiments?

Ex I want to consolidate all my experienced soldiers in one regiment and use my other to loosen up the enemy before sending in my vets for the killing blow.

Or, I want to spread them out to help the new recruits hold the line so to speak.
 
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Well, you can't build any manpower producing buildings where the dominant culture is not accepted.
How will this work with e.g. Irish troops in the British Army? Historically, there was a rather large contingent of Irish soldiers and officers in the British Army. Will we not be able to replicate this?
 
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I have a few questions.

Your explanation of manpower feels a little vague, does this mean that manpower production buildings directly move pops out of the economy and into the manpower pool? And if that's the case does that mean it's possible to "over-recruit" where the manpower production exceeds the population growth of a location?

You also said that we have no control over what kind of troops we get in our levies, could we expect levies based on culture like in Imperator?

Finally in previous Tinto Talks you stated there wont be building slots. Will there be any sort of hardcap or softcap on buildings other than lack of pops? (For example: infrastructure in Vic3)
 
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I have a few questions.

Your explanation of manpower feels a little vague, does this mean that manpower production buildings directly move pops out of the economy and into the manpower pool? And if that's the case does that mean it's possible to "over-recruit" where the manpower production exceeds the population growth of a location?

You also said that we have no control over what kind of troops we get in our levies, could we expect levies based on culture like in Imperator?

Finally in previous Tinto Talks you stated there wont be building slots. Will there be any sort of hardcap or softcap on buildings other than lack of pops? (For example: infrastructure in Vic3)
My understanding is that the manpower buildings produce manpower in a given location and are employed by some number of pops. When a unit dies (that is, from attrition or combat; not the regular manpower maintenance), it then "kills a pop" proportional to the distribution of manpower across your country.

A levy, by comparison, doesn't use the manpower system at all. It just directly converts pops in a province to fighting units (with no experience), which then convert back when the unit is disbanded, for that given province.
 
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First of all majestic dev diary. The feeling of age transition would be amazing,
What I would like to note:
1. Different army stack i.e. Cavarly would have a much faster speed and act as a fast response force. This gives extreme strategic and tactical depth. 10/10 additon.
2. The diversity of units seem to be amazing.
3. This game is not EU 5. It is something totally new and amazing.

With only what you have posted so far, it looks that this game is going to be monumental and unmatched.

And a few noble requests if that is allowed:
-Vicky so far did not keep me for playing the game more than 150 hours (probably going to change).
-CK3 lacks the depth and challenge after mid game (pdx team addresses that already) and going for a huge and majestic update.

But please lets not wait for 3 years to get a game with the needed flavour and depth!

This time though everything looks different and I have total faith in that!

Cheers to the devs and thank you!
 
Apologies if this has already been answered, but how does the supply of goods for maintenance to armies work?

Say your army needs a supply of 10 leather, and 20 guns each month, would that army just increase the demands of the province/location it occupies?
If you were at war, and were occupying an enemy's location, would the required supply be transported from the closest friendly location, or would goods be looted from occupied provinces?

Lastly, is the maintenance cost increased when doing something like sieging down an enemy fortress, as ammunition would be rapidly depleted, or is maintenance constant?

Thanks Johan, I have never been more excited for a game that will take another 2 years to be released.
 
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