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Tinto Talks #25 - 14th of August 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, the 25th one, the Happy Wednesday where we give you lots of information about our upcoming, still secret and unannounced game, with the codename of Project Caesar.

Today we delve into the mechanics of colonialism, another aspect of painting the map.

Power Projection
One important factor that has a big impact on the colonialism game is Power Projection. Each country has a power projection value, and it is primarily to allow a country to be able to exploit those with a lower power projection. Power Projection is very dependent on how advanced a country is, where each age has an advance that gives you about +10 of it. It is also modified by societal values, rank of the country and more. One important aspect is that the +10 advance for Age of Traditions is in the advance tree from the Meritocracy.

You do not gain Power Projection by doing specific actions, like in EU4, but it's entirely based on your country's current setup.

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Sadly, the “Sweden is properly balanced” modifier has not been developed yet..


Colonial Charters
So, how does colonization work in ‘Project Caesar'? Well, you colonize by starting a colonial charter in a province for an upfront fee in gold. Then each month some of the population will be moving from the homeland to the colonial charter, until all locations that can be owned are owned by you.

In almost all cases, there are people living in a location you want to colonize, so for you to be able to have a charter to flip to your ownership there are a few rules. A location needs to have at least 1,000 people living there, and a certain percentage of the population needs to follow your state religion and be of an accepted culture of your country.

colonial_progress.png

Progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged!

This percentage depends heavily on the difference in power projection of your country and the countries in the location. Yes, I said countries in plural, and next week you will understand what we are talking about. This has the implication that at the start of the game, Yuán could in theory start colonizing Europe, if it only had been closer and discovered. How the countries and pops already present in a location react to your colonization is something that will be clarified in a later Tinto Talks.

As long as you have a colonial charter, people from your owned locations will start moving to the locations in the colonial charter. The amount of people moving is rather low in the beginning of the game, but there are advances that will increase it in later ages. Societal values have an impact on it, and so does the distance to the colony.

One thing to take into account is that colonization does not magically create new pops out of thin air, and being able to create a huge colonial empire is not a feasible strategy as a low population country.

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Full speed ahead! Only 40 months per location to get to 1,000 pops!

Colonial Charters are not free, and moving people are definitely not free, and countries need to support them. The higher the population in the target province, the more expensive it is to colonize, the distance also has an impact, but colonizing in the same area or region as your capital is significantly cheaper. You can always cut costs to your charters, but that will also reduce the amount of pops moving every month.

colony_cost.png

Not too expensive, so we can easily afford it..


Colonial Nations
When a colonial charter is finished, and all possible locations in that province have become yours, you have multiple options for what you want to happen to that charter. If the province is close, and you think you can get decent enough control over it, you may want to just keep the locations as a part of your home country. You also have the option to have the province form a new colonial nation, or have it join an adjacent colonial nation.

Colonial Nations are a subject type that can not be annexed, but has a few advantages, or disadvantages depending on your point of view, in that while they start transferring less gold than a vassal would, they also grant some manpower and sailors, while also giving part of their merchants to their overlord.

To clarify, you can make colonial nations anywhere on the map where you can colonize.

Supporting the Colonies
If you feel that your charters or colonial nations are not growing enough, there are two tools you can use in the cabinet. Both of these become available from advances in the Age of Discovery

With ‘Supporting a Colonial Charter’ you will move pops from a province you decide upon and to the colonial charter you decided. The amount of pops getting moved depends on your current colonial migration capacities, so when you use it you can about double the migration to a specific

With the ‘Supporting Colonies’ you can move 100 pops every month from a selected province to a target province in a colonial nation subject. This can be useful when you want to boost a colony and you have overpopulated provinces at home, or when you think your country would be in a better situation if you could expel some minorities.

Restrictions on Colonization
There are several ways which can block other nations from colonizing certain places, including diplomatic treaties. At the start of the game, Norrland, Finland, Karelia and Kola are under the claims of Sweden and Novgorod who have divided the area between them.

We also have the situation ‘Treaty of Tordesillas’ where the New World will be split among two Catholic powers, causing lots of interesting dynamics.


Next week we will be back to talk about the difference between countries, and why owning locations is not all there is to life…

fun_map.png

And what is this teaser for next week about?
 
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That's a colony taking part in a war right on its doorstep. How many of those 60K French or 2M British settlers took part in the European conflicts of the wider 7 years war? While I won't go as far as saying that possibly none, they certainly didn't in numbers which would make a difference to the war effort.. What I object to is the inflation of manpower and sailor pools already present in EU4, the stuff that makes Spain have 300k manpower in 1550 because they colonized a few places.
I get what you're saying, I think: you object to the idea of kind of magically teleporting troops, yeah? Unfortunately I think this is the best way to simulate colonial troops without getting ultra granular to the point that you have individuals in regiment lists ("Richard Thompson from Stevenage; John Atkinson from Providence, Rhode Island, due to arrive in three months...")
 
Is there a way to directly choose what location to colonise in a charter province? Like a "preferred location", a way to to tell the game to focus on one specific location in which to send people?
 
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So if colonizing is weighted towards high pop coastal provinces does this mean every nation that starts colonizing the same province will all target the same location or is there a degree of randomness? Does the weighting also lean towards colonizing natural harbors first? Final question if the first question they do colonize the same location doesn't that just mean the person with high population will always win out in a race and the lower pop nation never gets anything if they target the same location? Is there a reason we can't pick which location we would like to colonize first in a province say as Portugal I see Castille colonizing a province in Africa but they are focusing one natural harbor and I want to go there to but I can't pick to just colonize the other natural harbor in the same province?
 
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I get what you're saying, I think: you object to the idea of kind of magically teleporting troops, yeah? Unfortunately I think this is the best way to simulate colonial troops without getting ultra granular to the point that you have individuals in regiment lists ("Richard Thompson from Stevenage; John Atkinson from Providence, Rhode Island, due to arrive in three months...")
No. If you read the previous Tinto Talks, especially the ones about the military, then you know how manpower and sailors are rooted in the population of your country. It's a pretty realistic representation. And then they upend part of that system to keep a gamey bonus from an earlier iteration of the game, giving the middle finger to the realism of the manpower system they themselves developed for this game.
 
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Questions:

1) Can you conquer "unlanded/tribal" nations? (like the Sami People one you showed at the end) Or just colonize them?

2) Is there any tech needed for colonization? Can the African nations you showed last week colonize the surrounding non-State lands?

3) Is there a mechanic for automatic pop movement, meaning, migration to colonial areas without the express order from the State? AFAIK many, many non-British Europeans moved into British colonies, just because of natural migration logics of the time.

4) What happens if two nations of the same culture and religion start a charter in the same province? To whom will the locations belong once the cap is achieved?

5) Are there different methods to deal with the natives like in EU4?

Suggestions:

1) It would be pretty interesting and realistic to have a mechanic where, if your State is religiously intolerant (as most surely will be), the religiously oppressed pops, unless bounded like the moriscos were, have a push to migrate to your colonial charters. This would be specially fitting in the Age of Reformation, where having low religious tolerance may be optimal.

2) The dynamic appearance of new colonial cultures would be great.
 
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what measures can countries do to stop someone from colonizing their land. like, if im Sweden and a bunch of french started moving in to uppland, i wouldnt just sit there and watch, id send the army and unalive them.
 
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Is it possible to block a foreign country from colonizing our locations? Also if a state tries colonize another state's location or charter it started to colonize but didn't finish will it have negative impact on relations?
 
Well, you colonize by starting a colonial charter in a province for an upfront fee in gold.

Just stop the colonial charter once you have your single location outpost flipped.
However, the fee encourages the colonization of entire provinces. I believe that having an optional feature to select a single location would help maintain the level of detail in colonization consistent with the rest of the game.

Can we choose which specific location within a selected province is colonized first?
 
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No. If you read the previous Tinto Talks, especially the ones about the military, then you know how manpower and sailors are rooted in the population of your country. It's a pretty realistic representation. And then they upend part of that system to keep a gamey bonus from an earlier iteration of the game, giving the middle finger to the realism of the manpower system they themselves developed for this game.
Is it possible this is simply a misreading of the ambiguous phrase "grant some manpower and sailors"? That may just mean that they exist and can be called on to fight, in case you're attacked in the colonies. After all, as in the aforementioned war, those were mainly Colonial militia "levies" fighting, and those came from the local English-speaking "pops", so to speak. No teleporting or abstraction necessary.
 
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Is it possible this is simply a misreading of the ambiguous phrase "grant some manpower and sailors"? That may just mean that they exist and can be called on to fight, in case you're attacked in the colonies. After all, as in the aforementioned war, those were mainly Colonial militia "levies" fighting, and those came from the local English-speaking "pops", so to speak. No teleporting or abstraction necessary.
Look at 'Overlord effects' in the table:
It's literally manpower conjured out of thin air.