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Tinto Talks #11 - 8th of May 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, and now we are up to the eleventh of these about this super secret game! This time we talk about military matters, and the differences between levies, mercenaries, and regular regiments.

But first..

Today, we at Paradox Tinto are releasing our Winds of Change expansion for EU4! Check out the video my team made at

And if the launch goes well, I can ask the team to start the map feedback posts later this week!


Military Organization
While there is a very large number of different types of units, they all belong to one of four different categories: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, or Auxiliary. Infantry is usually the bulk of most armies, and the other categories have specific roles in a campaign.

The size of a regiment varies over time, with the earliest Infantry Regiments using 100 men, while at the end of the game, there are around 3,200 men in each infantry regiment. Cavalry, Artillery, and Auxiliary units have different sizes.

We also categorize a regiment as either a levy, a mercenary, or a regular regiment. Any army can freely rearrange those into any stack they want, and split up their regiments as the player sees fit. So if you want to have half of a mercenary company in one army and the other in another army, then that is perfectly fine in this game.


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This is a unique cavalry unit from the first age that some cultures have access to.

Levies
First of all, we have levies, where you can raise your able-bodied fighting men into a fighting force. This provides you with a lot of people who can fight for you, but the levies have a few slight drawbacks. First of all, you can only raise them when you are at war or facing rebels. Secondly, when you raise your levies those pops you raise them from are decreased in size to represent the pops going off to war, and any dead men in a levy is population permanently lost.. Speaking of that, levies do not spawn with any experience to speak of, and you have no direct control over the type of units you get. Another slight drawback is that levies do not reinforce during a campaign either. A province where the levies have been raised will also produce less food and raw materials.

You can either raise all your levies, or from any province individually.

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Raising all able-bodied men in the Kingdom of Sweden will get us 12,000 men!

Mercenaries
There are many mercenary companies available in the world, and each area has at least a few possible to recruit. However, these are not endless free manpower, as other nations may be recruiting them before you can. A Mercenary Company signs up for at least a 2-year contract, but you can extend the contract if you so desire. More on how mercenaries can be recruited in a later talk.


Regular Regiments
Your regular army consists of the regiments that you do not want to disband and they require manpower to recruit. This recruitment can not be done everywhere though, as you need special buildings to allow recruitment of military units. Usually, these are the same type of buildings that also provide you with manpower. As the ages go by, you go from only some special buildings providing a minuscule amount of manpower to being able to build Conscription Centers in your core culture locations.

Manpower
Speaking of manpower, in Project Caesar this is primarily generated by buildings. Now you may ask, why do we need manpower when we have pops? Well, for us, manpower represents the more or less semi-trained men that can be used in a military force. And what is important, whenever a regiment loses strength, be it from attrition or combat, you will lose pops as well.

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This is a unique building for Mongol steppe hordes.

One other aspect to take into account when it comes to manpower is that Project Caesar does not have force limits, but instead, you are limited by how many regiments you can maintain. Every regiment requires some manpower each month to maintain the current level of troops.

It also requires a fair amount of goods each month, and if it does not have access to it, morale will drop, and it will not be able to reinforce or maintain its current strength.


As you may have noticed in some of the screenshots above, units do have a fair bit of unique attributes. There are some common ones for your entire country.
  • Discipline, which impacts damage taken and damage done.
  • Military Tactics, which impacts damage taken.
  • Army Morale, which impacts how long your armies are willing to fight before breaking.
  • Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery & Auxiliary power, which impacts damage done for that category.

There is also the Army Tradition, which is gained primarily from the average experience of your armies, which can be increased by drilling them, and impacts the morale & siege ability of your armies, while also slowly pushing you towards land on the land vs naval societal values.

This is not everything related to military, as we have a talk about the navies, a talk about logistics and a talk about our combat system planned as well.

Next week, however, we will be back with something completely different, and rather new and unique features.,
 
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As someone who's been mildly obsessed with some combat-stuff in EU4, I'm really happy to see all the changes.
I've always felt that one of big struggles of EU4 was that it didn't really depict the transitions that happened during that period in ways that would be that interesting mechanically. In 1.30, for instance, we got mercenaries which cost increased as the game progressed, but it just ended up leading to that bizarre state where mercenaries were actually cheaper than regular troops early on, and then became useless.

I'm super happy that there seems to be more effort and thought put into this now.

I'm also glad that, at least from what I gather, stuff like "the more you lose troops, the more powerful your armies are" is gone now. EU4 had a lot of extremely bizarre aspects to its warfare/combat system, and plenty of bugs that have been there seemingly since release, and I'll be happy to see them gone.
 
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Regiment sizes increase as time goes on, but I'm curious; with the larger 3200 regiment, would you be able to split that back down into smaller sizes? Or is that regiment the smallest it can be putting aside losses in battle?

why would you?
 
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Is there a cap to the manpower this building can provide? Or can the 5000 people employed there potentially provide more than 5000 manpower?

they provide 50 a month, if the pool is less than max
 
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One extra thought:

We obviously don't have most of the details on how combat works, but I am a bit worried about stuff like "flanking ability" possibly leading to the battles becoming hugely asymmetrical. This is a modifier that "makes sense" but my sense is that for battles to feel good, the player kind of needs to be able to develop some sense of how it's going to develop over the course of next few days.

EU4 has a problem with that now, after the changes to combat introduced in 1.33 and 1.34, where there's so much unpredictability due to cannons retreating at hard to grasp frequency (50% of the 3rd frontline's morale) and then reinforcing unevenly, that I think it's a nearly universally accepted opinion that the combat just felt much better before.

I hope that there's enough attention paid to making sure that maneuvering and such genuinely feel good in the long-run, and it doesn't end up with players just dropping their troops into a meatgrinder, because the numbers and changes on the frontline are too hard to grasp immediately.
 
Do we have auto drill in our armies? Because i feel like drilling has always been an underused feature by how incovenient and not practical it is to always click those buttons to drill single armies, aswell as assigning new generals all the time
 
Can i raise my armies from a specific province only? So for example i make a province focused on arny, and dont want to use my pops in a production focused province so if my soldiers die i will not lose pops in the production province?
 
Hi johan, I know that talking about culture is still a long way to go, but I wanted to ask about naming system in this super mega secret project that is project caesar.


something really bother me about most of paradox's GSGs is that the naming systems only tied to culture, but ignoring religion.
It's really an immersion-breaking to unite Indonesia as a balinese Hindu kingdom but then suddenly I have my king named Muhammad Jalaludin.
and if I wanted to mod that I needed to entirely remove muslim names from the malay culture. which is also not the most realistic option.

Aand conversely if my Dai Viet king decided to learn the way of the qur'an, it'd be ssuuuuper cool to have him be named Ahmad Nguyen,
...or Johan Tran if he's of any Christian denomination. :p

I know that researching the names of the individual religious groups from each culture will be quite an enormous task, but I think the modders will definitely do something about it if given the option.
 
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I really have not understood how manpower works.

Is it a pool of men you use to recruit and reinforce like in EU4, or something new, like a capacity, say you have +600 a month from buildings, and your standing armies require 500 a month to keep them?

You have a manpower pool.

A horse archer regimemt reduces the pool by 1 MP each month. (this is just natural "getting too old and retire etc))

A Kurultai (if fully supplied etc), will add 50 MP each month, and allow a pool of 3000 MP (of 5 years, sorry 10 is eu4),

Building a single horse archers regiment of 100 men will cost 100 MP.

So you build 25 horse archers regiment, that will cost you 2500MP, and have a monthly upkeep of 25MP.

That means you will only regain 5MP each month, making restoring the MP pool much slower, which makes it take 50 years to maximise your manpower pool with that regular army raised.

And if you fight a battle with your 2,500 horse archers, and lost 30%.. you now need to regain 750 manpower from the pool, while still maintaing the 25 MP.

Disregarding the fact that losing pops is BAD for you, losing manpower is not quickly regained either.
 
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Apologies if this has been asked before, but: can I declare a second war while at war already and what does that do to my levies? I hate the CK3 mechanic where I have to disband my levies before I can declare a second war. If some piss poor peasant state can't maintain their troops at peace time I want to be able roll over them with my army, be that levies or my professional army.
 
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are unique unit types depends on pop culture type or the country, like if lithuania has tatar pops can they recruit horse archers, or its only for nomad tatar countries
also will there be something similar the condottieri from eu4?
 
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