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Tinto Talks #46 - 15th of January 2025

Welcome to another Tinto Talks. The Happy Wednesday where we talk about our rather secret game with the code name of Project Caesar.

This week we will talk about military objectives and how they work in Project Caesar.

As our games grow more complex as the decades go by, we have tried to alleviate some of the concerns about micromanagement of military aspects. Back in the days of Hearts of Iron III, we could set province objectives for parts of an army hierarchy and enable the AI for them, and the AI would try to fulfill them. In post release EU4 we added missions where navies could be assigned to patrol areas or blockade or an army could be set to siege an area. Hearts of Iron IV introduced the system of painting on the map how you wanted the armies to fight, and when we made Imperator we ended up with the system that I personally feel is best for our games, an objectives-based system, where you can give units objectives that they try to do.

So for Project Caesar this is the path we are taking. And as we have been developing a new core architecture for the game, our AI has also been written from scratch for this game, of course, based on decades of experience making AI for GSG’s. This means that the military AI is using the same building blocks as the player can use with the UI.

In the military view for your country there is a tab for your recruiting and overview of your units, and one for handling your objectives. You can also assign objectives directly to a unit you have selected of course, but that will also be shown in the objectives view.

Objectives can be assigned by selecting the target area, province, location or sea-zone in the UI, or by clicking directly on the map.

Any objective can easily be edited while active, and units can be added or removed from them at any time.

carpet_siege.png


These are the objectives we currently have during wartime.

Blockade Ports
Any navy can be assigned to it, and you select which seazones they should be present in. It will then split ships up to attempt to blockade as many enemy ports as possible.

Carpet Siege
Here you can select which provinces should be sieged down, and the AI will split the armies you have assigned into smaller units and move them around to siege or occupy as much as possible as quickly as possible. It will attempt to flee with the armies if any hostile armies appear.

Defend Home Territory
This will attempt to protect the areas near the capital with the armies you assign, to make sure no hostile armies siege them down.

Hunt Armies
This objective will use the armies you have assigned to attempt to find enemy armies and engage them if it feels it can win.

hunt_armies.png


We can see two smaller hostile armies in Przasnysz & Sierpc..

Patrol the Seas
This is an objective that can be useful at peace time as well, as it will use the assigned navies to attempt to build up the maritime presence as quickly as possible in the assigned seazones.

Army Logistics
This is something you may want to assign to a support army with Auxiliaries on big campaigns. They will gather food where it's possible nearby and move it forward to deposit in any Supply Depots you have set in the target area.

Navy Logistics
This will assign a navy to gather food at a nearby source and then go to the target seazone(s) and act as logistic support for the armies that may require it.

Supporting objectives
There are a lot of sub-objective and supporting objectives that are primarily used by the AI, like join units, maintain troop levels, etc..

However, there are a few important support objectives that the player can use directly.

Chase target
This can be done when you see an enemy unit and wish to follow it and engage it. The unit will attempt to follow, but if it runs out of morale from movement, or the enemy manages to escape into the Fog of War, it may be lost.

Automatic Fleet Transport
This objective is automatically used, and is very similar to mechanics in EU4 and Imperator when you have an army and give it order to go somewhere they need naval transport. If there are navies assigned to support fleet transports, and you give an army the order, it will automatically create the objective and perform it for you.

Repatriate Units
This is a quick action when you just want your armies or navies that are exiled after a war to get home as soon as possible.



Next week we will talk about our new and in-depth Union mechanics, and how Regencies work..
 
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Johan said:
Supporting objectives
There are a lot of sub-objective and supporting objectives that are primarily used by the AI, like join units, maintain troop levels, etc..
Click to expand...
Will disloyal or rebellious subjects (Personal Unions, Tributaries etc.) create their own objectives that might directly sabotage the player’s efforts during the war?
 
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Johan said:
Blockade Ports
Any navy can be assigned to it, and you select which seazones they should be present in. It will then split ships up to attempt to blockade as many enemy ports as possible.
Click to expand...
  1. Will the AI prioritize blockading ports with the highest strategic value, or will it block as many ports as possible, even those of lesser importance?
  2. Can I command tributaries to focus on specific enemy ports, or will they choose targets to blockade based on their own AI priorities?
  • For example, as China, it would make little sense for my Indonesian tributary to blockade the northern coasts of Japan instead of focusing on the South China Sea.
  • Another example: Could I direct my Mediterranean vassal to blockade enemy ports in the Adriatic, or might their AI decide to engage in less strategic areas like the Aegean instead?
 
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Johan said:
Patrol the Seas
This is an objective that can be useful at peace time as well, as it will use the assigned navies to attempt to build up the maritime presence as quickly as possible in the assigned seazones.
Click to expand...

  1. If I task my allies or subjects with patrolling the seas (If possible), will they focus only on the assigned sea zones, or could they act outside those orders if they spot an opportunity, such as engaging enemy fleets?
  2. Could subjects' navies refuse to patrol specific sea zones, particularly if they are dealing with internal issues or disloyalty? Logically, they might prioritize blockading their own rebellious coasts instead.
 
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Will this work like in EU4, where you can individually select all the states you want the army to operate in, and if you do not select any states it will simply carry out their mission everywhere? If we always necessarily have to assign a specific area to every army we give an order to, then that feels like a lot of micro. But I feel it should be possible to limit the operational area if we want to. But likewise it should also be possible to just say "just do this everywhere".
 
Johan said:
Navy Logistics
This will assign a navy to gather food at a nearby source and then go to the target seazone(s) and act as logistic support for the armies that may require it.
Click to expand...
  1. If I assign subjects or allies to Navy Logistics, will the loyalty of my subjects affect their willingness to provide logistics, and could disloyal subjects sabotage supply chains during critical moments?
  2. Will subjects prioritize supplying my most strategic units, or could they decide to focus on their own needs if they have high autonomy?​
  3. Are there conditions that could make tributaries or subjects more likely to refuse logistics support, such as a war with another subject or a lack of trust?

Unwanted Exploit Scenario​
If a subject is disloyal and an exploitative player anticipates a rebellion, could they declare war on another nation and order the disloyal subject to prioritize supplying the player’s units instead of their own? In such a case, could the disloyal subject’s army suffer casualties due to lack of supply, with their morale dropping and conscription capacity being affected? How can the game prevent exploiters from using this type of strategy to weaken their subjects or manipulate them into harm for the player’s advantage?
 
I know this isnt related, but will we have custom nations feature like in eu4? That added so much playability. Also could we have the option for modders to use the eu4 start date system if they wanted to script a lot of sates?
 
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nyetflix2 said:
All of those native guys have the same facial expression lmao
Click to expand...
I do like how the background guys are also the same three guys as in the foreground, repeating.

Unironically I feel like a "simpler" artstyle like these is very beneficial for this game, given the massive amounts of different art pieces needed for units of five centuries on Seven (plus-minus 2) continents, using tricks like this allows for reduced painting times and makes creation of more unit art easier and faster.

CK3 for example has an art style that is rather hard to replicate, and it sort of suffers from this somewhat - for example, DLC art is visibly distinct in style as they all have very different artists behind them who usually don't replicate the exact style of the vanilla pieces, and vanilla CK3 also suffers a bit from the original couple of unit art being used for a huge variety of different MaA units.

TLDR I think this artstyle and techniques make Project Caesar's unit art easier to produce in sufficient variety (so that every region might have their unique unit art for at least the early eras), and also for modders and future artists for DLCs to reproduce the style.
 
So excited for these objectives! There’s one feature I desperately want: set an army to chase a specific army, as opposed to hunting armies in a region. Most of my (hapless) micro in EUIV is sending a stack chasing after an enemy, babysitting it to update movement orders whenever the AI changes direction. And I really wish I could say, target this stack, pursue until you engage it in battle. I know there’s a lot of complications here, but if you can somehow implement a feature like this, I will be beyond excited!
 
I'm glad we can still manually control units. Where I fall away from Vic 3 is in the combat system - I know previous games have boiled down to slinging doomstacks at enemies until they die. I know fronts, frontage, goals ect are a means of solving this and diversifying military gameplay but its so nice being able to manually move units rapidly about, setting up assured defensive battles in mountains or 'sneaking' through enemy stacks to get of a quick barrage/ assualt seige. Doing things that the Ai might not heuristically do. Goal setting sounds great but so often, in especially in close wars or wars what you are outnumbered and outmached, how you as a player go about your objectives can make all the difference. Both in terms of outcome and enjoyment.

With your logistics and attrition systems I feel doomstacking is adequetley mitagated. As I suppose to 'doomstack' you'd need to invest heavily in to logisitcs.



I'm wondering however, within an army will it be possible to manually control some units. I.e Infantry and Artillery whilst automating others i.e auxillarys. Can the system handle for example some units being directed to seige whilst others supply them. Or will I need 2 seperate armies for this? One for supply runs and one for the actual business of fighting and seigeing. (And will this subsequently double the micro of war if I am a manual control player that disfavours the automation)

Historically Im sure beseiging forces set up and got to work whilst their auxillaries/ baage train ect ferried supplies into yhe seige camp.
 
The system appears quite good as it is presented, but may I suggest that information about hostile armies' strength is unknown unless you have sufficient intel about them? I suggest that you could get this information either by simply forcing a battle, spying or by having light cavalry (if it exists) in nearby armies. I believe the necessity and usage of light cavalry for scouting purposes is well documented in the relevant time period, so it would be interesting to give the player an incentive to use light cavalry even though it might not be as useful in combat as other units.
 
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