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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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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.
well, I'm asking because the most recent Stellaris DLC appears to have used genAI to generate voices and "visual reference material" (which sounds a lot like concept art)

now as far as I understand PdxTinto is rather separate-ish from the part of Paradox making Stellaris, so I hope genAI like that won't be used. Would be super disappointed personally if it was
 
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well, I'm asking because the most recent Stellaris DLC appears to have used genAI to generate voices and "visual reference material" (which sounds a lot like concept art)

now as far as I understand PdxTinto is rather separate-ish from the part of Paradox making Stellaris, so I hope genAI like that won't be used. Would be super disappointed personally if it was
Ah, I see. I don't think this one will have voices so I doubt it'll need it for anything like that, and "visual reference material" is... well, if that's a part of an artist's process, that's a part of an artist's process, but that's not really something you'd see evidence of in the end product. It means "we spitballed with generative AI to give an idea of how we want the image to look for some abstract thing and then drew it ourselves, separately."

Given that everything in this game will, generally speaking, not involve weird alien nonsense, I feel like there's not gonna be much of a need for that. Drawing a bustling market town, a coronation, or a battlefield in the Early Modern era should be fairly straightforward, especially given the practice of having done so for the past 4 EU games.
 
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
Given that this game gives you a regiment-level fidelity and "auxiliary units" are handled as their own regiments, this sort of "resupply during a siege" would be something that you can do manually. Bring in fresh units and auxiliaries, rotate out some of the ones most under stress from the siege; rinse and repeat.

Not exactly the biggest fan of the manual effort required to do such a thing, but I guess it represents the potential for such reinforcing units to be ambushed by your enemies.
 
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Will the maneuver of land generals influence combat width the same way that naval maneuver does? In my humble opinion, a general's skill at maneuvering his army is the single most important variable in the outcome of a battle. An "attacking" general with greater maneuver than the "defending" general should suffer fewer terrain penalties than he would otherwise, (and vice versa) and he should be able to have more men in his combat formation, similar to naval combat in the other grand strategy game developed by Paradox Tinto, Europa Universalis Four. Napoleon didn't win battles because of mystical French "elan" he won battles because he was able to outmaneuver his opponents. Like the celebrated guerilla general Nathan Bedford Forrest quipped "just get there first with the most men". I think another interesting mechanic would be the ability to shelter your army in a fortress. If you have adequate supplies, you can greatly increase the length of a siege, deal more damage to the enemy with attrition and with your garrisoned army. I think this would greatly benefit smaller nations with defensible territory like the knights or albania, and perhaps let smaller nations more effectively engage in guerilla warfare. You should have the option to manually surrender a siege if you run out of supplies to spare your pops, and also spare the city from a possible looting. Prisoners of war should also exist; Pops or manpower that is taken captive, cannot be used by the enemy, and only requires a fractional amount of the base supplies to maintain the pops, as to not punish a nation for capturing troops in sieges or battles; the prisoners could then be mutually exchanged at the end of the war, or perhaps could be added into peace treaties. Lastly, peace treaties should be more dynamic and less one-sided. Most peace treaties from this era included exchanges, i.e. money for territory, as most wars were not fought "totally" by the nation state, but locally by autocratic rulers and their loyal retainers (mercenaries) for small gains rather than total victory.
 
I suspect this is a bit of a long-shot, but is there any system in place for allowing women to be conscripted too, with all the manpower/pop ramifications that might go along with that?
please. this is not woke universalis but europa universalis. women did not fight in wars in the time frame of the game.
 
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uh oh
somebody doesn't know how to talk about politics and is spouting falseness as if it was fact ... wouldn't think I would find one here...

But it is unfortunate that we won't be able to double the size of our armies, whilst leaving all the country unattended, and having a big dip in pop growth. That would be what I call big risk very little chance of reward either way.
 
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I suspect this is a bit of a long-shot, but is there any system in place for allowing women to be conscripted too, with all the manpower/pop ramifications that might go along with that?
I mean, I don't think the pops are divided by gender at all, so out of a regiment of 100 one of them might be a farmgirl who ran off to cleanse france of the english menace etc
I do think some events, or even special regiments, for recruiting women would be fun though, like during sieges or rebellions, having women as the occasional maiden general or officer or something would be fitting, thinking of emilia plater
 
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A real warfare system. Thank you Johan.
 
I suspect this is a bit of a long-shot, but is there any system in place for allowing women to be conscripted too, with all the manpower/pop ramifications that might go along with that?
Pretty sure pops/manpower is an abstract and doesn't track separate men and women. I'm sure there are plenty of Mulans and Russian Girlfriends in your army.
please. this is not woke universalis but europa universalis. women did not fight in wars in the time frame of the game.
There are plenty of historical records of women joining armies in small quantities, and women learning to fight are well documented in the combat manuals of the period, such as the Walpurgis Manuscript of 1320.
 
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well, I'm asking because the most recent Stellaris DLC appears to have used genAI to generate voices and "visual reference material" (which sounds a lot like concept art)
Six fingered, squinty eyed figures work well in a sci-fi setting, but they might look out of place in a game about the late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period :D
 
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"quick someone go tell the english that the woke joan of arc has been captured" -This guy probably
She didn't join the army to actually fight in battles, she was just there for morale.
Women in combat roles have historically been extremely rare (and still are), so there is no reason to represent them in any generalized manner, like being able to increase your manpower by recruiting women, which is an absurd suggestion.
 
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