• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Tinto Talks #17 - 19th of June 2024

Welcome everyone to the 17th Tinto Talks, in this Happy Wednesday, we will give you further information about the most secret game you could ever think of, the one with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will delve into the depths and mechanics of how the population system of the game actually works.

As a recap, we have 6 different social classes, with Nobles, Clergy & Burghers viewed as upper class, while Peasants, Tribesmen & Slaves make up the other three. Every location has a population, and each combination of social class, culture and religion creates a unique “pop” in the game. That Pop may contain 1 person, or 250 Million, but it is still referred to as a “pop”.


pop_browser.png

Design copied from an old game I made a decade or two ago… UI is a bit placeholdery, but i like the browsing capabilities..


Population Capacity
Each location has a population capacity which depends on quite a lot of factors. The core of it is vegetation, topography and climate, while the amount of buildings and development increases it as well. If your population is higher than its current capacity, then there is a very large impact on its migration attraction and population growth.

While there are no restrictions on how many peasants, slaves or tribesmen there can be in a single location, the amount of upper class pops there can be is limited, and depends on what infrastructure there exists for that type of pop. Of course, if their estates have money, they tend to want to construct buildings that increase how many they are to further increase their power in the country.

There are reasons why you want upper class pops, and not just always creating an egalitarian “all are peasants” society, and that is when the capital economy developing during this era depends heavily on burghers, so you want to have a fair amount of those. You also want clergy of your national religion as they will help with stability, and having nobles of proper culture will help with your diplomacy and warfare.


burgher_capacity.png

Having levies raised from a specific class, reduces the maximum population there can be for that certain class.


Promotion & Demotion
If there can be more pops of a certain social class, pops will promote to become that class over time. While there is a base value, promoting to some classes like nobles will just be a fraction of that each month. If you wish to speed this up in your country, you can use a cabinet member to increase it. There are many factors that impact how quickly pops can be promoted, some are affecting your entire country, some others are more local, like during Devastation or a Lack of Control. Demotion happens when you have pops over your capacity, and will happen much, much quicker than promotion.

promotion.png

16 peasants will be promoted every month to become what is needed in Kalmar...


Population Growth
Only peasants and tribesmen grow organically on their own, but all types of pops can die off from negative growth.

Overpopulation, Lack of food, War exhaustion and Devastation have a significant negative impact on population growth, while having access to free land & lots of food increases the growth.

Not to forget, the population can die directly from diseases and warfare as well.

pop_growth.png

Peaceful and nice, the population should grow nicely here…


Assimilation
Assimilation is a very slow process, and pops will assimilate to the primary culture in core locations if they belong to a culture that your country does not appreciate. Societal Values and Lack of Control have a significant impact on this, but there are buildings and other things that can impact it. In most majorly populated areas the natural growth of pops will outpace the assimilation. However, there is a cabinet action where you can increase assimilation in a specific province.

monthly_assimilation.png

Sadly this is a slow process in this location, 3 pops will assimilate next month..

Conversion
Converting pops works similarly to assimilation, but there are two major differences. First of all, there are mechanics and systems that sometimes change the religion of pops from what your country may desire. Secondly, there is normally no conversion, but you have to actively enforce religious conversion in a province by using a cabinet. The amount of the population that convert each month depends on what type of buildings you may have, your societal values, laws you can enact, or the privileges given to the clergy. If your clergy is very powerful as well, conversion is quicker.

monthly_conversion.png

103,26% of 0 base conversion is still going to be 0 pops.

Migration
There are several ways for pops to migrate, multiple ones regarding the colonization aspect of the game will be talked about in a later Tinto Talks. There is also content that does migration, where events, disasters or other scripted content will set up specific migration from one place to another.

However, there is also a natural migration mechanic, where the population will move between locations. Pops will move away from locations that have a negative migration attraction, and will go to one with higher migration attraction in the same market. Upper class pops are usually allowed to migrate, while not many countries allow their peasants to move freely.

As for other things, you can use your cabinet to control this, where you can have one member of the cabinet leading an effort to expel people from one province, severely reducing their migration attraction, while another one could attract people to another province. You can also construct buildings in lowly populated locations to attract pops to move there.

migration_attraction.png

The price of stone in Kalmar is not inviting, but it's calm and plenty of land is available..


Literacy
Each pop keeps track of its own literacy as well, and there are buildings, advances, laws and other things that impact how quickly it can grow and how high it can be. The average literacy of a country has an impact on the research speed of that country, and the literacy of a pop has some impact on its satisfaction. However, there is also an immediate impact on the location of the average literacy of all of the same social class. Amongst other things, the average literacy of the nobles in a location has an impact on how quickly control can increase there, and the average literacy of slaves in a location increases the unrest of the location.

literacy.png

Literate Burghers will definitely make you richer over the long term..


Population Needs
Each pop has its own needs for goods, and if they can’t get all of those goods, their satisfaction will be lower. The goods that a pop requires depend on their social class, their culture, their religion and where they live. They also may start caring about goods when they know about them, as the demand for tobacco will only appear in Europe when the pops actually know about it. Obviously people in colder climates want more lumber or coal, while a Jain pop is not wanting any fur at all.

pop_needs.png

I am not entirely sure why these burghers want mercury…

Satisfaction
The population needs impact their satisfaction in two ways. If they can't get the goods that they want, it's a penalty to their satisfaction. However, the prices of the goods also affect their satisfaction, as if the prices are high, then satisfaction drops, but if you can get the goods they require cheaper in the market they live in, their satisfaction will increase, but their literacy impacts how much they understand the price impact though.

Satisfaction also depends heavily on the status of their culture in the country, the religion they belong to, and how satisfied their estate currently is. There are other ways to make pops more satisfied like certain buildings, or the good old method of stationing armies.

Pops with low satisfaction will join and start supporting a rebel faction.


satisfaction.png

Of course, these poor pops lack one of the most important things in life.

Even though pops may not be upset enough to rebel, their satisfaction has other impacts, as the average satisfaction of all pops in a location has an impact on prosperity and control.


average_satisfaction.png

Here even the paradox maths check out!


Stick around, as next week we’ll be talking a bit about laws!
 

Attachments

  • monthly_conversion.png
    monthly_conversion.png
    118,2 KB · Views: 0
  • 190Love
  • 175Like
  • 8
  • 4
  • 1
Reactions:
Can massive population exchanges naturally occur? For example, in the case of long wars, severe diseases and others cataclysms decimating entire pops in some regions, then other peoples from elsewhere migrating and settling in this newly emptied land, like the Slavs migrating to the Balkans in the 6th century, who replaced the ancient Greeks and Romanized Illyrians/Thracians.
 
  • 4
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Question, and i realize this might be beyond the scope of vanilla Project Caesar, but would it be possible to split livestock into Cattle, Pork and Poultry.

I just think that different pops would have different meat desires.

For example Muslim pops wouldn’t want pork, so if all other meats become too expensive they might be really unhappy.

Idk, just a thought.

Second, how exactly are you going to distinguish between forced/violent conversion/assimilation and peaceful integration?
 
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
For nobles max-cap is "government says we want 10 nobles here"
Okay, I mean, I think we can understand some level of abstraction. It makes sense for "landed aristocracy", like you need a duke or a baron to administer a certain region. However, I feel like you have a whole population of "petty nobility" that isn't well represented.

Having "petty nobility" as a naturally growing population would also allow them to be a recruitable pop for specific military units, In Poland, IIRC, in the 17th century, 5-10% of the population were nobles, and most would be "petty nobility". You could have a system where "winged hussars" could only be recruited from petty noble pops. That lends itself to some interesting interactions (limiting the manpower for a very powerful mid game unit, but also having a trade-off with a larger noble population leading to greater concentration of political power among the nobles, mimicking Poland's historical development).

As I see it, "clergy/nobles/burgers" are essentially like occupations instead of pops. It would be cool to see:

clergy and nobles promote from and demote to petty nobility

burgers promote from and demote to "commoners" (urban lower classes)

peasants/farmers have the opportunity to promote to commoners (and potentially commoners back to peasants/farmers)

serfs and slaves being unable to promote because of laws

Maybe this could be a focus of a DLC, but I think the pop classes could be expanded on.
 
  • 6
  • 3Like
  • 1Love
Reactions:
While this happened historically, I'm a bit ambivalent about portraying "culture x is better at Y than Z"
I hope you reconsider this!

You are already going to portray different populations at different technological levels. Instead of having a silly mechanic like "studying technology". you could invite craftsmen from other countries. This is interesting mechanically because you will have to deal with non-primary culture pops, if you're very innovative and open-minded you can handle this better and therefore develop faster (a more organic way of "innovative" increasing your technology research rate potentially").

Would be interesting, considering things like Ostsiedlung and colonialism!
 
  • 3Like
Reactions:
While this happened historically, I'm a bit ambivalent about portraying "culture x is better at Y than Z"
Could it be done for certain tech "leaders" maybe? For example, if Hungary first researched and built deep shaft mines, they are considered leaders or pioneers in mining, and Hungarians, if invited or migrate to your country, give you certain bonuses?
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Very good.
Question, is there a difference in the land where farming is done? Simple land that can produce and chernozem?
Or more fertile lands near rivers, some in China and near the Nile? I suppose, that's not really something that can be attributed here, but since it's shown here that surplus food stimulates population growth, then....?
 
Is the literacy value best thought of as 1) what percentage of a pop are literate, 2) how competent (and engaged) a pop is on average with reading and writing, or 3) something else?
i.e. could a literacy of 13% for the burghers mean that they can generally sign their names and recognize common words, but most of them can't be bothered with more than that?
 
How is that ahistorical? Where do you think nobles came from? At least in the German speaking areas, there were lots of serfs that were raised up to the rank of noble, while still being unfree, i.e. the ministeriales.
Nobles generally came from clans and tribal leaders, warriors of some founding monarch, (rarely) ennobled people (usually in military service).

Ministeriales, as you yourself pointed out, are UNFREE. They are not nobles in the 'strict' sense. They aren't landed nobility, they didn't enjoy the political rights of nobles, etc.

For the most part, it was simply impossible for even extremely wealthy non-nobles to advance into the nobility. Though this does depend a lot on what country you are looking at. The point is, in most countries, ennoblement was exceedingly rare (like, really, really, really rare), particularly in well established monarchies.
 
  • 2Like
  • 2
Reactions:
How do food and food-related raw materials interact?
Is food entirely just for population growth/starvation? And raw materials like wheat are consumed for satisfaction? Why can't pops just consume more generic food for satisfaction instead of needing specific goods like wheat or livestock?
Because nobles requires variety to be satisfied.
 
Is pop movement 100% (excluding other mechanics) only within a market, or is movement to a directly neighbouring location that happens to be in another market allowed? If not, why are they trapped in their market? :eek:
 
  • 1
Reactions:
the assimilation base value seems way too low honestly.
it currently is 120 pops a year (12k in 100 years) in one location and only if you have a cabinet member which is already so restrictive.
just think about this to convert france into another culture you would have to spend 100'000 years (yes one hundred thousand years, don't even hope of doing a one culture run) and that is assuming the population doesn't grow and that you keep a cabinet member doing only that.

like if the problem is balance make it cost a lot of money but hell even 1000 a month as base instead of 10 might be low, and it's not like it is an ahistorical number, lot of places formed/converted to new cultures in 100 of years not 100k of years, examples being france, iberia, new world countries, prussia, russia, turkey just to name a few.
 
Wouls it be possible to have a system, kind of like vicky II, where peasants can only become burgers and clergy and only burgers can become nobles ? Maybe this would make an interesting setup where noble pops have a hard time rebuilding themselves when they are depleated and it depends on burger pops (maybe this would only fit european standards though)
 
  • 1
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Why does the raw material price in the location affect migration attraction?
Wouldn't raw material production depend on how much capacity you have for peasants working in the mines/quarries/fields?

Does that mean that even if the capacity for peasants producing a raw material in a location is maxed out, a high price would still attract more migrants to come, even though they can't actually work on producing that raw material?
Probably because the location/province would be rich from high prices of the raw goods production.