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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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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.
Is there a cap to the manpower this building can provide? Or can the 5000 people employed there potentially provide more than 5000 manpower?
 
Super excited about this!

It sounds like this game will follow a similar system to IR, with the multiple types of recruitable units (e.g. archers, light infantry, swordsmen all being Regular Regiments)

It would be super cool if we were able to recruit unique units from our vassals. Or, if the unique units are tied to culture / traditions, it would be cool if we could integrate a vassal (or recently conquered's territory) culture into ours, allowing us to create those units ourselves.
 
I imagine important people like that would be scripted in. Idk anything about Timur but I imagine it might be an event like the events that give you Elizabeth and Mary as England in eu4
I hope. Because Timur's state couldnt have been established without him. But i really wanted to see rulers such as Fatih, Yavuz and Kanuni in the ottoman empire napoleon in the france etc.
 
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Every regiment requires some manpower each month to maintain the current level of troops.
Does it only mean for regiments that have taken manpower attrition or it's like when some units have grown old or their military service is over, so they need to get replaced?
 
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Interesting idea, to have both manpower and levies. Kind of like in Imperator. And yes, people die.

"Unique" buildings : wouldn't it be better to make them available to anyone who conforms to the government form? For example, if someone somehow becomes a tribe, it would have access to the mongol buildings. Though if it's a question of names, I'm fine with different cultures having different names for the same building.
 
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This is a unique cavalry unit from the first age that some cultures have access to.

Isn't that culturally essentialist to tie horse archers to certain cultures? Why can't every nation recruit horse archers? Why are you railroading the player's army composition? [/joke]
 
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Will it be possible to mobilise only part of a levy, so that the impact on your country is less shen you don't need so many troops?

Will there be specific types/quality of horses for units? Like how in Imperator how we have steppe horses vs regular horses.
 
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I don't mind them being abstracted into a single good, representing them as different goods would add very little to the game overall, while leaving you with the extra chore of managing different types of weapon production/procurement.
I disagree. Producing swords isn't the same as producing crossbows or as producing muskets or producing cannons.

Recruiting large artillery regiments or building powerful warships should require a good supply of gunmetal (a mix of bronze and brass) or later cast iron for all the cannons they need.

And if you don't need to manage several types of weapons, armor and other supplies, then the link between economics and warfare is pretty shallow.
 
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I don't mind them being abstracted into a single good, representing them as different goods would add very little to the game overall, while leaving you with the extra chore of managing different types of weapon production/procurement.
i subscribe to this. i'd rather it stay the way it is rather than have dozens of different weapons
 
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At very least make a distinction between pre-gunpowder infantry weapons (lots of steel), small arms (less metal but require unique goods like saltpeter), and artillery (requires dedicated and expensive metal forging/casting facilities to make)
That can be represented with different production methods. Artillery already exists as a good as Johan stated above.
 
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I really have not understood how manpower works.

Is it a pool of men you use to recruit and reinforce like in EU4, or something new, like a capacity, say you have +600 a month from buildings, and your standing armies require 500 a month to keep them?
i would also like a more detailed explanation, as i didnt really understand the one given
 
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If I wanted to do a game as Hesse where I become the mercenary capital of Europe and constantly renting out my highly trained army to the highest bidder, are there systems in place to allow me to do this?
 
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Units hold weapons in their hands too early. Invention of the gun is early but swords were at the forefront in most wars until the 1700s. I don't think its seems realistic that units move with gun in the years of 1480s
What? Guns were used in the 1300s and widely established in the 1400s. Guns are the main reason that armor switched to full plate in the 1400s.
 
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That can be represented with different production methods. Artillery already exists as a good as Johan stated above.
No? At least, not unless production methods and what troops you can recruit are directly tied to each other. Otherwise you could still recruit early musketmen with your old pre-gunpowder PM to get away with not having sulfur or saltpeter.
 
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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.

Does the regiment size change with tech or with age? That is, can opponents in a battle have different sized regiments. How does combat width work with different regiment sizes?

I assume the regiment size changes in powers of two, so if it's with ages, that's six ages confirmed.
 
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