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Tinto Talks #23 - 31st of July

Hello everyone to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday, the day of the week where we discuss details about our super secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

This week we will delve into the glorious world of logistics and sieges. You all know the saying “amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics”.

Leader Assignment
First of all, one thing we have added is what we refer to as commission time. If a character has been assigned to lead an army or navy, you can not remove him from command before at least 12 months have passed. This removes the “teleport a leader around the world” exploit, and also makes it more of a choice of how to deploy your characters.


Reinforcing Regiments
While your levies do not reinforce, your regular regiments will attempt to reinforce if you still have manpower, and get access to the goods they require. A regiment that is part of an army that is retreating, is in combat, loaded on a ship or currently taking attrition losses will not be able to reinforce.

A regiment can only reinforce in your owned locations and in a location owned by someone you are fighting a war together with, when that location is currently not occupied.

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Not many soldiers, but 5 a month is enough here …


Army Movement
When people talk about logistics it is usually intrinsically linked to the movement of armies, and movement of armies in Project Caesar has some changes in it compared to what you may be used to.

One thing that has taken its inspiration from the Hearts of Iron series is the fact that when an army is moving they will slowly be losing morale. This creates the natural flow of armies marching and then resting, and not just marching across Europe and immediately joining a battle, like the march has had no impact at all.

We also have added the fact that an army that is beyond a certain size will be marching slower, where the size is based on its total frontage it is fielding. While you can attach units to other units, this makes the attached units move slower, as military organization in the late medieval era was rather limited. In later ages you get advances that reduce this penalty significantly, completely limiting it in the Age of Revolutions, and speaking particularly about that age, we have an advance there that makes multiple corps combat more interesting, making them to ‘March to the Sound of the Guns’. This advance allows an army to automatically react, if another army of ours in an adjacent location enters combat, and then quickly march to join that battle.


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Guess which is my favorite advance from this part of the Age of the Revolutions tree?


Food and Armies
Now you are wondering, that is fine, but an army can not march on an empty stomach? That is entirely true. Each army has food it needs to consume every month, else they will start deserting and dying. If you run out of food during a siege, you are basically forced to abandon the siege very quickly as your army evaporates.

A standard infantry regiment can usually carry a few months of rations with them, but when they are gone, they are gone. Here the new category of units comes into place. One major type of the Auxiliary Category is the Logistic units, which can carry far more food than any other type of unit.



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They might be bad at fighting, but they will provide some food…



So how do you get food for your armies then? Well, if they are stationed in your own locations they will take food from the local provincial supplies, so you sometimes have to be careful about where you station your armies, so as to not cause the local population to starve. If you want to get the food from your allies or countries you have military access with, you need to negotiate a treaty that allows you to take their food supplies. This is not always something every country will accept. Your subjects have no say in this though, as most types of subject give this access implicitly.



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Maybe we should have more than a single A’Urughs…


Food Supply
When you are at war, you can steal food from occupied provinces. If you control the capital of a province, you can steal the food of the local populace there to feed your armies.

If your army is at an hostile location, where you can not get local food, you can try to trace access up to 2 locations away, through controlled locations to get the food. If you can’t reach your own locations at that distance there are two ways to get food to your armies.

First of all, if there is a Supply Depot within that range, your army will draw food from it. A Supply Depot can be created by any army and you can deposit food until its maximum storage capabilities, and any army within range can withdraw from it. Any army can gather food from their homeland and deposit it into the depot if there's space. There are advances increasing the capacity of your depots as well.

You also have capacity for the navies to provide logistic support as well. There are two unit abilities that can be done for them, gathering food and distributing food. Gather food will take food from any adjacent province you own, and your fleet can store food depending on the food carrying capacity of the ships. Distributing food allows a navy to act like a floating supply depot that your armies can get food from.

While we do understand that not every player may enjoy caring much about logistics, for those you can assign logistic objectives to supporting armies and navies, and then they will solve it for your main armies.

You also steal food from your enemy in a battle when they are defeated, as a defeated army can not protect their entire baggage train as they try to escape.

Sieges and Occupations

Now let's turn to the second part of this talk, where we will talk about how sieges will work. First of all, there are two different types to talk about here, as not all locations are equal. Locations without any fortifications will not have any long siege, but an army with a single full strength regiment is enough to take it in a few weeks. A location with some sort of fortifications requires a full siege though.

siege_progress.png

Having an offensive societal value is not ideal to defend your sieges..

Food has a significant impact on how you plan your military campaigns, as it affects how long you can sustain a siege. The key thing here, and this is something I am a big fan of, is that sieges are gambles. You don’t know when a fort will fall, and now with the fact that if you run out of food you will run the risk of actually losing and failing a siege. About every 30 days there is a chance for something to happen in the siege, with chances of it getting worse for defenders or another month of holding out.

siege_outcome.png

It won’t surrender immediately, but maybe we can avoid disease amongst our troops..

With these changes, the assault is now a more potentially viable option, as either you win, and save time and food, or you fail the assault, and have taken casualties and thus preserving your food supply longer.

While besieging a coastal location, it is not only important to blockade it making the siege faster, it can also at the same time supply your army with food.

Automatic Control
As the map is more granular than in previous games we have made, warfare would turn into a massive slog to manually siege or occupy every single location. Now while we have automation systems, it still would not be very fun. Project Caesar has two different ways to automatically gain control over several locations at once. First of all, if you take a fort, all locations in its zone of control will start changing control to you. This is also valid for forts owned by an enemy if we have taken it. Secondly, if you take the capital you will start getting control over all locations in that province. Of course, this is blocked by hostile armies and forts.

As mentioned in previous posts on the forum, we have the zone of control system in Project Caesar as well, but the one with far less complicated rules that was used in Imperator Rome. As you might have noticed earlier, there is an advance in the Age of Revolutions that allows you to ignore Zone of Control. While that may be useful to chase down enemy armies, you often want to take forts and cities anyway to get your logistics sorted out.

Recruitment Options
One thing that has not been mentioned yet about the military is that we have different recruitment methods for regiments, where you can either rush the training so a regiment can be ready much quicker, but at far less strength, or spend more time in training and start with higher experience.


recruit_methods.png

So training does pay off!


Next week we will talk about ships, and some aspects of the naval part of the game.
 

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1 daily
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Will army units take morale degeneration while onboard a transport ship? Is there an impact on morale when they've freshly disembarked? HoI 4 had land units go down to 10% "morale" (organisation) for taking the train.

If an enemy fleet is distributing food to a beachhead, can my fleet capture those ships and keep the food they were distributing? Assuming there's a significant chance to capture ships if the player invests in that direction.
 
I understand that realism is not everything, but realistically, if your army lost its general, there would be other officers who would take over the control of said army, not leave it entirely leaderless.

Just throwing ideas, but maybe you could assign young characters to armies to be subordinate officers, where they could (hopefully) gain on some skills and be available to take control of the army if it was in enemy territory and the general died or if you want to split the army etc.

Or you could have leaderless armies have temporary stand-in leaders based on your army tradition.

In EU4 it tends not to be a huge issue unless the general dies mid-battle, in which case a loss of combat effectivness in to be expected. I don't know how it's going to be in PC, but you have stated that the character skill of your commanders are vitally important, seemingly much more so than in EU4. So perhaps this is an instance where to reconsider this particular stance?
 
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Is the siege system at least slightly different numbers wise than the EU4 system? EU4 sieges are legit the worst part of the game, i legit go insane when I get 4 disease tics in a row at 64%. Just unfun gameplay.
 
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Are armies without generals almost always inferior to an equal army with a general or is there a small chance of victory?

Perhaps, as a suggestion, leaderless armies could by default have a randomly generated lower skill junior officer. Possibly with the opportunity to promote them.
 
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two buttons technically

detach auxiliaries
detatch artillery


1) If you detached these and they stay behind but get attacked by surprise, they will be easily captured? At least the artillery units.

2) Are there any sneaky actions you can pull off in the game such as assassinating an enemy general or raiding the enemy army to neutralize its cannons (sneaking in and hammering a nail where the touch hole/vent is)? This was known as "spiking the gun".
 
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Hi !

A proposition for the general, idk if that is doable. But could you make a button on army "recruit a general from the army" with the condition that the leader of the army died while being away from home ? This leader would be either less good than a classic general or would cost more, idk what would be a good thing to do to balance that. But in that way, it would permit one man in the army to take the lead of said army in the case of the death of the general during a military campaign. I do think it would be better than just having an army leaderless.
 
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I was hoping we'd learn more about pillaging and occupying locations today. I felt like EU4 did not give you enough control on how you wanted to loot/pillage. I think a big improvement for Project Caesar would be to give the player more freedom by having the options to loot for gold or pillage for food, each giving different benefits and causing different penalties in the location. Scorched earth could also reduce food production in a province and make it harder for armies to resupply. Both looting and stealing food from the enemy were historically important for keeping armies paid and fed, and the interaction with the looted location is something that I think would work well in the game. Will you be talking more about this in the future?
 
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That is what you do when you don't have food.. and it works as well as it did for Napoleon in russia.
Is that really a good example to use for the entire system? Russia basically burned entire farmlands just to prevent Napoleon from taking their food. The vast majority of countries did not do this, and pillaging for food was very common in this time period. It was usually done much more successfully than Napoleon in Russia.
 
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I honestly hate thsi siege Idea I liek the concept behind it but why do it this way? In reality most sieges were not really a gamble they were a shutdown case you win eventually because teh defnders lose food suppliestoo and run out fatser than you if you can cut them off.

So while I get why the CK and vic2 systems suck, this sucks too. the ebst would be a mix of both, where a siege can proceed faster or slower depending on randome events, but it always progresses as long as you have the capabilities to cut off supplies, meaning cities that can be supplied via ships need naval support to even be able to be sieged.

Overall I think sieges should be won eventually and not have the possibility of lasting years or centuries witrh enough bad luck.

Real life sieges were a battle of progression, youi buidl earthworks, bombard the enemy and so on. What was more decisive was the fact you needed to win before you ran out of food or the enemy was rescued, only a very few sieges were really up to luck. They were mostyl planned maticilisly and the fact I amy be stuck in enemy territory outside the campaining season should be negative enough to withdraw.

So I'd rather see sieges to be won with a maximum time in mind, tehy may be faster or slower but they will never take years, as that is pretty unrealistic overall, because yes it happened but most sieges alsted a year or so because eitehr the city saw no rescue and surrendered because of lacking food and no hope of rescue. Have the randome throws but add +1 per month and add some rare events taht make it take longer than expected. The big question then become scan you rescue the fortress before it falls or does the winter force the nemy to retreat because they dont have food or support to survive the winter, if you then can disrupt their supply line sit is even mroe dynamic and you can win a siege without a battle, because cutting their supply makes it harder to win.

You could then also enable decisions to store food for a siege that cost money and take food from surrounding locations, to increase the time a fortress can survive a siege. Making it mroe realitsic and reliant on preperation and not luck, as war is waged with a plan and not a randome hand of cards.

Lastly there could be an army ability "siege breaker" where you dont win a battle but start one with a small frontline to breka through into the city to increase the garrisson and restore supplies and moral in teh city.
 
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Regarding the catapult icon at the siege, can/could this upgrade when time passes, getting more modern?

Would be nice to see
 
In later ages you get advances that reduce this penalty significantly, completely limiting it in the Age of Revolutions, and speaking particularly about that age, we have an advance there that makes multiple corps combat more interesting, making them to ‘March to the Sound of the Guns’. This advance allows an army to automatically react, if another army of ours in an adjacent location enters combat, and then quickly march to join that battle.
I sure hope this is something which can be toggled on and off for individual armies.
 
thats is basically how it works.. dicerolls on how food supplies drop, or if your siegeworks create breaches, or morale drops for defenders
But food supplies drop ina straight line, you cannot just get mroe fooda dn the people in teh city use a specific amount each day or starve to death. Which is how a siege is won or lost, if enough food was stored and moral held up through enough food and victories in the battles (as sieges often ahd abttles for teh walls, not really to storm but to keep the city on the towes), they were lost when food ran out or the hope for rescue.
 
Please can we have a cooldown for restocking/rebuilding a fort after a siege has been cancelled? No going from 90% to -60% because your army looked the other way for a single day like in EU4
 
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Overall I think sieges should be won eventually and not have the possibility of lasting years or centuries witrh enough bad luck.
I agree with parts of this. I think the province's food supply should create a limit on how long the siege can last before they surrender. As long as the province has an adequate amount of food stockpiled, the siege would end through the ticks anyway. But a province that has been heavily pillaged and has low amounts of food reserves would have a duration of say one year before they auto surrender.
 
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Is there some limitation to the "ignore ZoC" advance? I think there's some forts where zone of control should always exist, such as mountain passes. How do you march an entire army around a montain pass? Is there a way of differentiating between the two? Maybe if the location has only two connections, then you cannot march right through the fort, even if you can ignore ZoC.
 
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