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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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Is it possible that a merc company general/leader might have ambitions to become a leader of a nation, or become a tag that you can play as themselves (or in general)?
 
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Hello, I'll be your host today as Johan is lost in the north busy in Stockholm with meetings.
3 choose, like Medival: liberate,ransom and execute...i remember the funny accent etc...i hope in future appear new meccanics...and maybay hybrits country (likea normal country can expand too via buildings in other country)
 
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It might be a way of getting money to develop your country's economy by investing it in buildings, etc.
Os there any mechanic regarding overpopulation? I'm thinking whether we could have an scenario in which you are a poor country with positive demographics to make that interesting. Otherwise, game mechanics often tend to make keeping a high population and developing the land (e.g. loaning) the most efficient strategy.
 
Wouldn't it make sense to just release POW's in some cases so you don't lose the pops? Like if they were on a losing side of a civil war or rebellion or you annexed their country so you have no one to ransom them to. Couldn't getting back POW's also be somthing that can happen in a peace deal?
 
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All UI, 2D, and 3D assets may be WIP and subject to review up until the release of the game.
Please change the sliders. They don't fit at all.
Also these are incredibly unclear:
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Perhaps the shield background should removed or something.

Also I don't get the use of NATO counters when the game is from 1337-1836
 
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Can you recruit mercenaries from "hostile" cultures? And will mercenaries fight the state of their origin or a state of their culture, or will they defect / mutiny?

yes, you can recruit them. and they don't care about who they fight as long as they get $$$
 
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I'm assuming that one way of lowering mercenary loyalty is if you invade their homeland, would that be correct?
I don't imagine they'd be happy to be ordered to pillage their hometown.

actually, the mercenaries are gathered from an entire area, so we dont keep track of that.,
 
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It would be cool to add the options in the game to use pows to assault city and castle walls like the Mongols and other hordes did, and the ability to enslave them to gain slave pops if you can have slaves and the pows are of another hostile religion/culture.
 
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Some questions
  1. Are the commanders my characters, other nations characters, or nobodies characters?
  2. Are the Pops my pops, or pops from other areas?
  3. If they are my pops how are these different from levies?
  4. Do these mercenary commanders act as generals? Do they have to?
  5. As it sounds like the mercenary payments are periodic, if they are captured do I still pay them?
  6. Is there any indication of likelihood of accepting bribes or history attached to mercenary groups?
  7. If I capture mercenaries as prisoners, who pays the ransom?

1 - "nobodies" :p
2 - pops from the area,
3 - pops becoming mercenary leaves the population numbers.
4 - yes
5 - you pay them as long as you got a single regiment around.
6 - its all about the $$$
7 - you cant ransom mercs.
 
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Will some mercenary companies be available as army based countries? This feels more appropriate for something like condottieri's in Italian Wars.

nothing we have made yet, but its a good idea.
 
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Also another question - can marauder bands arise? In the case the employer country runs out of money to pay the mercs and nobody wants to bribe them... It would be a great mechanic to have for example for the Thirty Years' war.

like an army based country ? :p
 
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yes, you can recruit them. and they don't care about who they fight as long as they get $$$
So…you are telling me as Hungary, I can name my King Sigismund, hire a bunch of unhappy Cuman mercs, raze some Czech silver mines, and usurp the Kingdom of Bohemia from the incompetent Wenceslas IV?
 
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Reinhard von Steyer has to be such a mood!
He carries a big book where he has the age, name, blood group and food intolerances noted down of every single man, down to the camp dog.
Hes also a valiant leader and passable tactician.

Oh, and hes a diplomatic master mind. When a city surrenders to him he thinks its irony and attacks still.
He also forgets who he is fighting for or against and throws a coin each day to determine his overlord.
Last time the duke of Stuhlweißenburg (Székesfehérvár) wanted to make him a gift he shat on the middle of the dukes great room as he mistook the city name for a veiled diplomatic expectation
(Stuhlweißenburg can be translated to White Castle, chair of power(Stuhl) or Shit(Stuhl) White Castle)
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