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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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Hi Johan, will there be different pip levels according to tech group? I want to make playing non-Western (namely Chinese) nations (in a style at which I can catch up to (or even surpass) the European nations) viable at a beginner's level, and it doesn't seem fair that (in the absence of any High American units because Native American nations are usually dead before they can modernize) Western units can just steamroll everyone else.
 
Will regiments increase in size at the same rate or will infantry regiments increase first and then cavalry regiments and then artillery regiments? An issue EU4 had was that you had too much artillery in proportion to the infantry and cavalry in an army.
 
Something that should change:
Being able to recruit more than one unit at a time in a developed province as long as there is population and resources to do so. It doesn't make sense for Beijing to only produce units one at a time like another province where there is little population.
 
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1 monthly manpower maintenance for a regiment seems too much to me, that is, they are:
12 a year.
and 100 in 8.3 years.
Assuming that they had never entered combat, a rider who joins the regiment at the age of 18 would be leaving it at the age of 26 (wouldn't that be very young?)
 
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View attachment 1131767
1 monthly manpower maintenance for a regiment seems too much to me, that is, they are:
12 a year.
and 100 in 8.3 years.
Assuming that they had never entered combat, a rider who joins the regiment at the age of 18 would be leaving it at the age of 26 (wouldn't that be very young?)
Consider it an abstraction for things like illness, injury, and the fact that not all soldiers are going to have a continuous period of service.
 
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Consider it an abstraction for things like illness, injury, and the fact that not all soldiers are going to have a continuous period of service.
Yes, I understand... but even double that would be too much (I also understand that you can't put 0.50 per month). Losing 100 manpower maintenance in 8.3 years on a regiment of 100 is losing them all. If that had happened to Alexander the Great when he entered Anatolia, when he arrived in India he would not have left 1 soldier.
 
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Do units in a location where they cannot reinforce continue to have their monthly manpower maintenance requirement active? It would seem more logical if this was suspended given that reinforcements cannot get to the unit at the time...?

Also, does the manpower maintenance scale with unit damage? Eg, if a unit of nominal size 100 men has sustained 10 casualties, are all the resource maintenance requirements reduced by 10% as well?
 
Curious, do Streets and Roads affect/increase the Food/Army Support Limit of a Location?

And could i then cut of an army from its supply-lines, by maybe occupying a nearby road location, forcing the army to eat faster through whatever they carry?
 
Wondering if you could get most of your defeated manpower back after the war in a peace treaty or by a ransom? It's rare that all of the people in a defeated army are executed EU4 style unless by nations like the Mongol Empire or the Zulu Empire. Most are taken captive and are enserfed, enslaved or POW until the end of the war to add to the peace treaty weight.
 
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Not sure if someone else asked about it, but will the structure of levies/retinues/mercenaries be different for different countries? For example, hordes never really had a concept of a standing army, almost all able bodied men were usually able to ride and shoot from horseback. And some countries like the Roman Empire had large standing armies much earlier than others.
It would be cool if the change towards a standing army was coming with various decisions to centralize the country, organise the military, etc. rather than arbitrary buildings that are only unlocked with time or some given tech.
 
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:+: Spark’s Note 7: Fat Lady Sings :+:

Back when Northern France was Neustria and Austrasia, the 1st of March brought the Frankish warlords together in the Marchfeld, whence they set forth on their summer campaigns. For centuries they mostly campaigned against each other, until they pulsed ever-outward under the Karlings.

These armies, like all armies, marched on their stomachs. There is something endearing about Charlemagne’s paladins threshing at the autumn wheat on return from a great battle on the open field. Of course, we know this was often not the case, and come winter roving bands kicked down the doors of peasant hunts to relieve them of their hibernal store of salted staples and onions.

While I doubt EU5 will dynamically adjust food stores for the seasons, certainly auxiliaries approximate this role. We can imagine the new stack wipe is when cavalry reach these regiments, and like Bane breaking Batman’s back upon his knee, it is time then to go home and have a think.

A thousand years after the Marchfelds, the Ottoman Sultans also mustered their Sipahi cavalry in late spring. The extent of Turkish success north of Belgrade was essentially defined by the natural limitations of assembling men in Anatolia to culminate outside the walls of Pest before winter. Have a click around the Long Turkish War; most battles and sieges took place around September: [Category:Battles of the Long Turkish War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Battles_of_the_Long_Turkish_War)

I highlight the Franks and Turks as they both engaged in total war (or a damned near thing) alongside the more familiar noble war. Franks dismantled the Saxon tribes, and the Turks pilaf’d their frontiers. In EU5 terms, regiments languored against levies.

To segue to another time in France, I feel the secret of EU5 is Tinto has us chasing Agincourt. The immediate impact of this legendary battle was the depletion of France’s noble elite. When the noble knights are gone, the impact is felt on national stability, and the loss of the crème de la crème exposes the nation to the horror of defensive total war, fighting with proverbial winter stores.

High drama awaits. Some player’s Ruthenian levies will send the Sultan of Rûm’s noble Timariots packing. You’ll cross a river into Girona with a hundred thousand Frenchmen, only to lose your auxiliaries and watch a stillborn campaign end in calamity (Oh, they tried, big blue blobber, and yes, in 1285 so the try went). Only then, praise Johan, come the consequences.

’Tis a funny thought, that kings and monarchs exposed themselves to such fragility, expending nobles clad in iron and gold as if they were a renewable resource. Then you look at our civilization and how we deploy non-renewables, and see mankind always has been walking ‘round the surface of an eggshell.
 
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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.
Does this mean that Discipline is the same across my entire country? Will some random peasant levies I just raised will be just as disciplined as my well-drilled standing army?
 
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Will pop classes affect how many troops you could raise? Like I'd imagine levies would have a higher proportion of nobles compared to a regular army. Plus, I'm not sure how this would work with regional mercinary pools, but I'd imagine places with a lot of berghers would have more mercinaries available. In Japan there could be cultural bonus that allows nobles to be hired as mercinaries too.
 
Hi, this super secret project looks UNBELIEVABLY AMAZING. I hope it is more than just boring clicking and you have to make an effort to achieve your goals. Pls do not ruin this game introducing some unrealistic mechanics or absurd events. I would like to buy it :) even three copies because it seems to be so realistic and great. I hope I will not have to wait long to play it. Could you pls tell me if armies can plunder enemy's locations and destroy buildings (you mentioned it is not easy - what does it mean) and take some pops as slaves?