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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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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.
Taking two seconds to realize that pops do not have sex should have completely negated any weight to the claim.
 
Taking two seconds to realize that pops do not have sex should have completely negated any weight to the claim.
Actually, I don't think Johan has said whether pop numbers represent the entire population or only working age men like in Victoria 2.
Obviously for building employment it would only be the latter, but the game may still display the full population in other areas.
 
Actually, I don't think Johan has said whether pop numbers represent the entire population or only working age men like in Victoria 2.
Obviously for building employment it would only be the latter, but the game may still display the full population in other areas.
No, I'm pretty sure it's everyone, since China has a population of around 86M, which is close to the census numbers from 1351. Regardless, the number of pops who work in "buildings" or function as manpower should be rather miniscule anyway, so it is not too difficult an abstraction. I doubt, for example, that levies will ever make up more than 33% of the population (and even that seems rather high; I would say it should be around 15%).
 
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No, I'm pretty sure it's everyone, since China has a population of around 86M, which is close to the census numbers from 1351. Regardless, the number of pops who work in "buildings" or function as manpower should be rather miniscule anyway, so it is not too difficult an abstraction. I doubt, for example, that levies will ever make up more than 33% of the population (and even that seems rather high; I would say it should be around 15%).
Yeah but that was the population map mode, which would obviously show total population. But in most areas of the game, like the military building shown above that employs 5000 peasants, pop sizes would only be a quarter of the total population.
 
Yeah but that was the population map mode, which would obviously show total population. But in most areas of the game, like the military building shown above that employs 5000 peasants, pop sizes would only be a quarter of the total population.
Do you mean the pops available to work in that particular building would be taken from a "pool" of 25%? Yeah, if I had to guess. Not like it would be shown, anyway.
 
Do you mean the pops available to work in that particular building would be taken from a "pool" of 25%? Yeah, if I had to guess. Not like it would be shown, anyway.
If your country has a population of 4 million people, then you would have 1 million pops shown in locations. That's how it works in Victoria 2 and so far it looks like it will be the same in Project Caesar.
 
so far it looks like it will be the same in Project Caesar.
What are you basing this off of? Women also worked in agriculture during the time period (as did children) so certainly it was not only 25% who were working. Clearly the food production of a location is based on its population (TT#9, I believe?) so I do not see how this makes much sense. Either way we have seen no evidence in either direction, and given such a dearth I would much rather assume the null.
 
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as that's what you're going to care about as the player.
Why are you making this assumption? I remember seeing plenty of comments in the earlier TT that first discussed population (#3) discussing how excited they were to see the population count of each of their locations grow. Certainly no one has the desire to constantly be multiplying that number by four in order to get a true count.

In either case it appears as though you are making this claim purely based on comparison to another game, which is in my eyes rather fallacious - I do not particularly care that both have the same game director. Sure, you have employee numbers in the tooltips, but I do not see how that suggests in any way that based on this (remember, many locations may not have buildings at all, given the game's granularity) we will only see the "workable" population of the location. Especially since in early modern England, for example, children would begin to work on farms at the age of six to eight - certainly a 25% does not make much sense in an agricultural context, and you would do well to remember that the vast majority of people during the time period were engaged in such occupations.
 
Will it be possible to raise any culture-specific units as long as the tag controls locations with that culture or are tags limited only to units of their primary culture?

For example, could Magyar-dominated Hungary raise Cuman cavalry units and send them to raze Bohemia, Kingdom Come-style?
 
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Why are you making this assumption?

Because it would be really confusing to players when a building wants 5000 workers and the location shows 10000 peasants, but you can't staff the building because out of the 10000 peasants in the location, only 2500 are actually workers.

Victoria 3 can have problems with this, I remember helping someone with on reddit with this issue months ago. There is a journal entry that requires you to be below a certain percentage of peasants, but when you look at the number of peasants it shows you, it actually only shows the workforce, so if you compare that with your full population then your percentage is going to be significantly off, as you need to compare the full size of your peasant pops with your total population.

I have no idea if it's actually going to be 1/4, the exact historical numbers are always going to vary, but since buildings have worker numbers like 1000 or 5000, it's pretty abstract anyway. Buildings are going to be balanced around whatever workforce percentage they choose.
 
Because it would be really confusing to players when a building wants 5000 workers and the location shows 10000 peasants, but you can't staff the building because out of the 10000 peasants in the location, only 2500 are actually workers.

Victoria 3 can have problems with this, I remember helping someone with on reddit with this issue months ago. There is a journal entry that requires you to be below a certain percentage of peasants, but when you look at the number of peasants it shows you, it actually only shows the workforce, so if you compare that with your full population then your percentage is going to be significantly off, as you need to compare the full size of your peasant pops with your total population.

I have no idea if it's actually going to be 1/4, the exact historical numbers are always going to vary, but since buildings have worker numbers like 1000 or 5000, it's pretty abstract anyway. Buildings are going to be balanced around whatever workforce percentage they choose.
It sounds much simpler to me, then, for the population numbers to say "X (workforce: X/4)." Again, we have seen no evidence to the contrary, and this is in my eyes a much more simple solution. Until there is some official confirmation in either direction, I will continue to assume the (what is to me more) obvious case. You may feel free to assume the other. Not much can be gained by continued conversation.
 
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.

he already said there wont be any "scripted" historical rulers, as they did that before, and barely anyone played with it. he did however confirm Timur (someone already born).
 
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Does the Manpower pool *include* the men already on active service in the field then? A combination of both active and potential soldiers? Or is it just the potential reserve, as in other games?
 
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Then how do POPs get killed as your manpower in the form of regiments die in battle?
What he meant in response to your question was that the buildings that generate manpower don't continuously turn POPs into manpower (as in that they are lost to your economy forever), that part is abstracted. If the building is fully worked, you get the manpower output from it which pools, but POPs working there are still alive. There is a monthly manpower maintenance cost of units, but that doesn't lose you POPs either as it only represents people mustered in or out of the regiment. When it comes to replenishing battle or attrition losses that is when the buildings which generate your manpower kill the pops working in them, presumably proportional to the number of buildings and the actual manpower cost of reinforcements.
 
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