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Tinto Talks #20 - 10th of July 2024

Welcome to another Happy Wednesday, for the 20th Tinto Talks, where we give out a lot of secret information about our absolutely 100% super-secret game Project Caesar.

First of all, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your great feedback, which is helping us shape this into an even better game.

Today we talk about what will replace the Technology Levels and National Ideas of EU4. While some aspects of the Idea system are covered by the Societal Values and/or the Laws of a country, this new system will cover the rest.

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Maybe these advances are good for us?


What were different effects from the Technology Levels and Ideas are now something we call “Advances”. Advances can unlock new diplomacy, new units, new abilities for units, new character actions, new subject interactions, new estate privileges, new laws, new policies in laws, new inheritance systems, new casus belli, new government reforms, new cabinet actions, new buildings, additional levels for buildings and new production methods. An Advance can also unlock mechanics like investing in stability, building roads, collecting taxes and much more. Last but not least, advances can also give you important stats like more literacy for your nobles, or better military tactics.

At the start of each age, each country will get a new Advances Tree, which will be unique to that country. A tree usually contains about 100 advances, some which are common, and some that are specific to who you are playing. Every tree, except the Age of Tradition, has 4 different starting points, a common one, and one from each institution. The ones from an institution tend to unlock relevant advances to that institution.


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Eventually all advances will have fitting and often unique icons, but for now, the sickle is good!

About 70% of all advances in a tree tend to be common for every country, but the rest depends entirely on which country you are playing. Over one third of the advances in a tree in Age of Renaissance and Age of Discovery does not require any institutions to research.

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This is part of the tree unlocked by the Meritocracy Institution..

We also took the national ideas and adapted to advances. Some of them made no sense and were lost, but in general the starting bonuses ended up as two Age of Traditions advances you start with already researched, and the rest is spread over the rest of the ages, with what was the finishing bonus as an advance in Age of Revolutions. In many cases they have been moved to the appropriate time as well, so currently many unique and powerful Swedish advances are in the Age of Absolutism. We have also heavily revised those whose names survived, and when we work in making unique content for a country, we aim to add more advances as well.

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Poland currently has 16 unique advances...

We also have a lot of unique advances for what culture you are playing, or what religion you are playing, if you are a country that can own locations or not, and for what type of government you have.

Some of the ideas from the idea groups ended up directly as advances unique for certain types of countries, like the Horde Government ones were converted to unique advances for Steppe Hordes, and the Divine Ideas as unique advances for Theocracies.

However most of the ideas ended up being sorted into an administrative, diplomatic or military focus, with at least 10 in each category for every age, starting with the Age of Renaissance?

Why 3 categories? Well, at the start of each age, you will pick one focus, which will add those advances to your tree for that age. Now you may think, why would anyone pick something else than the military? First of all, there are different powerful benefits and tough choices you have to make. Let's take a look at the choice in the Age of Renaissance.
  • Administrative - Better Administrative Efficiency, Lower Interests, better proximity propagation, Cheaper Mercenaries and more..
  • Diplomatic - Better Merchants, More Diplomatic Reputation, March Subjects, Cheaper Warscore Costs and more.
  • Military - More Prestige from Battles, Monthly Tradition gains and more.
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Hard or easy choice?

At the start of an age, the tree is populated with the advances depending on what your country is at that time as well, so you will only get relevant advances to choose from in that age. If you switch tags or change religion or government form, that will be seen in the next age.

The Advances tree for Age of Traditions is a bit unique in that it has many starting points, and there are many countries, particularly in the New World, who do not start with all of them. Metallurgy, Agriculture, Written Alphabet, Ship Building & Meritocracy are different starting points who all have trees. Feudalism, which requires to have embraced the institution to research, is in the Agriculture tree, and requires Horse Riding researched first. Legalism is part of the Written Alphabet tree and requires Codified Laws and the institution to have spread to unlock their sub-tree. Many of these are more expensive to research.

This together with lots of unique advances in the first three ages provides an interesting progress as a new world or similar type of country outside of the Eurasian Core.

Each advance has a research cost that is the same for almost all advances. There are a few keystone advances such as “Written Alphabet” that are far more costly though. Every country generates “research” each month, which is “paid” directly into the advance you are currently researching. While a bit unrealistic, but good from a quality of life perspective, you can store up to a year's research without having an advance being researched. There is also a sort of catch up mechanic where advances from an earlier age are cheaper than the current age.

The amount of research you do depends on what type of country you are, if you are a settled country, or still a nomadic group of pops, and on the power of your liturgical language. The satisfaction of the clergy estate and the average literacy of your country also impacts how quickly you research.

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As you build up the literacy of your population you're research will grow .

You can also fully automate research and let the AI keep researching for you, and of course we got a proper research queue, so you can just select which techs you want to get, and it will add all prerequisites to the queue as well, and you can keep adding any valid advance to the queue.

Stay tuned, as next week we will delve into the fun and joy of exploration..
 

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You said last week that we shouldn't watch the institution system with eu4 googles without having seen the technology system. But having read the tinto talk, I don't see how this technology system adresses in anyway the problem of eurocentrism. If you don't get the institutions, you'll still not get access to certain technologies which will make objectively weaker. This system is the classic trope of europeans gaining hegemony via intellectual and technologicall superiority, when this game could have given other mechanics which reflect more historical realities (importance of population concentration, competition for ressources, competition for trade goods, military competition, monopolies over the trade of certain goods...)
 
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This is great, I can't wait! I'm excited by 'strength of liturgical language.' Is this the same as the court language mentioned previously? Is liturgical language hard coded by tag or culture, or can we change it by policy? Could you switch from Greek to Latin, Arabic to Chinese, to affect this rate? If you can propagate your language, that would make for a very interesting research-focused gameplay style!
 
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still better than the old. it also give more freedom of choice . i mean the tech and ideas system in eu4 is primitive af compared to the later games
While I understand where you come from, I still feel like blocking what would have previously been idea groups under a once in a 100 years choice feels very strange.

@Merrivale Your post summarize everything that is wrong with this TT. I really hope it will be read and good changes will be done to that system.
 
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Say Johan, do you have some internal "beta testers" for Tinto Talks? Because it seems your communications skills on this one shot VERY wide given how many people thing choosing a focus will lock you out of one-third of the tech tree. Should'a made it more clear that the foci only add 10 techs on top of a large number of common techs.
It’s a weekly dev diary man, I think we can be understanding enough not to expect a communications team greenlighting it, especially since he did follow up…
 
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I wonder how badly the game's balance will be shattered if modders move all of the techs into a single focus. And I bet they will, if this utterly nonsensical system remains in-game. A country making technological advances in only one of administrative, diplomatic, or military fields for one hundred years is the most unimmersive and unrealistic thing I've heard in a long time, it sounds like something from the Bad Ideas thread not a serious DD!
I'll try not to answer to hyperbole ... I'll really try.

OK, I give up.

You know EU4 is a bad and fundamentally flawed game, because modders can give themselves Tech-63 at start :eek:

On a lightly more serious note: Having 10% of your advances optional (you choose, not the tag, not the culture, no-nothing forces you) - this 10% being able to choose at the cost of not choosing other 10%, really really breaks immersion, history, the game-balance and my personal well being. ;)


Ok, that was not serious either, but having to give up on a small fraction of techs/advances, while a lot of other (the most) are rather generic - really is not so bad. Probably you think, that you have to play 100 years only diplomatic or only militaristic - but that is nor the case.
We can discuss realism, but game-wise the free option to specialize your nation somewhat at an opportunity cost, looks like the much cited "meaningful choice".
 
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Everything is better than the old linear system.
Different sure, but better? That needs to be seen in practice before it can be believed. If nothing else it doesn't look *worse* right of the bat, but it also mostly looks like a shift sideways as it stands.
 
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Here is an idea to try to fix this : tie the advances to institutions, instead, which I understand are each 30 years or so.
Have the global choice come at each new age, but allow someone to switch at each new institution, for a cost. Make the advances more expensive each time you change focus during the same age, and make that cost increase for each advance already taken in the group.

That way, even though I'm still not a fan of having marches more expensive if I took mercenaries, it would be possible to have both.

Also, make us choose if we want the sets from a previous age instead of the one from the age we are at, at the start of each age.
 
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Not sure how I feel about being locked into a focus for the full 100 years - personally I think it would be more immersive if say, a militaristic ruler comes to power in a country that has been administratively organised for the last 50 years that they would be able to redirect the focus at a great cost of stability / control etc. rather than my nation that has, let's say, been playing a diplomatic game for the last century randomly switching to military focus because an arbitrary date was reached (despite the leader and estates being completely unchanged.)
You aren’t really “locked” into a focus, you just unlocked new advances that you can unlock until the end of the game. I agree that it happening once every 100 years kinda sucks and is very arbitrary, but Im not sure what’s the alternative.

If you could change them on an every ruler, what would happen with current advances? If the researched ones would stay, this would make it very easy to cherry-pick the good ones from all 3, making focuses effectively useless. Losing advanced makes even less sense.

You could make a lower number of advances get unlock with every ruler but then it would be very hard to assure that everyone gets the same number, and would lead to a weird situation where people would try to kill their rulers on purpose to get more advances.

Curious if there’s a third solution since Im not sure I can think of something better than the current system.
 
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I do wish the "focus that locks you in/out of ideas" was handled differently.

Maybe the set of advances would have a "base cost", and when you pick a focus, those from the other focuses become 3-5 times as expensive to research. They would still be available, but they become a suboptimal choice to research, unless one of the advances feels very important to your playstyle.

Could also make it so that with the picked focus, instead of getting the set of advances for free, they become significantly cheaper to research.
 
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Does this stack with ages? E.g. if I'm two ages behind do my techs have 0.67^2 = 0.44% the default cost?

More seriously, this seems yet another argument for why global ages are silly. Why would Aztecs or Japan suddenly become 33% better at researching plate armor or whatever because the Europeans suddenly became very good at sailing their boats long distances (started Age of Discovery)?
I do not mind global ages in general but here indeed it makes no sense. It would be better if the game kept track of when you were exposed to a tech and have it become cheaper with time (-33% over 100 years, -50% over 200, etc) and with how many neighbours have them.

Having everything instantly become cheaper accross the globe at a specific date feels gamey. Same as having the pool refresh once every 100 years for everyone at a the same time, causing meta rushes for specific techs** in specific years.

I would prefer if there was a way for the techs to appear more organically over the century, maybe put some semi-random factor that you get a new one every year or so.
It would also make going throught the 100 innovations not at once be less dauting as you only have to evaluate them a few at a time.
 
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