• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

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.


PY1i0QRMAuYEsej-5zpt_7lZMxXLLCCBPTddUNCRR9GQ3qDpT2Eta_rsPp1z80rKS4IG-Mtn4NJ5RlX9wOnuLziEx6j4XoD4CNCoiWuo8uO6vGEWtXnFSnPBqaQpg_-0E_qhfpPpLmwWngETkCafyhU

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.

lwc36qKfMap3fnpoARbRdADpd8skxjGquMLJCP0dAWPJYJN1yQSuqzwvosm7_KOrblhYUzs8DKJmdaZDNBaD3d8mr9JG--0FZIRoYX67JGbUWbTi7sok6qUUVNGFEWJ1Cd8Pcg9E7N-GY8J_mknwuq8

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.

qk_-5EwQtnABoUMucSmUNjHMQp9Tx-5GU5-rJxVpAvnycVXmoZ98GxRoRbTg5oeaDXxB-zYf5U2wvZfQ0xY3rxC9o4pEuXLn1-eMEntbS4raoALAdTzlGXhi2UMk04gnB48g6s15eDc88VcngS2NmBU

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.,
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • 256Like
  • 163Love
  • 11
  • 7
Reactions:
  • 18
  • 17
  • 8Haha
  • 4Like
  • 2
Reactions:
Not all soldiers that are taken out of action by attrition or battle should ideally be killed I'd say. It's a ballance, if like half return to province you could have the armies bet twice as large before it start having the same kind of impact on the population. But in general some kind of death reduction stat, perhaps technlogy that can improve it. Being closer to home improving it. Would be nice for flavour, and then encourage to not send your armies to the other side of the world.
 
  • 7
  • 2Like
Reactions:
So if I build a Kurultai I employ 5000 peasants in it and get 50 manpower per month. I assume that military units recruited in that location will see their casualties reduce the population that is employed in the Kurultai. If I have 5000 manpower from this location the +50 per month will stop? If I have 5000 manpower in this location without raising any units, nobody dies, but once I raise the unit I will churn through the manpower at some rate due to the flexible unit cap?
 
  • 48Like
  • 30
  • 9Haha
Reactions:
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.

Different unit types? So camel or elephant units for example? One thing that always caught my eye was how despite having units that were supposedly camels or elephants in EU4 they still had a horse icon when you recruited them so it felt like they were just regular horse cavalry in a costume.
 
  • 5Haha
Reactions:
That can be represented with different production methods. Artillery already exists as a good as Johan stated above.
If the produced good is the same, then a different production method doesn't really make a difference.
Making warbows at the start of the game in less advanced countries would produce the weaponry good just as much as state of the art halberds a few hundred years in.
 
  • 7
  • 3Like
Reactions:
Will your troops reinforce while in enemy provinces? Can I bribe mercenaries in another army to swap sides or disband? Does how well a campaign in a war is going affect morale?

no, your regulars need friendly territory to reinforce.

mercenaries can be bribed.
 
  • 115Love
  • 37Like
  • 7
  • 1Haha
  • 1
  • 1
Reactions:
Currently its "guns" and "weaponry", but its one of these things that are relatively easy to rework, and we keep iterating upon goods/buildings constantly.

Please keep it like that. The game already has an insane amount of goods, we dont need different PM and buildings for different type of weapons. The AI will struggle enough as it is.
 
  • 12
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Why so many numbers/stats? Does the game need to be so complex? Sigh. We are in 2024, people don't have the time and patience to play such games.

Looking forward to next week's dev diary, regarding the new and unique features...
 
  • 21
  • 4Haha
Reactions:
  • 69Like
  • 31Love
  • 7
  • 2
  • 2
Reactions:
Do mercenaries present on the map or are they offmap entity like in EU4? If they are present, i hope price for ale in that location skyrockets.

kinda offmap
 
  • 46Like
  • 17
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
  • 57Like
  • 12Love
  • 4
  • 2
Reactions:
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.

This is not an economic simulator. We don't need 10 types of buildings and PMs for lots of different types of weapons. Weapons in general is perfectly fine. On top of managing your economy people don't want to be microing an armory production with lots of weapon types.

Never mind that, the AI would never be able to handle it.
 
  • 17
  • 3
Reactions:
Can I raise, for example, only 50% of levies in all provinces or in a specific province?
If I wanted to have only a small amount from one province, so most people keep working, would I influence that through buildings? Or are levies always tied to peasant size?
 
  • 2Like
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions: