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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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IIRC that money 'vanishes', but maybe it would be interesting if some money goes to the pops of the origin region...
It would be nice to have something like this, since otherwise the player will always be incentivized to only recruit from pops outside their own nation so they don’t lose pops in battle. If money went back to said pops, the player would have more reason to consider recruiting from pops in their own nation.
 
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Two questions:

First, can we mod in new unit abilities?

Second, what is the historical basis for countries renting out their armies? There certainly examples of countries joining wars for pay (Sweden did this several times for example), but I can't think of any where a ruler allowed another country to use their armies for pay.
 
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If we hire our army out as mercenaries, is it the AI that takes control or are we waging war for the AI ?

AI controls
 
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nothing :p so make sure they are happy enough
I think this is a low priority oversight. Mercenaries recruited from my area should use the money given to them to develop their areas. My pops go out to just fight and die for fun? Of course they are going to go back home with their fortunes. Maybe something like 30% of what they get paid is reinvested in their areas.
 
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Does the player really have no agency over the units they are renting out?

It would be a good mechanic to allow the player to control the mercenaries they are selling, most importantly to have something to do (gameplay), or to prevent them from being squandered, or make some nice extra money from looting the enemy.

I think playing a mercenary country would be a lot more interesting if you actually got to control your units, rather than AFK via "Set it and Forget it".

Not having control over your own mercenaries seems quite boring, to be honest.



Edit:
And for those disagreeing, please do explain how you find no control over your mercenaries as more enjoyable, than being able to play them :)


Speaking only for myself naturally, what you suggest would be theoretically fun (maybe) but practically bad. If used as intended it might be fun but it would put incentive on using them just in the same way as condotteri is mostly used in eu4, aka get money and just have them afk. You get the money and you are not helping the AI since its your competitor in the long run. It would also work the other way around which is even worse, the AI would now control units you pay for and all too often the AI just walks off and gets itself killed or some other stupid thing. Not a single time have I felt like accepting condotteri from AI in eu4 has benefitted me in the way it should have.

Those are my concerns about it atleast.
 
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In the options to handle the prisoners of war there is, ransom, kill or recruit. Which one will be used when the country from where the prisoners are from get annexed, either by the owner of the army having the prisoner or a third party?

Will one of them automatically trigger? Ransom for example? Are they going back home?
 
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Hello, I'll be your host today as Johan is lost in the north busy in Stockholm with meetings.
POWs are gonna be a mechanic here, so it's only fair to warn you that people are going to start expecting them in other games as well.

Also, sacrifice. The fourth option is sacrifice. We're drifting towards the "Stellaris" side of the "Paradox Atrocity Potential" scale.
 
Why would 10 000 unorganized and lowskilled levies(or lowtech natives) automatically beat a 1000 men strong standing professional and trained army?
I don't think it is an automatic loss but about capturing the army for imprisonment. I'm pretty sure it is saying if an army loses to an army 10 times Its size then all of them would be imprisoned but if they win or deal enough casualties that it is no longer 10 to 1 then they won't be imprisoned.
 
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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.
Probably mentioned already in the eleven pages extant, but I can't fail to notice the option of just letting them go? (Or hiring some of them and having the rest go home instead of eating my food.)

My impression from some diaries of people in the Thirty Years War soldiers who lost at sieges or were left over after battles were largely offered "take up soldier/mercenary duties or go home".

And the selling point of "become a mercenary" was "you'll get paid right away" while the "go home" was "at your own expense" (and unless it had been a siege that ended with an accord of surrender, it would also be without most belongings like a weapon and suchlike). So a lot of people would indeed (in their mercenary ways) figure that fighting for money was better than a long walk home and trying to find someone to be willing to arm and pay you for a second run.
 
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Hello, first time commenter here! I've been following Tinto Talks since they started discussing PC and I'm so excited at how it's going so far! One thing I've been really interested in is how the army selection UI will look (will it look more like the modern CK3, IR selection UI, or will it have elements of EU4? I've found that the more modern army selection UI doesn't give clear visual cues that multiple armies are selected, whereas EU4, and to some extent HOI4, both gave really clear visual cues when multiple separate armies are selected). I was wondering if the team might be able to give some insight? I had some quite specific feedback but wasn't sure if this would be the right Tinto talk/forum for that!
 
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This comment is related to ALL of the dev diaries. With the huge amount of changes with this game, will there be a beta to help out with the further development until release? I personally think that if you own EU2,3, and 4 you should get automatic access. :) Please don't delay release because of this comment.
 
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1、Can prisoners be turned into slaves?

2、Can states plunder the population of other countries?
Many nomadic regimes often do this to increase their population. And the early Qing Dynasty(Later Jin)also strengthened its own strength through this method and plundering.

3、Can prisoners of war become Regulars besides Mercenaries?
Many regimes have incorporated prisoners of war into their Regulars, such as the majority of the army in the Shun Dynasty being the former Ming army.
 
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2、Can states plunder the population of other countries?
Many nomadic regimes often do this to increase their population. And the early Qing Dynasty(Later Jin)also strengthened its own strength through this method and plundering.
I think this is already covered in the Slavery Tinto Talk. Two of the ways of taking slaves is conquering and sacking cities during war and building slave markets in your own locations (only affects non-primary and religion pops).
 
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It's specifically winning the fight with 10 to 1 odds, not just merely having the fight.

I take the quote below to mean that it works like in EU4, overrun aka stackwipe happens when there's 10 to 1. So that ratio automatically leads to the larger side winning, and after that victory, prisoners are taken.

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.
 
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