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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 your troops reinforce while in enemy provinces? Can I bribe mercenaries in another army to swap sides or disband? Does how well a campaign in a war is going affect morale?
 
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I think from Imperator I will miss two things regarding this topic:

My generals being jerks and not following my orders. (And having to be placated or bribed)

And raising levies before the war (to either build roads or to walk them to the border) - in Victoria 1, mobilization as a mechanic made your neighbours mobilize aswell in preparation. Even nations that you weren't going to attack.

Also does this mean I can't build roads with levies in peacetime?
 
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Two questions:
- Will countries across the world start with same-similar regiment sizes? It feels weird to me that places like china and india are burdened by the same medieval-small scale armies of european countries, where european army sizes of this time were a consequence of weak political power of governments, something not necessarily plagueing other parts of the world.
- Will regiments gain experience from fighting in war as well and not just from drilling? (I hope so)
 
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Any info about Auxiliaries? Also about soldiers that can you recruit from core culture; how are soldiers line janissaries and gulams represented?
 
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Is there only one trade good representing all weapons?

With how many individual goods Project Caesar has, I expected at least melee weapons, ranged weapons, cannons and muskets.


Currently its "guns" and "weaponry", but its one of these things that are relatively easy to rework, and we keep iterating upon goods/buildings constantly.
 
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With the unit types, for example with Steppe horse archers.
Is there possibility to have 2 or more different types of cavalry, like lancers and archers mixed, unlike in EU4, where you can have only 1 type of cavalry?
 
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Now that I've actually read the article, this game's design philosophy change compared to Project Caesar IV (2013) of having systems that actively bounce off of and affect each other and have tangible effects outside of 'number go up :) number go down :(', as well as having actual trade-offs and decisions to be made depending on what you require instead of basically objective positives and negatives with no real decision making opportunity, gives me complete confidence that no matter what the final product looks like in terms of polish and content amount, the underlying 'core' will be nearly perfect to build on. This'll be a damn good game!

Anyway quick question - I'm sure the combat mechanics will be improved greatly, but I wanted to know if you're planning on sticking with the usual visual representation of combat where you have very little abstraction from the actual dice rolls under the hood and essentially looks like a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet duking it out for a couple seconds and your reward is a post-duking-out equation with 2 sprites. Not that I hate that type of representation, but I was curious to see if you're planning on experimenting with something different.
 
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Is the manpower you raise for armies directly your pops or is manpower some abstraction where the more pops you have the more manpower you gain per month. And if units take damage will you lose pops?
 
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is the topic next week still related to the military though?

Oh and also, can I specifically raise levies in non-accepted culture provinces and have my unaccepted pops fight and die in my wars while my core pops are insulated? Can I build the manpower buildings in those provinces too?
Smells like russian spirit
 
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