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Tinto Talks #12 - 15th of May

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, where we delve into the details of the most top-secret project ever made.

This week we talk about something that is rather new to our GSG, and that is the concept of international organizations. Now this may sound like an anachronistic term, and when you read further in this Tinto Talks, you’ll go “but you already have this in previous games”. Yes, we did have some hard-coded systems in previous games, like the Holy Roman Empire, but what we have here in Project Caesar is a completely dynamic system, 100% scriptable and extendable for modders, which allows for many of these, and with far more flavor.

What is an international organization? Well, at its heart is a group of countries that share some common things, and then quite a few attributes that can be defined for them. The instruction file right now is 140 lines long, and it will keep growing.

Some examples of things that an IO can have are the following.
  • If it has a leader or not, and if the leader is a character or a country.
  • If it's unique or there can be multiples of it.
  • If locations can be owned by it or not.
  • Member benefits or penalties.
  • Laws and Policies it can have.
  • Special statuses inside the organization
  • How members will behave during wars
  • And dozens more unique attributes.
Membership in some of these can take a diplomatic relations slot.

As we continue our development of this game, we keep adding more of these, adding more unique flavor to the game.

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We have “control-groups” like every PDS game has had since EU1, and Stellaris added icons for quick selects… The one for Project Caesar can be pretty much anything in the game, and if you start as a member of an organization, you get a control group for it from the start.

Common Organizations
Let's take a look at some of the generic ones, some of these have been hard-coded systems in previous GSGs, and these are not unique organizations in a campaign, but can exist in multiple instances.
Coalitions
These can be created, with a country as a target, when the target has an aggressive expansion beyond a certain threshold.
Unions
This is a sort of defensive alliance between countries that share the same ruler. They may or may not have different levels of integration.

There are a few others like this, including defensive leagues and tribal federations.


Religious Organizations

Catholic Church
Every country in the world that is part of the Catholic faith is a part of this organization. They have issues that the cardinals vote on, and being a member has implications and restrictions. Of course, this has the added benefit of having Catholic pops in Catholic countries paying a tithe to the Church, which eventually finds its way into the Papacy.

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One reason to go Lutheran?

Crusades & Jihads
These are temporary international organizations that will be created when a Crusade or Jihad is called. They have a target set and act like an alliance against that country.

Autocephalous Patriarchates
Meaning self-headed, an Autocephalous Patriarchate is a metropolitan bishop in the Eastern Christian confessions which acts independently and does not depend on or answer to any other hierarchically superior church authority. The different patriarchates then have their own synods of bishops to decide upon anything affecting their own religious jurisdiction.


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WiP grahics etc.

There are many of these, for Orthodox, Miaphysite, and other Eastern Christian confessions.

There are many more, some other religions have a central organization, and others have fragmented ones.


Specific Organization
There are also a fair amount of completely unique and flavorful organizations.

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What's this then?

Tatar Yoke
The Tatar Yoke consists of various principalities of Eastern Europe that are subject to Tatar Rule following their invasion in the 13th century. The most prominent of rulers is awarded the title of Grand Prince, and is tasked with collecting tribute from the other tributaries on behalf of the Golden Horde Khan.

Middle Kingdom
The Middle Kingdom is the meaning of China and has been considered the cultural center of East Asia since Antiquity.

This organization is led by the Huángdì, the Emperor of China, who has a number of Fēng Chén, akin to vassals or tributaries, that can be promoted to Celestial Governors, equivalent to the Secretariats that the Yuán dynasty used in the administrative organization of their empire. Its members have a unique societal value, Sinicized vs Unsinicized, and there’s a Tribute system that determines how much Celestial Authority the Huángdì gets, which is used to enforce Laws and Decrees.

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The Tribute system is a system where the Huángdì sends gold to the other nations in the Middle Kingdom, depending on their size.

Holy Roman Empire
The glory of the ancient Roman Empire lives in the memory of all in Europe, Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor, but it was not until the coronation of Otto the Great that the current Holy Roman Empire was born, once again recovering the ambitions of a revived and unified European Empire.

This organization, of course led by an Emperor, has different statuses for countries like secular and religious electors, secular princes, free cities, and imperial prelates. It has laws that impact the organization and its members, the most important at the early game being the Golden Bull, which is a must to get approved in order to further develop the institutions of the Empire.

There are others in the game at the moment, like the Shogunate, the High Kingship of Ireland, and many more, as the system is very flexible to use.

Next week we will talk about what Religions we have in the game.
 
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As the Golden Horde could you expand the Tatar yoke to perhaps include most of Eastern Europe? And as another nation could you create an equivalent organisation to organise tributaries?
 
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Sad to read that Hansa will not be an OI. To me it seems as the perfect candidate to be one, instead of a playable country.
 
Johan said:
However, I think it should work the following way..

An alliance between France and Ulm should cost MORE for Ulm than France.
Click to expand...
Actually, that brings up an interesting point, one of dynamism in your diplomatic relations if a flexible capacity is adopted according to the status of the countries. If you're a small country allying with bigger countries, it may cost more capacity to maintain those relations, but if you grow larger, the size difference lessens, which makes those relationships cost less. Even if you didn't have a hard-increase to the total capacity (say, it stays at 100 total and you don't have any modifiers that increase that number), you'd still eventually be able to invest more in relations as the capacity costs of your current spending equalizes out due to your own expansion. Conversely, if you're allied with a country that starts snowballing ahead of you, it may become more difficult to keep your relationship with that country as the capacity cost on your end to maintain that alliance slowly rises.

This would be a super interesting thing to have to adapt around and keep a player invested, just like the rise and fall of available trade goods, as you may either pull ahead or fall behind. It could easily create a diplomatic snowball effect, but the ideal is that it would move players to have to manage their diplomatic relationships and adjust their plans and prioritize the relations that they want to keep until they can gain access presumably to tech bonuses as the age goes on that increase the hard cap. This would make playing tall a viable strat while not reducing the complexity, being that whatever modifier (whether it's strictly size of a country compared to yours or something else) would affect the asymmetrical diplo cost between two countries would force you to constantly juggle your relations as the nations you're allied with slowly expand tall and you may not be able to keep the same relationships the entire game without enduring penalties and be forced to prioritize which ones are the most valuable to you.

This would also have an effect on the AI players as well, because as it starts costing less for you, the equilibrium forces it to start costing more for them, and so you may eventually find yourself in a position where you get so big that you start losing allies because they can't afford the cost to maintain diplomatic relations with you - 'getting too big for your own britches' - and so you may suddenly find yourself in a precarious paper tiger spot where you become the big dog who ends up fighting a war alone against an alliance of smaller nations of similar size because you snowballed ahead of your prior alliances and they broke those alliances as a result of the capacity cost being too high. And on a similar wavelength, it would cause the game to play out somewhat in tiers, where tags on a similar wavespace tend to interact moreso with each other than tags wildly smaller than themselves, which could lead to a "all the big dogs are ganging up on the little guys" effect, or lead to a "all the little guys gang up to take on the big dogs" effect - both of which are interesting in their own rights for how it could create a dynamic ebb and flow response.

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TL;DR theorycrafting on the potential dynamism of asymmetrical diplomatic capacity if it means that the cost of those relationships constantly changes as your power level vs. another country changes, either giving you more room to breathe or forcing you to juggle relationships and prioritize. Both can create interesting situations for players to manage and the potential scenarios that could play out as a result of a system like this are very cool to think about.
 
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This new system looks incredible, and that HRE map is gorgeous.

I'm excited to see more about the religion system next week, especially since it seems that this "international organizations" system will integrate a lot with religions, seeing as the Catholic Church and Orthodox Patriarchates at least are modeled in this way.

I do hope you avoid the pitfall of EU4 at release, though, where Catholicism is a debuff the player wants to get rid of by becoming Protestant, I hope there is some mechanic/ability that makes all that tithing money worth it. It seems that the design for "Project Caesar" is much more a history simulator than a min-max map painter, and I'm really looking forward to that change of pace, so I hope the religion, international organization, and mission tree systems don't reward min-maxing and metagaming as much as they do in EU4.
 
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Johan said:
A lot of AI is still hardcoded for performance reasons,.
Click to expand...
Can someone explain to me what that means? Does it have anything to do with the "intelligence" of AI?
The AI in EU4 is very, very dumb. I haven't played EU4 in years without using the Xorme-AI mod which makes things difficult.
It is very necessary that it be a challenge, that the AI has no mercy, that it exterminates you if you do things wrong, that it sieges well, that it moves well.
The EU4 AI resembles the AI of Age Of Empires 2 from 24 years ago... but in that game the modders created the "barbarian" AI before the Definitive Edition came out and it incorporated it, and if you play in very difficult you are exterminated (but not because the game cheats, but because of doing things right).
I pray to God that the AI is as intelligent as the most expert of the players (since the most time we spend in these games is in SP not in MP)
 
Is it possible to reform an organisation from one type to another? Like reforming Yuan's Tribute system to something like the HRE.

It would be a cool playthrough goal if it was possible.
 
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Marcelo88 said:
Can someone explain to me what that means? Does it have anything to do with the "intelligence" of AI?
The AI in EU4 is very, very dumb. I haven't played EU4 in years without using the Xorme-AI mod which makes things difficult.
It is very necessary that it be a challenge, that the AI has no mercy, that it exterminates you if you do things wrong, that it sieges well, that it moves well.
The EU4 AI resembles the AI of Age Of Empires 2 from 24 years ago... but in that game the modders created the "barbarian" AI before the Definitive Edition came out and it incorporated it, and if you play in very difficult you are exterminated (but not because the game cheats, but because of doing things right).
I pray to God that the AI is as intelligent as the most expert of the players (since the most time we spend in these games is in SP not in MP)
Click to expand...
It means that the game isn't using its scripting engine to make decisions for all AI countries, but instead hardcodes a lot of their behavior (i.e. leaves it unmoddable/minimally modable) because parsing and acting on generalized script behavior is a lot slower than straight code.
 
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zweihander said:
Well, I'm a bit worry that international organizations (which is described as "completely dynamic system" in the DD) in Tinto Talk will become a "modular" thing and lack of real uniqueness, just like religion in CK3. I hope my worry is wrong.
Click to expand...
I have the same concerns of this post. Not exactly sure why, but having a dynamic system that encompasses multiple unique characteristics, isn't very fun, at least to me, imho. It takes away the "uniqueness" of many traits / cultures. It's kinda weird, I can't explain it too well myself.
 
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Marcelo88 said:
Can someone explain to me what that means? Does it have anything to do with the "intelligence" of AI?
Click to expand...
While non-human players are called AI, they are not 'really' intelligent, they are just programmed to do certain things, whether it's code in the game or scripted AI mods.
A lot of AI behavior in these games works by assessing the best choices to make, e.g. what is the best way to spend my money, which is the best building to build, where do I siege first, what do I colonize first, who do I ally with, etc.
A lot of this can be exposed in script so modders can fine tune the AI's preferences (and make it more aggressive for example), but when it comes to things like moving your armies around, I'd imagine the code can get very complicated and it wouldn't make sense to make that scriptable.

Johan's response means it's likely that most things that you would interpret as the AI being more or less intelligent (like its tactical ability in warfare) will be hardcoded.
 
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Ispil said:
It means that the game isn't using its scripting engine to make decisions for all AI countries, but instead hardcodes a lot of their behavior (i.e. leaves it unmoddable/minimally modable) because parsing and acting on generalized script behavior is a lot slower than straight code.
Click to expand...
So... the AI will be bad/ won't be the best?
 
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Marcelo88 said:
So... the AI will be bad/ won't be the best?
Click to expand...
That entirely depends on how much time is spent on fine-tuning AI behavior.
AI mods in Victoria 3 that make the AI actually competent at building up their economy, for example, do nothing that wouldn't be possible for the devs to include in the game, but they usually have one or multiple people that spend a lot of time on getting very specific things right.
 
Oh my god!! This is huge! A dynamic HRE!

HRE n EU4 always stuck to me as a regional anomaly. It's good that other parts of the world get some kind of similar mechanic to model the fluidity of authority and state power.
 
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