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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 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.
That would make sense since a horde would pretty much get what they need from raids and razing other lands without suffering the drawbacks of draining manpower from their settlements...because they are used to moving around a lot and ready to fight.
For more 'settled' cultures, losing a chunk of your population, especially if they are from certain caliber ( after all, it is not just peasants that go to war but nobles etc also ), the impact would definitely be bigger.
Now how that can work in game, guess you can have these unique buildings like the Kurultai have less negative loss from the regiments it can create.
 
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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.
Hopefully this gets noticed, because this is absolutely something that should be in the game. The turnover rate of units absolutely should scale with their current manpower to avoid weird behaviors like this. One count argue that’s the penalty for preserving unit experience but unit experience not being diluted by reinforcement and turnover (except through an abstracted decay rate) is itself absurdly detached from reality.
 
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I don't mind them being abstracted into a single good, representing them as different goods would add very little to the game overall, while leaving you with the extra chore of managing different types of weapon production/procurement.
I think Cannons are important enough to make sense as their own good given their unique roles compared to regular guns.
 
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no, your regulars need friendly territory to reinforce.

mercenaries can be bribed.

What constitutes "friendly territory"? Does that include enemy territory that is occupied by you or a war ally, or does it have to be owned by you or an ally? To me it feels like being able to occupy a far-flung territory and be able to reinforce there despite the separation would be cheesing the system quite a bit.
 
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what will be the basis of manpower for rebels?
i assume it depends on what kind of rebellion it is
but if a rebellion occurs in say a handful of provinces, will the amount of levies i can levy from there be less, as some of those men presumably were swayed into joining the rebellion?
 
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For some reason it looks funny that 0.2 horses is sufficient maintenance. Because 0.2 horses is a dead horse.
Basically using fractions for something that cannot be divided feels weird.
So you okey with 100 people horse regiment require just one horse to be created? Clearly numbers is abstraction and not 1-1, i not sure even that saying that 1 horse mean 100 actual horses (and 0.2 will mean 20) will be correct.
 
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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.
I talk about the concept in general. See the other post I quoted that confirmed scripted rulers.

If he exists at the start of the game, I don't see a problem. But if it takes some years to appear via event I would prefer if the stats can change or if there is a chance he didn't do what he did in history and he doesn't show.

The more time passes the less probable should be to have events happening the same way, this includes being born, getting the same education (stats) and doing the same things. And I understand this may be difficult to simulate, that's why I proposed that gamerule to disable this kind of events.
 
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I wonder, after all that has been said by Johan about maintenance cost of an army, and slowness of replenishing manpower, etc, would that mean that wars are going to be fewer and shorter? I suppose that some sort of alpha (beta?) testing is happening, therefore some people probably know the answer to this.

I would like to see shorter wars than in EU4. Even after a single battle, depending of calculated time to refill the manpower, it would be possible to calculate warscore. Which leads me to another dilema: will it be still necessary to actualy occupy a certain province to have it as a war spoil? I mean, suppose someone loses a great deal of manpower in a single battle, and it would take, like, 20 years to recover it, and his enemy still have big army available. Would that enemy still have to occupy every single province (or location, or whatever) for it to be conquered as a part of peace deal?
 
I think Cannons are important enough to make sense as their own good given their unique roles compared to regular guns.
And they already are their own good, as Johan explained. I can also agree with them splitting that further into firearms and artillery pieces, but I don't think the game needs to go much further than that and become like HOI4 where you need to produce a myriad of different equipment for your units/armies.
 
A lot of mercenaries and professional soldiers turned to pillaging when work was lacking (for example a lot of ), and the line between mercenary and bandit was pretty blurry at times. Will anything like this be represented in game?
 
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Yes, we had that, but the AI was exploitable.
Was it exploitable in the sense the AI would raise levies when not needed? It seems unfortunate not being able to raise them just because of AI behaviour :( If two wars are shortly spaced out in time, would we need to raise the levies twice, once for each war? Or would we at least be able to keep them raised for a period after the war ended?
 
Was it exploitable in the sense the AI would raise levies when not needed? It seems unfortunate not being able to raise them just because of AI behaviour :( If two wars are shortly spaced out in time, would we need to raise the levies twice, once for each war? Or would we at least be able to keep them raised for a period after the war ended?
Levied do not reinforce so raidng them again isn't bad
 
Ok this is rather a niche question.

Will there be the possibility of vassalising mercenary groups and having them become a substitute regular army?

I'm mainly thinking about how Gallowglass and Kerne mercenary companies in Ireland became vassalised by Irish and Hiberno-Norman lords thus providing them with an ersatz standing army.
 
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Nice. Can't wait to learn more about the ages. Will they be country specific like CK3 eras or global like EU4 ages? I feel like a CK3 style would allow for things like stone age and copper age cultures in the Americaa, Arctic, and Oceania.
 
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