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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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So far I've thought every TT has come up with some really great mechanics for this new game...and many of them seem to be borrowed from other Paradox games that I've played and enjoyed and I think these mechanics will be incredibly awesome.

My comment for this week is that I really hope army mechanics aren't borrowed from other Paradox games. I don't mean levies either, I think that'll be a nice addition actually. I guess I mean moreso the UI and hotkeys. I've played one campaign in Imperator Rome and one in CK3 and while I really, really enjoy the games, my one complaint is organising and moving around armies feels somewhat clunky to me. I found it (relatively) time consuming to split up units, or to create units that had the template that I wanted, or to click units that were in the same location, etc. In EU4 I can quickly create carpet seige stacks (bbx), or whatever stack that I wish to create, I use templates, assign generals, split stacks in half, etc etc...all very quickly using hot keys. It is also easy to select a number of units and using the deselect hot key to manage where each unit will go to. I find EU4 is much, much easier to micromanage units.

I hope that makes sense, I had a hard time trying to convey my thoughts.
 
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How strong are regular and mercenary regiments compared with levies? Would it be feasible for a rich country to maintain a small regular force and then just hire mercenaries to fight your wars and spare your population early on, or will the numbers available through levies be so much larger that this strategy is not viable?
 
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With the unit types, for example with Steppe horse archers.
Is there possibility to have 2 or more different types of cavalry, like lancers and archers mixed, unlike in EU4, where you can have only 1 type of cavalry?

yes
 
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i would also like a more detailed explanation, as i didnt really understand the one given
It seems to me that buildings generate manpower, which is used both for the initial recruitment and monthly maintenance of regiments. The maximum manpower pool is the 10 years total of the manpower production buildings (so the Kurultai in the picture would mean 6k manpower over a 10 year period), and we will need to strike a balance between how much of our manpower we use for recruitment and how much we leave in reserve for reinforcement. I presume reinforcement cost is tied to the percentage loss of the regiment, so the horse archer, which has a 100 men in the regiment and uses 1 mp/month for maintenance will need the fraction equal to the losses of the regiment for reinforcement. So if it loses 25 men to attrition, it will take 0,25 from the pool to fully reinforce.
 
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

yeah, that will happen
 
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Are you restricted to 1 unit type per category at a time like in eu4 (e.g. you set your cavalry to 'horse archers' and all of your cavalry are that type) or can you mix and match? (E.g. having 1000 musketeers and 1000 pikemen)
 
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Anyway quick question - I'm sure the combat mechanics will be improved greatly, but I wanted to know if you're planning on sticking with the usual visual representation of combat where you have very little abstraction from the actual dice rolls under the hood and essentially looks like a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet duking it out for a couple seconds and your reward is a post-duking-out equation with 2 sprites. Not that I hate that type of representation, but I was curious to see if you're planning on experimenting with something different.

I like excel :p
 
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Is the manpower you raise for armies directly your pops or is manpower some arbitration where the more pops you have the more manpower you gain per month. And if units take damage will lose pops?

Its an "abstracted layer" of how many of your peasants are possible soliders
 
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1. The separation between levies and regular armies is pretty good. This is that i missed in eu4. It makes no that you recruit the same way in medieval and napoleonic era.

2. It's stated that you can recruit levies from each province or all. Can you do some in-between, like recruit all from a certain area or region? Otherwise it may end up in micro-hell where all levies is too much and selecting province individualy may be A LOT of clicking.

3. Splitable mercenaries good.

4. Where people in mercenaries companies come from? Are they somehow included in the pop system or they are coming out of thin air?

5. Does the army have a supply that it allows it to maintain full strength for some time after losing access to supply?

6. In eu4 (and don't other Paradox games) there is a weird trent that points received from an outcome of a battle (in eu4 those are army tradition and warscore) are based on your casualties received. How much casualties the enemy received seems not to be important. This is very weird, winning a battle with little casualties and dealing a lot of damage should be inspiring and give a lot of army tradition/expirence. How this calculation is handled in this game?

7. This is something i asked before but didn't get an answer. Why are you not planning to give players options to micro-manage army maintenance? I mean "mothballed armies" or selecting only part of armies to be fully maintained. It's hard to belive that a non-centralsed government (that a nation will be probably for most of the campaign) just have a single "slider" to manage army maintenance. I get this is planing budget in macro scale. But why can't so be armies be excluded from paying full maintenance and just be on minimal payment not to disband? "We will give you money when we will need you to fight"

But if you're e.g. a great empire and you're at war with some insignificant nation far behind your technology level, and you just need a few hundred or thousands of army to win it, you don't need to fully pay for your 1 milion army.

Or if you just need to put down a small rebelion, you just need a fraction of your army to do that.

Calculation of this world be very simple: slider would affect only fully maintained armies and the ones marked for "minimal maintenance" would not be effected at all.

In the first Tinto Talks you mentioned that the game aims to be immersive and believable. Not being able to manage armies like that is one of the things that breaks my immersion in eu4 and i hoped something that could be avoided in this project.
 
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