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Tinto Maps #4 - 31th of May 2024 - Poland, Ruthenia, Baltic

Hello everyone, and welcome to the fourth Tinto Maps! The feedback that we've received so far has been great, and there will be news soon regarding the map fixes that we've already done.

This week we are showing you Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, and the Baltic region. Let’s check it with no further ado:

Countries
Countries.jpg

A bigger picture of what’s going on in this region today, as we hadn’t shown it entirely before. To the west, the Kingdom of Poland is ruled by Casimir III of the House of Piast. It is not a completely unified kingdom, as there are several powerful vassals under him, most of them also Piasts themselves.

To the east, the Duchy of Lithuania is ruled by Gediminas, who has greatly expanded the influence of the country into Russian lands (side note: Gediminas entitled himself in his diplomatic correspondence ‘king’, but was considered by the Pope ‘king or duke’, and the title of Grand Duke wouldn’t be formally adopted until later [most likely replicating the Russian title ‘Grand Prince’]. That’s why Lithuania starts as a Duchy, although it will have an event that would make it possible to adopt the dynamic country name of ‘Grand Duchy’).

To the south, the principalities of Kyiv and Galicia-Volhynia have recently fallen under foreign influence, the first ruled by Theodor, brother of Gediminas of Lithuania; and the second by Yuri II, also from the Piast dynasty.

To the north, the Teutonic and Livonian Orders, which conquered the lands of Prussia and Livonia a century ago, are at war against Poland and Lithuania, after a long-established rivalry.

Also, a side note: we will talk about Moldavia in the Tinto Maps devoted to the Carpathian region, as it’s currently in a ‘placeholder’ spot.


Diplomacy.jpg

A new map mode, the Diplomatic one! The game starts with an ongoing war between Poland, Lithuania, and their respective vassals, on one side, and the Teutonic and Livonian Orders, and Bohemia and its vassals, on the other.

Locations
Locations.jpg

Here you have the locations of Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, and the Baltic region. Some issues that have already been reported by our Polish coworkers are the inconsistencies in the location naming in Polish (we’ll use proper Polish letters more thoroughly), and we’ve also started to review both the Polish and Baltic locations based on the early feedback you gave us. Oh, also, the Vistula and Curonian Lagoons missing is a bug, we’ll properly re-add them while doing the map review.

Provinces
Province.jpg

Any suggestions for provincial naming are pretty welcome, as in the last DD!

Terrain
Climate.jpg

Topography.jpg

Vegetation.jpg


Cultures
Cultures.jpg

The Baltic lands have an interesting mix of different cultures. ‘Western Baltic’ culture represents the people speaking a West Baltic language (Old Prussians, Yotvingians, Curonians, etc.), while ‘Prussian’ is the culture of the German settlers of that area; on that style, we have a ‘Baltic German’ culture in the lands of Livonia and Estonia that also got settled by German-speaking people. The divide between Polish, Ruthenian, and Aukstaitian might be too deep, so we will most likely add a bit more mixed situation in the borders between these cultures.

Religions
Religions.jpg

A region with a more interesting religious setup! Apart from the Catholic-Orthodox divide, you can also see the Romuva religion, which was a hot topic in 1337 (shall the Dukes of Lithuania convert to Catholicism, or stay Pagan?). Red stripes to the north are other Animist populations. Also, disregard the Sunni region to the southeast, as we have to review all the pops of the Pontic Steppes, as well.

Raw Goods
Raw Goods.jpg

From the distribution of the materials, maybe a couple of things might catch your eye. The first is that there’s an Amber good present on the shores of the Baltic Sea. The second is that the Tatra Mountains, in Slovakia, have a bunch of precious metals, which makes them a very interesting area to exploit and develop.

Population
Pops.jpg

Pops 2.png

The population of the region is divided into country and location views. Two notes: The total population of Estonia is not 711K people, that’s the total for its owner, Denmark. Second, we’ve read your feedback regarding the population map mode, and we’ll take a look at how to improve the visualization of the data, making it better for you.

EDIT: Markets
Markets.jpg

And that’s all for today! The region that we'll show next week is Italy! Cheers!
 
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Am i forgoting something, but is it the first time (exepet the "alternate start date in EU4") that the game start and there is war ongoing ?

i don't think there is any of those in EU4 and we can maybe extend this to others games like Vic 3, CK3 or even HOI4 witch is insane when we talk of a game on the 2nd world war.

And with this info, i think we can expect other "wars on the start date" in the rest of the world ? am i right ?
Hoi start italy and ethiopia at war
 
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I hope theres mechanics as Lithuania (and others inclined) to invite jewish populations expelled from elsewhere, as happened historically.

Freeing the western baltics and inviting more people to balance out the earlier invaders, strong and robust and ready to take on the black plague with good sanitation practices!
 
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Hmm, 1,9 milion for Poland seems too high. I think the population of Poland during that period was less than one million.

Pre- or post black death? (edit: even if Poland was somewhat less affected compared to other areas in Europe but i guess that wouldn't be necessarily reflected in game).
 
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Will it be possible in Project Caesar (not EU5) to see where "pops" of a culture live when you click on them like in Imperator:Rome or Victoria 3?
Also is it possible to change the color of "western baltic" to another one because when it gets mixed it is hard to see the difference on the map :)
 
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Very interesting! How will you handle the Norwegian and Swedish crowns? Both kingdoms are ruled by the same king at the start date with the ruling dynasty being in conflict with both Norwegian and Swedish nobles at the time. Will the game represent how nobles ruled large parts of these nations and the king held only certain regions of the countries as crownlands? Will there be mechanics to facilitate how events historically played out in the region? And here again, when it comes to the plague will the controll the crown has in the country have an effect on how effectively you can enforce stopping trade and commerce to hinder the plague from spreading?
 
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A good decision to present central Ukraine and Belarus as one culture, given that at that time the linguistic drift from the Russian language had already begun, but the division between them had not yet begun.
 
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Maybe you could consider Wieliczka Salt Mine and Salina Turda in the resource map? Neither seem represented but if I'm not wrong they should be the major suppliers of salt in the area.
 
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A bold request: would it be in the realm of possibilty to get cropped screenshots of the location map file with each TM? (The .png or .bmp with the uncompressed colors)

I'm making a digital twin in GIS, and tracing all the provinces takes a lot of time each week, where raster polygonisation would go really fast ^^
 
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Regarding the population map mode by country:

As far as I can tell you‘ve chosen to put in the population count into every bit of Land that is owned by said country.

My suggestion would to fix just one number to the capital location/province/region to get rid of some of the unnecessary numbers hovering all around the place.

A second thing might be to use a color grade in this map mode just like in other games (I‘m thinking of Vic 3 here). And maybe add a switch to the map mode that you can have it in a single flat color as it is now.

Maybe for better visibility you could also use a single color with a gradient per country to show which provinces those pops are coming from.
 
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