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Tinto Talks #62 - 7th of May 2025

Hello everyone and welcome to another Happy Wednesday! Today we will show off some more things related to our very super secret game Project Caesar.

Lets do a quick start as the Teutonic Order, as they currently start at war, and I want to go through a bit how a battle works in detail. Background information about the country can be found in the latest Tinto Flavor about the Orders at https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...5-25th-of-april-2025-military-orders.1737515/


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Our tax base is low, even if we have a decently sized population.


But how is that population then?

62_pops.png

Fairly diverse eh?

While over 70% are Catholics, only 26% belong to our Prussian culture, so we can not raise a large amount of levies. And considering I have nine different provinces, it would take centuries to make them all Prussian.


However, I also have other problems, in that I don’t have great control over most of my country, and Masuria in the southeast is particularly low.

62_control.png

Roads are too expensive during a war, but soon...

So my early decision is to try to promote the Prussian culture in our capital, and increase control in Masuria.

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It seems all my leaders have a nice platemail uniform!


So let's take a look at this war then, how should we handle it? We have about 100 regulars and about 3.8k levies, and while we have a numerical superiority on our side, Poland and their allies have a rather large army as well.

62_war.png

This is the war mapmode, and you can see our armies in green, allied in blue, and what is not hidden by fog of war, the enemy armies in red.


Ideally, as we have a nice amount of manpower from all of our Order Commanderies in Europe, I’d like to raise some more regulars. Luckily, we earn some money from the trade in our cities, even though our tax base is so weak.

I give the order recruit two more Crusader Knights, at 100 men each in Marienburg, and while I gather my levies and regulars in Osterode, I notice that the army of one of the Polish vassals, the County of Sieradz, have moved across the border and started sieging our Castle in Thorn.


62_thorn.png

The red/green bars under the section numbers of regiments and men indicates how much frontage is filled.

While my morale is a bit low after marching across my lands, I have just appointed a new general with some great stats, and decided to adjust my army to maximise my chances in the battle.

I put my 192 men strong noble levy cavalry on the right flank together with 1,000 feudal levies. The center gets 2,000 feudal levies, but my left flank has my 2 armored horsemen, and the remaining 524 feudal levies. I have high hopes that they will engage quickly and shatter the opposition flank. There are some tribesmen, footmen and clergy levies in the reserves, but I don’t expect much of them. My commander still needs 10 more days to give an effective bonus to the army, which I really want, as his 84 diplomacy is another +16.8% of morale.

62_formation.png

Yes, the 15 tribesmen will be useful…

I finally give the orders to march to my army, and a few days later, we reach Thorn.

They have a slight edge in morale, as their commander has an even higher diplomacy than ours. Their military tactics are 1.18 compared to our 1.09, due to a stronger noble estate and privileges granted in exchange for that. We do have the edge in discipline though, at 13.10% vs 2.37%, for which we thank the Crusader Discipline advance and the Military Orders estate privilege for the Clergy…

62_battlestart.png

White numbers at the top of the sections are currently engaged men, while the grey at the bottom is men still not fighting.

At the first hour, our plan to use cavalry on the flanks paid off, as they with the slightly higher initiative got lucky and engaged immediately. As there is no enemy engaged, they’ll do morale damage to the entire opposite section.

A few hours later..

62_battle_2.png

Green numbers on brown at the top there is WiP

Our left flank is not engaging fast enough and our 50 armored horsemen are getting destroyed by the enemy levies, and they are way too outnumbered to rout 1000 levies. In the center the enemy have their mailed knights engaged, so this should now be interesting.


Lets check the tooltip for our Cavalry. 19 men remained, but they killed 42 enemies last hour, while losing 12 of their own. We had hoped that the rest of the cavalry had engaged at the same time.

62_cavalry_does_damage.png


Yeah, need to show as multiplicative numbers, not as +percentage.




The mailed knight levies in the center shatter on our feudal levies, while our horsemen are destroyed. Luckily they bought enough time for the rest of that flank to engage.

62_tooltip.png

You can also tooltip a battle-widget on the map and see morale and how many are fighting..

Quite a few hours later, fighting is still going on, and most regiments have engaged, while some of our reserves have joined our weakened flanks. We also have better dice rolls, so now it looks really good.

62_battle_3.png

This battle is now won, and it's just a matter of time until the enemy collapses and flees.

Next week, Pavia is back and will be talking about some more religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism. Tomorrow though, is the big day!


Don't forget to join us for the stream at May 8th, 6PM CEST / 9AM PDT at https://pdxint.at/CaesarAnnouncement !!
 

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Also called, you on the right vs the guy she tells you not to worry about on the left

But the guys on the right won...

Friendly reminder Charles V had the opportunity to unite all of Europe after this battle but chickened out instead of realpolitking.

Imagine an EU almost 500 hundred years before the real one?!
 
I think it is a series of attacks from all sides. When your regiments are in battle, enemy regiments on other flanks will attack them... I can have a mistakes. Does CK2 have another mechanic for this situation? Do the regiments quickly kill enemies on their flanks and then attack and win battles on other flanks after that?
In CK2, you can manually move regiments between flanks by clicking a little button called "Reorganize Army". The meta was to put literally all regiments in the center flank to concentrate the full force of your army in one direction rather than dividing it three ways. This effectively made the flanking system redundant if the player can bypass it so easily, and it was one of the reasons CK3 got rid of flanks entirely to focus on Men-at-Arms instead.
 


@Johan from what we've seen in the recent videos, I really don't think that 1 regular should have 10x more combat power than 1 levy, which I assume from the videos and previous statements still holds true.

Levies should instead be only slightly worse in combat due to training/equipment dif, but primarily have significantly less morale, or take more morale damage.

TLDR;
  • Individual Regular/Levy combat power ratio should be closer than it is now (10x --> 1.5-2x).
  • If proven inferior in battle, levies should be fleeing en masse, not dying en masse.


 
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Is there anyway to stop your cavalry charging full headlong into 1000 infantry with 19 men? Seems great to have initiative but only to waste it on foolhardiness?

I like that cavalry on an enemy flank should cause constant morale damage but the cavalry shouldn't charge straight away unless with vast superiority but to wait for infantry to engage and hit the sides and rear?

Though I think maybe commander skills and traits should play a part in this maybe with reckless commanders charging straight away.
 
To adress a concern about CB and how to wage war... instead of limiting player freedom - why can't there be a system based on moral. If you attack someone without cause your people/levies/armies should get a natural moral penalty (why would they after all want to die for this cause?). If you get unjustly attacked on the other hand, you should get a moral boost (as you defend your country/people from these foreign invaders). Such a modifier could also be adopted to be based on religious/political organisational/institutional multipliers etc.
 
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I like the banner (artwork), it looks good.
 


@Johan from what we've seen in the recent videos, I really don't think that 1 regular should have 10x more combat power than 1 levy, which I assume from the videos and previous statements still holds true.

Levies should instead be only slightly worse in combat due to training/equipment dif, but primarily have significantly less morale, or take more morale damage.

TLDR;
  • Individual Regular/Levy combat power ratio should be closer than it is now (10x --> 1.5-2x).
  • If proven inferior in battle, levies should be fleeing en masse, not dying en masse.


Yes they break and flee, then the light cavalry runs them down slaughtering them for sheer murderous glee.