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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/


62_teutons.png

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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Please, don't use this icon for religions.

View attachment 1291777

I still hope this is just a placeholder from I:R.
I personally have no problem with this icon tbh, but a simple replacement of the icon with a dominant faith would be a good idea for many here seemingly, and I shall give it my support as well.
 
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On another note, will there be Tinto Flavor on Friday or is this week preoccupied with the super secret announcement of the super secret game tomorrow? If there is one, what country will it be?
 
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View attachment 1291754

Excellent, we get flanks! :)

But I have to ask, how will artillery divisions fit into this? Do we still get backrows? Or must I fire my cannon's shot right in the enemy's face, like some kind of un-gentlemanly person who didn't ask first?

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.
 
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The only piece of feedback I can give here is that I can't believe you're still using the Neopagan "Romuva" rather than the more accurate "Baltic Pagan" label.
Neither is an endonym - unfortunately - but Romuva is explicitly the name of the Neopagan movement and should not be used to refer to the pre-19th century Baltic beliefs.
I see the reasoning, but between the 2 endonyms I'd prefer the one that at least sounds more natural and less bland.
 
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I must be missing something- the numbers from sections and the "total" (I presume) number of soldiers in army don't add up. For example, in the last screenshot, it's 3,769 total vs 3,683 from sections. Why's that?
 
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calling everything "x pagan" is rather bland though.
I'm not convinced this game cannot improve on religious depiction because of flavour concerns. I'm sure the portrayal of Zoroastrianism by CK2 could have been considered less flavourful without the simplistic and anachronistic way it was done, but through that portrayal the game worsened several widely-held misunderstandings about that faith. Now this game is looking to do something similar - if not quite as egregious - by continuing EU4's tradition of conflating Baltic Pagan beliefs from the 1800s with those from the 1300s. Bland is better than actively wrong, but there are more options than just "Romuva" or "Baltic Pagan".

You can easily use a term which is flavourful and which isn't tied to later movements. I'd recommend looking at names for various gods, such as Saule, the principle solar deity and using it to inform the in-game name for this faith (Sauleist might be an example), Perkūnas was another popular god and his name might be used instead. You could even use something like a Baltic word for the gods themselves, Dievs or dievas, though the Indo-Aryan origin of the words to others would not differentiate it as much as others. Those are just the ideas that immediately came to mind, but a little more research would certainly return even more, if none of those seem suitable.

Flavour does not mean you have to use the name of a movement half a millennia removed from the one you're portraying.
 
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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/


View attachment 1291487
Our tax base is low, even if we have a decently sized population.


But how is that population then?

View attachment 1291488
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.

View attachment 1291490
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.

View attachment 1291491
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.

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.


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.


View attachment 1291494
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.

View attachment 1291496
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…

View attachment 1291497
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..

View attachment 1291498
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.

View attachment 1291500
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.

View attachment 1291502
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.

View attachment 1291506
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!
In the battle screens, the four main rectangles (showing troop counts) aren't in line with each other, nor are the rectangles on the left misaligned in the same way as those on the right. Is that just WIP or do they shift on the screen based on some criterea?
 
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Next week, Pavia is back and will be talking about some more religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism.
What about Buddhism? Is it also a Dharmic religion?
 
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The pruthenian culture should be renamed to old prussian.

The name pruthenian is a gradual change from the original prūši (the exact writing and pronunciation can differ, but the idea is the same), which is also the origins for the name prussian. Therefore you have 2 names for the same thing, which is inconvenient and confusing.
Is it not a tad odd to have an at that point still living culture called “old” and thinking about possibilities what if “old Prussian” had a rebellion and a few centuries later had out populated the Prussians that would make an even weirder situation, while I do think you complaints on the name Pruthenian are reasonable I don’t think old Prussian is a good alternative, maybe if it was already dead and only for like historical characters like old Saxon in CK3 but for a culture still living it just feels weird, so ultimately to me Pruthenian feels like the least of two evils
 
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Can you give the option to use pie charts instead of donut charts? The lesser percentages are easier to see that way. The icons of each category could fit in the top left corner if they are made a bit smaller.
 
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