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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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Code:
    maintenance_demand =  steppe_horse_archers_maintenance
    construction_demand = steppe_horse_archers_construction
What is the benefit of moving these to a different file? Is it really better to have all demands for military units in one file, rather than having each unit's demand right there with the rest of the unit?
 
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What stops the player from cheesing the "can't raise levies before going to war" mechanic by declaring war on some OPM tribe somewhere, massing all their levies on the border of their actual conquest target, and then declaring war? I hope it's not a hard block from declaring war whenever you have levies raised for anything.
 
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Will we be able to choose our army tradition? Like horde states use different type of cavalry, and they dont use infantry. Is it possible to make a tradition like this in the european states?
 
Shouldn't pops be removed at the time of recruitment rather than at the time of death? Otherwise, you would get situations where a pop is both fighting in an army while at the same time working in a building somewhere. They could return to their home province if the army is disbanded. Also, I think mercenaries should be tied to pops too.
 
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Is raising levies instant, or does it depend on how much control you have over a province? Like levis will be raised in Sweden, they should be ready quickly in Stockholm but might take longer to get the ones in eastern Finland.

Also, how does reinforcement work, will that be covered soon? If a french army is marching through german lands, will it be instant but at a reduced rate, or will the reinforcements need to get to the main army?
Levies take time to spawn.. if its all in one region, its even slower than local.

the french army will not reinforce in german lands.
 
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Code:
a_steppe_horse_archers = {
    category = army_cavalry

    copy_from = a_age_1_traditions_cavalry
    max_strength = 0.1

    morale_damage_done = 0.2
    initiative = 5
   
    movement_speed = 1.0
   
       
    combat = {
        grasslands = 0.2
        sparse = 0.2
    }
   
    maintenance_demand =  steppe_horse_archers_maintenance
    construction_demand = steppe_horse_archers_construction
   

    gfx_tags = { archer_tag light_tag }
}
A bit of a request. Can you code in support for making artwork dynamic, either by allowing checks/triggers where it is used or allowing scripts to run to replace/update these values?

I ask because I would love to be able to more easily add art variation based on culture/religion. For example, I'd like a unit like
a_light_infantry
to use different GFX art based on certain checks. A good example of how missed this feature is in CK3, where artwork is quite static forcing modders to replace vanilla files, like this great mod for unit art
 
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What is the benefit of moving these to a different file? Is it really better to have all demands for military units in one file, rather than having each unit's demand right there with the rest of the unit?
I'm guessing there's some spaghetti code involved where the game expects everything that consumes goods to be in ONE directory, so non-building things that eat goods need a pointer to a separate file in the appropriate place.
 
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okay, we cant recruit levies during rebellions
This means declaring war and staying until rebels are pacified will be the meta then? Right?
 
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Is there any negative to having a large standing army/lots of manpower buildings, in terms of produced goods in the location?

people are not an endless resource
 
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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.

I hope we get cannons as a good as they require a different scale of production and are a defined good for ships.
It's also a really important part of military history in terms of how cannons were made and in which quality and how difficult it was.
 
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I'm guessing there's some spaghetti code involved where the game expects everything that consumes goods to be in ONE directory, so non-building things that eat goods need a pointer to a separate file in the appropriate place.
lol no that's not how it works

I mean I can see a benefit for sure. If I wanted to make a mod that adds more military goods, I'd only need to edit the scripted values file with demand/maintenance instead of touching unit balance, but on the other hand, I can also see it as being annoying when you want to rework something completely.
 
Really like the distinction between manpower and pops. Felt it was weird at first but it really allows for a differentiation between having alot of pops (France and Russia), vs having alot of soldiers in the army (Prussia).
 
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