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Tinto Talks #53 - 5th of March 2025

Hello everyone and welcome to another Tinto Talks. This is the Happy Wednesday where we tell you about what is going on with our entirely 100% secret game with the codename Project Caesar.


This week we will talk about how mercenaries and prisoners of war will work in this game..


As we mentioned in previous Tinto Talks, we have 3 types of regiments. Levies, Regulars and Mercenaries. You can at any point rearrange any army and move regiments freely between them, no matter the status of the regiment.

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This Teuton Army has 1440 men in the left flank, 545 in the center, 2567 in the rightflank and 373 in the reserves. Why so few in the center, I'd expect that is where the bulk of the regulars knights are. In total the army has 6 cavalry levy regiments, 2 regular, and 9 mercenaries, for a total of 634 men.



Hiring Mercenaries
When you hire a mercenary company, you will first need to find a commander that can raise the company for you. This is not a simple choice, as a more competent commander will cost more gold, but the amount of regiments you can raise under the mercenary depends both on the administrative ability of the commander, and the amount of possible mercenaries the pops of that area has.

Mercenary regiments rely on having their soldiers come from pops, and if there is not enough soldiers for them in an area, that will limit the amount of regiments

Negative Stability in the country together with devastation and low control in the location determines how many pops are willing to leave home and become mercenaries.

The type of regiments that a mercenary can raise depends on what regiments are commonly available in the area the mercenary is recruited from. Some types of regiments may be more common than others in an area, and just because you have found a nice 99 admin commander, he may not be able to raise enough of a certain type of regiment that you want.

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This is a pretty good commander which can lead a pretty big army..


Contracts and Extensions
When you hire a mercenary you set a default contract length, and at the end of that contract the mercenaries will stop their service. However, if you are still at war, the contract will be extended for another year. If you wish to terminate a contract in advance you need to pay the remaining contracted fee.

You can also have auto extension on contracts and manually extend a contract for another 24 months for an individual mercenary company at any time.

Each new contract signed or extended has a signing fee that heavily depends on the type of troops you wish to hire, and the skill of commander.

Bribing Mercenaries
However, just because a contract is signed does not mean that the mercenary will stay loyal for the entire contract. Another country may come around and just offer more money to buy their loyalty. This is not exactly cheap, but it can be rather useful at times.

Renting out your Armies
One alternative to paying gold every month to your regular regiments at peace is to rent them out as mercenaries. You can select any unit you have and put them on the market for a given percentage of your costs, usually above your own costs as you need to turn a profit after all. If all goes well, you earn gold, and your regiments get some nice experience.

These armies are then listed as possible armies to contract for any country within range.

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The Aragonese army is available fore hire for a cheap price..


Prisoners
Sometimes when you win a battle by overrunning the enemy, you can capture regiments of the defeated side. Overrun is what players refer to as stackwipe which happens when you have 10 to 1 odds, or when the other side has 0 morale you have a larger army.

There are multiple ways to deal with prisoners, if you don’t want to keep them around and feed them. No matter what though, the prisoners will die off slowly over time, as this is not the age of the Geneva Convention.

Through various unit abilities, you have ways to deal with the prisoners.

First of all, you can attempt to ransom them back to their owners, which will net you some gold, and return the regiments to their owner.
Secondly, you can recruit them to fight as mercenaries for you, but that means you have to pay them. The advantage of that, is that they won’t fight for your enemy though.
Thirdly, you can just execute them. That is a bit frowned upon, so it will impact your Aggressive Expansion, but sometimes it might be worth it.
The Fourth option you will know more about when we talk about the Nahuatl faith in a future Tinto Talks.

However, if you overrun an enemy army with prisoners, you will of course free them and take them back.




Now we have gone through the core mechanics we have for Project Caesar. The next few weeks we will go through all the changes that have happened during this year, thanks both to your great feedback and from internal and external testing. After that it's time to go through the mechanics of the different religions, the different situations and the different international organizations we have!
 
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I would like to use my prisoners as semi-slaves for work, because why not? Lets build something. Or let's send them to colony\colonize with them some areas in my country (just like Lithuanians did with some muslims and later polish king Sobieski with some Tatars).
 
Will disbanded army units return to the population pool or will some go to the mercenary pool?

Will armies have different movements speeds if they are with prisoners and or siege equipment (cannons)?

Will disbanded naval units become pirates in the later eras?

Will privateers be the same but accesible via naval gameplay or do they have unique mechanics?

Will army names have flavor names or will all armies be known as 1st, 2nd army, etc.?

What mechanics will make mercenary prominence die down organically by the 18th and 19th centuries?
 
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I take the quote below to mean that it works like in EU4, overrun aka stackwipe happens when there's 10 to 1. So that ratio automatically leads to the larger side winning, and after that victory, prisoners are taken.
Ah, hm, you're probably right. That's annoying.
 
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Are there mechanics around simply not paying mercenaries, or paying them less than promised? Adding on to this, what about mercenary revolts and mercenaries just generally committing war crimes under your command?
 
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@Johan can you as employee "exotic" units that you normally don't have access to as mercenaries? Like if as England I manage to recruit mercenaries from India or South East Asia can I get Elephant cavalry?
 
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First of all I love this game. I have been playing it since eu1 and this looks like it is going to be the ultimate EU " hm" Caesar game :).

Historically prisoners of war have often been used as forced labour to build fortreses or infrastructure etc. Sometimes they have even been used to settle other parts of the country like when the russians sent POWs to live in sibiria. Will this be reflected in the game in some way?
 
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However, if you overrun an enemy army with prisoners, you will of course free them and take them back.
What if these prisoners were not from you or your allies, but from some other war the defeated army was in? Free resources for Nahuatl? Ransom to owner for gold or free them for relations boost?
 
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I think this is already covered in the Slavery Tinto Talk. Two of the ways of taking slaves is conquering and sacking cities during war and building slave markets in your own locations (only affects non-primary and religion pops).
Ah, that reminds me - another option for prisoners of war I didn't see in the four point list was the method used both by Russia and Sweden during the Great Northern War and later (i.e. as nations moved away from mercenary armies to more standing forces) - pows got used as basically slave labor until the was was over. (Building fortifications or other earthworks, running Siberian farmsteads etc.)
 
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PC fix.png


I do like it but we need to change the UI it is not clear because the lines below the brown boxes are quite small, better increase the line size decrease the box size and order all of them to show intuitively what does it mean, showing stuff with pictures and order makes it easier to understand.
To me it's crazy that on your proposals for changes the icons look better and sharper than on the originals. I don't understand why everything is so blurry and illegible in official images from TT.
 
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I'm guessing this is clear, but just to be safe. If a country close to me ,recruit mercenaries that means that some of my pops that are close to the area of recruitment will be taken?.

Also, will be possible to do the same with Navies? Kind of a mercenary navy/privateers?
 
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Does Bribing Mercenaries come with any sort of longer-lasting institutional impacts on the mercenary company itself? I can imagine a world-renowned mercenary company that has existed and followed contracts loyally for 200 years suddenly breaking contract will be quite the stain on their honor, and this might reduce the rate at which they would be hired.
 
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Did nobody ask what happens when we wipe an army of a nation that holds captives of a third party we may or may not like? Imagine we kill an Austrian stack that has Ottoman prisoners and we are Poland. Do we just free the Ottoman prisoners? We should get to keep them!
 
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Did nobody ask what happens when we wipe an army of a nation that holds captives of a third party we may or may not like? Imagine we kill an Austrian stack that has Ottoman prisoners and we are Poland. Do we just free the Ottoman prisoners? We should get to keep them!
I hope they just get free and you get a relation buff maybe like +25, that would be easy and realistic
 
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I hope they just get free and you get a relation buff maybe like +25, that would be easy and realistic
It wouldn't be realistic in the case that you don't like the nation, but it is the easiest solution and I would also be happy with it. Don't wanna overly fixate on minor mechanics like this.
 
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Will mercenaries reduce army tradition? I always disliked how you lost professionalism when hiring mercs in EU4

No, you don't lose army tradition from hiring mercs in PC
 
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