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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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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.

Its not 0.2 horses.

Its 0.2 Juchart of Horses per rider.
 
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You can still pull levies from those locations, though, right?

yeah, but non-accepted culture levies are very small unless you give a lot of laws and privileges around it.
 
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Sorry but it takes some time for me to realize that it’s a Swiss unit. Thanks to Wikipedia.

Is it the unit for goods in PjCsr? Or some dynamic localizations?

Wikipedia says that it’s a measurement on area - I’m completely unfamiliar with this - but curious.
 
ok while i understand that units like horse archers might be historically more of an eastern unit type, shouldnt have all nations have atleast the possibility to to go non-historically and do the same thing?
 
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Will there be a distinction between the equipment technology you have and the tactics available? For example if a native American nation fails to secure the resources to make gunpowder weapons, will their armies still be able to adjust tactics to minimize the damage from European gunpowder tactics or will they be forever stuck with the military formations of 1500 and get endlessly plastered until they find some sulfur and saltpeter?
 
This might be a stretch, but are you planning on adding a system of loyalty to the general similar to the one legions have in Imperator Rome? I think that such a system could be interesting to emulate something similar to how Napoleon took power from the assembly.
 
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This might be a stretch, but are you planning on adding a system of loyalty to the general similar to the one legions have in Imperator Rome? I think that such a system could be interesting to emulate something similar to how Napoleon took power from the assembly.
could be a fun way to model byzantine civil wars, or just civil wars in general
 
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Sorry but it takes some time for me to realize that it’s a Swiss unit. Thanks to Wikipedia.

Is it the unit for goods in PjCsr? Or some dynamic localizations?

Wikipedia says that it’s a measurement on area - I’m completely unfamiliar with this - but curious.

i was silly.

all units for goods are just arbitrary
 
is PC going to have UI that that scales with the display resolution?
 
Also with the military and pops in general, can you have brothels to boost their happiness and will they have good sprites on the map, I want to zoom in and see my beautiful soldiers ready to do their duty and if we have good soundtrack in project Caesar , as I want some good fast paced battle music so I can feel it flow into my veins or to demonstrate that I haven’t lost yet and ride forth victoriously
 
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So excited to see all of this. I am very curious with the auxiliary units concept...

Logistics is an important aspect of war and sieges. Medieval armies relied on foraging, and pillaging, to maintain their supplies. Are auxiliary units going to be used to bring out these concepts from simple dice rolls?

Tactics for medieval sieges leveraged sapping units as an auxiliary unit. The Ottoman siege of Candia is a good example of this.

Adding such dimensions to logistics and tactics would add spice not only to a single player game, but multiplayer as well.
 
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How will supply lines to reinforce armies work? In EU4 armies half way around the world regained manpower like if they were in their backyard.
 
Would you be able to improve the quality of your army through equipping them with better armaments (ie. 0.4 guns / regiment instead of the standardized 0.2) or some other way that will make a regiment punch above its weight through economic means (besides army maintenance)
 
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Great post as usual but I have a few doubts (haven't read all comments but I scrolled through all dev responses):
1) will you try to simulate, somehow, the seasonal war-waging that was customary in many parts of the world until late modern era? You could, e.g., have levies automatically disband in winter and come back in spring
2) why can levies not reinforce, at a rate dependant on pop growth? That would be more realistic as well
3) mercenary companies are great for medieval and early modern times - but later on European countries would simply hire single professional soldiers in their armies. French army in the XVI-XVII centuries had a big % of German, Italian, Spanish, even British soldiers. Wouldn't it be better to delete merc companies at some point in the game?
 
Not sure if anyone has already said an idea like this, but with guns and things available as their own goods, it would be cool for nations to be able to purchase weapons to make units like artillery before they have the tech for it, with a price penalty for not having the tech yet and negative modifiers for the unit which they don’t have the tech for yet
 
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I am intrigued by the list of Swedish provinces, specifically the 12 'other' provinces which supply a total of 2'473 soldiers; I assume these are areas like Dalsland, Uusimaa, etc. which reasonably would probably supply very few soldiers, though I am especially interested in how the 'edges' of realms such as Sweden, Norway and Novgorod will be represented, what with the (in my opinion) thus far glossed over Sámi and Birkarls, especially since this is a time where Christianity and the organised states of the south are just beginning to take their first steps into Northern Fennoscandia.
 
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