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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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Ok, I was going to ask some more questions about how manpower works and where mercs draw their manpower from, but forget that.

Can you tell us the three locations for the Azores? Is it Terceira, Sao Miguel, and then the rest, or Eastern, Western, and Central? Or perhaps three major towns of the islands? If its named after towns, I'm going to assume that either Angra or Praia would be one of the names. In which case, please name it just Angra or Praia - the names of Angra do Heroismo and Praia Da Vitoria date to the 1830s.

Kind of a passion of mine, I married an Azorean girl.

...

Who still isn't too sure she's fond of me playing "That game where you keep marrying 16 year olds and then kill them when they stop having babies."
 
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Johan, the Kingdom of Sweden's levies screen states that levies will gather in all Region capitals. Can you explain what a Region capital is, and say whether they serve any purpose beyond being where levies gather?
 
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Johan, the Kingdom of Sweden's levies screen states that levies will gather in all Region capitals. Can you explain what a Region capital is, and say whether they serve any purpose beyond being where levies gather?
So now our smallest subdivision is referred to as a Location, while a group of locations is a Province, and a group of provinces is an Area, and a group of areas is called a Region, and a group of regions is called a Subcontinent, and a group of subcontinents is called a Continent.

Now the question remains what a group of quotes is called.
 
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Looks cool.

My computer won't be able to run this from earlier exeperience but I'll keep an eye on this project and indulge myself in EUIV if I need a fix, while I wait for the aeons to pass and for death to die. :p
 
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What is the benefit of moving these to a different file? Is it really better to have all demands for military units in one file, rather than having each unit's demand right there with the rest of the unit?
These seem to just be variables, most likely defined at the top of the file or above the first unit making use of them.
The big advantage is that they allow you to quickly switch a bunch of units that are supposed to align in upkeep. So you don't need to change the number in every single unit that uses it, instead you just change the single variable, makes it less likely to miss a unit too.
 
If mercenary regiments are tied to specific locations can an enemy hire a mercenary company based in your country and vice versa, and if so, will it just spawn behind your lines?

Do we/the ai have control over how many mercenary companies are based with our borders? I would hate to see my pop depleted to fight other people's wars.
 
If you can't raise troops unless you are at war. How do you deall with rebels early game when you don't have a standing army? I mean England didn't have a standing army after their civil war/revolutions of the 17th century! I hope the game does not force you to have a standing army if you don't need to.

If you face rebels then you can raise levies.
 
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Oh and while Johan is here I'm going to ask something related to two previous TTs, not expecting an answer but I was wondering:

A stone quarry building was shown that produces 1 stone with 1000 workers and a bunch of input goods. Kalmar was shown to produce 1 stone with 1000 workers, but no input goods were in the tooltip.
Does that mean that RGOs don't ever need input goods? It makes sense that a generic building wouldn't be as efficient than an RGO, but having thousands of workers mining stone without any sort of input good looks very strange considering all the machinery they had in the time period. I'd expect the difference to be in output instead.

Or would the potential of feedback loops be too much of an issue if even basic RGO production needed goods to function?
 
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1. How significant will be the effect of technological advantage? Is it possible, for example, with a detachment of 167 people, like Francisco Pizarro’s, to defeat an Inca army of about 7,000 people, as was the case near Cajamarca?
2. The trade in firearms was an important part of the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese exchanged slaves for firearms, which gave African tribes a military advantage in internecine struggles. This is how, for example, the Kingdom of Kongo arose. Japanese daimyo also purchased Portuguese arquebuses until Japan developed its own firearms production.
I consider these examples a compelling reason to divide the "weaponry" product into bladed weapons and firearms, because the production of bladed weapons was present in civilizations around the world, the production of gunpowder weapons, like cannons, required a higher organization of production, and trade in them was strategically important. Everyone loves gunpowder empires!
 
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So will losses suffered by regular regiments only cost manpower, or will these losses also be reflected in a reduction in the population of the regiments home province/location like with levies?

in the pop
 
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This syntax is ambiguous. Is this "You can't raise them when you are not (at war, or facing rebels)" or is it "You can't raise them when you are (not at war), or (facing rebels)"? That is, do rebels allow or disallow it?

Rebels allow
 
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If I rent out my army as mercenaries to a country fighting a war, but then that country's enemy bribes me with more money to fight for them instead, would I keep the money from both of them? And can we send requests to ask countries to rent our army rather than having to wait for them to come to us?
 
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If I lose control of the province the building is in, do I lose the replenishment of the force drawn from that province? Gameplay wise, if my whole nation is occupied am I still able to pump out units as if it werent?
If you still have a manpower pool then some..

BUT you can't reinforce anyway if not in friendly locations.
 
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My question is more related to the diplomacy of war.
If the levies of an AI country are wipe out, will this country will be greatly willing to make peace ? Considering they will take decade to recover.

yes
 
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