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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.

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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.


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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.

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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…

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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..

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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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I noticed that Discipline amount is not changed throughout the battle.

Also, can we get the numbers to be larger when more numbers are involved, rather than having the same size for every number and having bigger/more fractioned number be displayed smaller than the other? This issue is also seen in the Buildings tab, where numbers with more characters being displayed smaller than a LESSER number with fewer characters. At the very least, it will affect the readability of the game as a whole.
 
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I see that the two armies in a battle are opposed on the horizontal axis, while we talk about left and right flanks, which may lead to confusion, since the "left" flank is located in the upper section for the attacked and the lower section for the attacker.

Did you consider rotating the engagement screen 90 degrees so that at least from the pov of one army "left" and "right" flanks would be on the actual left and right side of the layout?
 
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Could you put an icon, a loading bar or something on the army panel that tells us if the commander is "fully operating" or how much time in still needs, please?
 
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they do a nice barrage in the star of the battle and then stick in their section.. they got shit initiative so wont engage early after, so other regiments will "tank" for them.
Do units with firearms do something similar, e.g. shoot a volley and then charge? Or how does that work? Do they only shoot? Do they do both?
 
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Also please consider making the darker boxes* more visible, that way the positions and tactics can be easily noticeable with a glance, not by having to stare at it for 5 seconds to realise. At least a bright frame with dark filling can do the job so easily and will be easily visible for the players imo.
 
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they do a nice barrage in the star of the battle and then stick in their section.. they got shit initiative so wont engage early after, so other regiments will "tank" for them.
Talking about artillery. Will we see any differences between sige and field guns. Like artillery was used at 1410 battle of grunwald by teutons but it didn't have much effect but were used in battle. And later when lighter artillery showed up it's not like heavy guns stop existing. Will we get yo use both types in one army or it will be either either?
 
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they do a nice barrage in the star of the battle and then stick in their section.. they got shit initiative so wont engage early after, so other regiments will "tank" for them.
Will they get higher initiative if I cast "Haste" on them before battle with my Lash of Discipline staff?
 
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Green and blue backgrounds on army icons are way too similar imo.
And I have no issues with colour-blindeness.
So maybe make them more distinctive.
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Also, what do 41.7K and 37.9K numbers exactly mean? Potential combined levies? Current armies' sizes?
 
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I don't like the battle screen, it looks really bad.
 
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