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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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'm curious, is 3 urban locations a normal amount for a country the size of the Teutonic Order, or it's a very low quantity?
Are they Marienburg, Königsberg and Danzig?

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It seems a little odd to me that the icons on these tiles are little highlighted mini-maps of where the tile is. But I can see where the tile is by looking at it. Not sure what the point of that is?
 
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I'm curious, is 3 urban locations a normal amount for a country the size of the Teutonic Order, or it's a very low quantity?
In another TT, Norway was shown to start with 6. Having done a quick googling of how much land did the Teutonic Order and Norway occupied, with 177000 km2 and 324000 km2 respectively, at least it's comparable, but it's also a matter of game balance in the end.
 
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What's stopping me from moving all of my regiments into the center flank and concentrating all of my army's power in one direction, like you can in CK2?
 
What's stopping me from moving all of my regiments into the center flank and concentrating all of my army's power in one direction, like you can in CK2?
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?
 
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I'm really sorry in advancea bout this extremely negative post but this UI is genuinely atrocious, from the ugly and bold green bars to the 2 pixel resolution sprites this game legitimately has the worst UI direction out of any modern PDX game. Even the font and text colours are bad, with them not only being ugly imo, but also being horrendous from an accesibility pov. I suffer from an issue where I can easily feint from straining my eyes and I honestly can't read the text in this game without risking feinting (Yes this is real). The text shadows, font, spacing and contrast are all abysmal, Please create a dedicated UI team to rebuild the entire UI from the ground up. Especially since - despite all their faults - Vicky3 and CK3 have genuinelly beautiful UI's which feel both modern and classic, PC's UI feels like it was made in MS paint in 2008.
 
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This is the frist time I think I've seen units on the map. (might have been shown before but I havn't seen).
I cant see the typical paradox "big men with weapons" who represent armies in every pdx grand strategy game before.
Will they not be a part of the game because of performance or are they just not visible here?
 
This is the frist time I think I've seen units on the map. (might have been shown before but I havn't seen).
I cant see the typical paradox "big men with weapons" who represent armies in every pdx grand strategy game before.
Will they not be a part of the game because of performance or are they just not visible here?
I just think its not zoomed in enough, i think they will show off the units with the 3D map
 
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Initiative.

light infantry and light cavalry has higher.

diplomatic ability of a commander increases it by 1% per DIP.

there are also advanced affecting it
If engagement "difficulty" is static (which I assume it is?), then wont advance bonuses cause regiments to engage faster and faster as the game progresses, making the whole mechanic of engaged vs not a little redundant and lowering the importance of a high/low Initiative stat on units and skew unit type balance significantly? It seems like it only takes a few hours for mostly everything to engage in the very early game as is...

Also, do topography/vegetation/defensive buildings support unit initiative modifiers?
 
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