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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.

62_cabinet.png

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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Suprised to see this frozen conflict is still depicted as active war meanwhile Ottomans and Byzantium starts at peace
 
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As many people have asked many times, Teutonic Order and Poland should not start at war


”Both sides agreed on an armistice, while King Władysław died in 1333.”

Hostilities had already ended in 1332. Treaty of Kaliscz in 1343 is better represented by an event than by a conventional ”peace treaty” that ends hostilities.

Edit:
Polish wikipedia has additional context for the long peace negotiations that could also be an event:

 
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Nice work!

Quick question about the army formation UI: are the bars on the regiment cards just visual indicators of their position, or are they clickable buttons?

If they're purely visual, I think it would look much cleaner without them, since the regiments' positions are already clear from their placement on the grid (left, center, right, reserves).

If they are buttons, I'd suggest switching to a drag-and-drop approach to change positions, and removing the buttons altogether.


CleanShot 2025-05-07 at 10.08.11.png
 
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There's a mistake in the name of the Polish general (Turekski - that's not Polish, it could be Turecki instead, although not really in Sieradz in 1337).

Do you have a list of all Polish names somewhere? I could check them for you.
 
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Will there be funny dudes dueling on the map too on release or?
Would be miffed to see my boys not go at it
 
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"Turekski"?

An adjective formed from "Turek" I presume?

Nice idea, but if so, then it'd be "Turecki". Yeah, Polish grammar isn't among the easiest out there.
 
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View attachment 1291492
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.
This total troops amount being displayed is toggled off for "harder"/realistic gameplay settings and multiplayer games, I assume?
 
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İnstead of seeing clashing between right and left in the battle screen, I would prefer clashes between up and down, as the one closer to us (down) naturally feels like our own forces and the enemy on the ahead fits to be upper ones
 
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Are units like "crusader knights" composed of pops of the same culture (like in vic2 for example) ?

only when it comes to levies.
 
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Nice work!

Quick question about the army formation UI: are the bars on the regiment cards just visual indicators of their position, or are they clickable buttons?

If they're purely visual, I think it would look much cleaner without them, since the regiments' positions are already clear from their placement on the grid (left, center, right, reserves).

If they are buttons, I'd suggest switching to a drag-and-drop approach to change positions, and removing the buttons altogether.


View attachment 1291756
Agreed, drag and drop would be much more intuitive IMO!
 
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Neat. But I thought you guys said today would be a TT about more changes made based on feedback.

was a miscommunication i guess.
 
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