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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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Someone may have asked this already, but its a long thread:

Levies start off with “no experience to speak of.” Is it possible there may be ways that this can be changed, so that your levies start off with more experience?

I’m thinking of some way of modeling how some societies required their militias to train regularly.
 
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I’m thinking of some way of modeling how some societies required their militias to train regularly.
Good point. As an example, around 10% of the North Indian population in the mid 1600s regularly engaged in gymnastics and other kinds of physical training to that end. A higher percentage than 10 were also capable of handling rudimentary firearms and other kinds of weaponry.
 
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.
But if I lose 30% of a regiment or 50%, however much, do I still need to pay the full maintenance cost of said regiment?
And also, I don't quite understand how manpower and pops interact with each other. When I get manpower, do I absorb pops into the manpower pool? As in, would I lose pops if I lose manpower, even if that's their pop-job?
 
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But if I lose 30% of a regiment or 50%, however much, do I still need to pay the full maintenance cost of said regiment?
And also, I don't quite understand how manpower and pops interact with each other. When I get manpower, do I absorb pops into the manpower pool? As in, would I lose pops if I lose manpower, even if that's their pop-job?
You lose pops when you lose manpower in battles or to attrition.
 
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What? The building that creates manpower employs the peasants. Like the building shown above employs 5000 peasants. It just doesn't kill 50 per month to generate +50 monthly manpower.
Ok that makes much more sense, thanks.
 
I hate when in eu4 you fight a war against another player for 20 years and after a pirric victory you get attacked by someone who was 20 years afk developing and building their country, and now you have to surrender and he makes a horrible peace asking for all your tradenodes... I just want to mention this so you can try to create a system where balance and interesting wars are encouraged and unilateral wars are not. I think the priority should be to make the gameplay fun, not necessarily realistic. Obviously, if it can be both, the better.


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I hope that army losses are not a 1:1 ratio to pop losses. Just because your army got stackwiped, doesn’t mean they were literally all killed in most cases. If a battle turned against one side, many might run away/desert/be injured/be captured and later ransomed. Only in rare cases (usually being completely surrounded or hemmed in by terrain preventing escape) were armies even close to totally wiped out like that. Whether the army itself remained a coherent fighting force was another question.
 
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I hope that army losses are not a 1:1 ratio to pop losses. Just because your army got stackwiped, doesn’t mean they were literally all killed in most cases. If a battle turned against one side, many might run away/desert/be injured/be captured and later ransomed. Only in rare cases (usually being completely surrounded or hemmed in by terrain preventing escape) were armies even close to totally wiped out like that. Whether the army itself remained a coherent fighting force was another question.

Iirc, you still get half the manpower from a stackwiped army in EU4. Presumably something similar will happen again in EU5.
 
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Yeah, if you can buy cannons or firearms of the local market, and can recruit proper regiments, then you can field them.

if you can't, then you can't.
Will AI European nations to try to prevent cannons and firearms from being accessible to native markets, or any other market outside of Europe for that matter?

Trading these goods away for quick profits seems like a extraordinarily short-sighted thing to do for would-be colonizers.
 
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Units now requite goods to be produced and maintained. Do regiments also require food to upkeep when raised both for levies and standing army? If so, will they draw from a national market as they would for instance in Vic 3 or will they draw from markets they are present in? Will my army recruited in England and stationed in the colonies - consume England's food or would they consume local food?
 
I am going to take the risk and say something that may get me downvoted, but I think it is something important to mention, especially to the MP community, so I hope the SP community can have some mercy.


All of this sounds interesting and realistic, but I want to ask if there is a mechanic that helps you recover from a war. This is a problem that I see in vic3, where 90% of the time it isn't worth it to go to war, so you stay all game afk building buildings and attacking undeveloped countries that can't do anything against you while avoiding any war that may be challenging. So you can avoid losing half of your population in a war and is going to stop you from snowball since population is what limits you at the end.


I hope you can add something like a "baby boom" mechanic so even if you lose half of your male population in a war, in 20 years your population can recover thacks to not losing your female population, this dosnt mane war isnt going to hearts since you are still going to suffer 20 years of less income and military weakness. but at least the others countries aren't going to snowball outside of your reach.


I hate when in eu4 you fight a war against another player for 20 years and after a pirric victory you get attacked by someone who was 20 years afk developing and building their country, and now you have to surrender and he makes a horrible peace asking for all your tradenodes... I just want to mention this so you can try to create a system where balance and interesting wars are encouraged and unilateral wars are not. I think the priority should be to make the gameplay fun, not necessarily realistic. Obviously, if it can be both, the better.
As a SP player, I completely understand that these situations can be frustrating, especially in multiplayer. I myself have played a couple MP games where another player took advantage of my weakened state. But that's just it, they took advantage of an opportunity. It is 100% rational and understandable to do so and is completely historical and realistic too, this shouldn't in any way be restricted by some sort of hardcoded game mechanic. It is not fun for the losing player, but, well... it's not supposed to be.
Edit: (Generally speaking, I think situations like these need to be regulated by the players in the MP server, not an in game mechanic. Setting rules for what is and isn't allowed is standard practice in a lobby after all. If you do not like these things happening and the other players feel the same, then you need to come to a consensus and create a server rule that you can't screw over a player for x amount of years after they finish a brutal player war, for example.)

And I agree that recovering from a brutal war should be possible if you focus on peace and prosperity after a war, but a "death war" SHOULD have consequences, in fact I'd LOVE it if EU5's mechanics completely eliminated the idea of a "death war". It's just neither fun nor realistic for most players and nations to do, would devastate a nation and losing as many men as you lose in some EU4 MP wars would not only cripple but completely eradicate a nation. The concept of a "death war" in project caesar should NOT exist. It's just too gamey, exploity and totally depends on which player can get the most modifiers and buildings for manpower.

There are many other ways to show your skill and conquer even in multiplayer.

Now I'll reiterate that this is not an attack against MP players, and I genuinely hope this game will be just as much fun for MP players as it will be for SP.
 
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How does the ottoman devshirme system work? Is there such a system where the ottomans specifically get manpower from Christian pops? If so do you still need the Christian pops to be accepted culture? Or maybe you need unique buildings for them?
 
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How does the ottoman devshirme system work? Is there such a system where the ottomans specifically get manpower from Christian pops? If so do you still need the Christian pops to be accepted culture? Or maybe you need unique buildings for them?
As per his reply to my response, there will be a mechanism for converting slaves to manpower. So, you'd turn those Christian pops to slaves, and then via buildings turn those slaves into manpower.
 
Might be an odd question, will/is genAI being used in the creation of project ceasar?
My guess is probably not? Generally speaking once you start getting into "we're working within our own bespoke game engine", things like Copilot lose most of their utility. Just too many things way too specific to the system you're using. I wouldn't be surprised if they've taken a look and probably ask a prompt or two to answer some programming-related questions that aren't going to be engine-specific, but that's probably the extent of its usage.

If you mean, like, building descriptions and the like, they pay people for that. If you mean artwork, they pay people for that, too. Localization is handled by an external company these days. If you mean the map setup or history... good luck getting those things to spit out anything even remotely approaching accurate at the level of fidelity that this game demands.

If you mean, like, for the game's actual AI agents for each country, it's just way too much of a mess and damn well near impossible to tune to any level of useful, to say nothing of too expensive at the computational level and all the other problems that I could prattle about ad nauseum if given the opportunity.
 
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First sorry if you’ve already had a question like this. I had a look but there were no replies to this sort of question. Hello I have a question/ request/ suggestion. I see you’ve said that armies can’t reinforce in enemy territory and was wondering if this would be reconsidered. My reasons are 2 fold:
  1. when sieging down forts, and this has required some abstraction on my part (I hear it’s sometimes required) that armies will stop sieging when the manpower in an army falls below the fort level/ garrison similar to eu4 which is very frustrating
  2. It’s not very historical, most sieging/ campaigning armies would get reinforcements from home, for example napoleons armies in France got reinforced, not going home to reinforce.
So, what system would be used to make this work? Well my thinking was each army would have a toggle, when the army moved in to friendly territory, the toggle would automatically move to reinforce and when it entered enemy territory it would go to don’t reinforce. If the players feels it necessary, they can then change this in enemy territory. This would stop a constant drain on manpower

But what would be the negative to this? Well to make this work:
  1. rather than reinforcing every week (I’m guessing happens in friendly) it would reinforce monthly to simulate reinforcement happening less frequently (or 3-4 times longer than normal)
  2. The reinforcement path would use the logic from the trade system - the route of the reinforcement would be calculated using the same math as a trade route I.e from the army to the closest home territory.
  3. The highest attrition value along this route would be applied to the reinforcements x2 to simulate (through abstraction) some reinforcement armies being ambushed by the local defence forces or through guerilla actions
  4. This would mean reinforcing in hostile territory is possible but costly in manpower terms but also operating near rivers/ the coast would be cheaper as less attrition would be applied
I’m not sure how viable this would be in terms of AI and performance cost
 
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