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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…

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And what is this teaser for next week about?
 
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2. There are ways of getting 'soft control' over a location and its resources without directly owning it (which is kind of what happened historically with the misiones and presidios in some of the most remote Spanish holdings in America). More about this the next week.
is it also a way to represent the tribute Sweden and Novgorod took from the Finnics
 
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I would have expected it to be by area, actually. Their size seems to match historical colonial charters better. And would allow countries to 'claim' a lot more land that they don't actually control, which is also quite historical.
I think it kinda depends. In Finland and Northern Sweden, which they used as an example in this diary, the provinces are large enough that an area wide charter would mean trying to colonize all of the modern Swedish and Finnish territory at once. In reality the process took centuries, with Sweden first colonizing the areas around the Gulf of Bothnia, then expanding into inner Finland and then in more recent centuries colonizing Lapland. In this case it would be more immersive and accurate to do it province by province. The same would probably apply to settling different areas in Greenland, Ireland and maybe colonization by Novgorod too.

Also I think we should remember that compared to America Europeans hadn't yet done that much colonizing in Africa and rest of the world during the game's time period. They pretty much just had a few bits of the coast in Africa, while Indonesia had only been partly colonized by 1800. Colonizing province by province in these places would probably also make more sense than area by area.

Maybe you could have the option to do it either by province or area? Or somehow be able to treat multiple charters as one charter? I do wonder how the colonial nation system would work with the US colonies, which seem to correspond to areas currently. Would the colonies be named after the areas or the province they started from? Could the name dynamically change if the colony expanded to encompass an entire area?
 
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Maybe certain provinces that are considered underdeveloped could be open to colonization, like how many Germans went eastwards. A ruler with a small country but a lot of land could allow for specific provinces to welcome settlers. Same thing could apply to religious refugees during the Age of Reformation, as a lot of Huguenots ended up in Brandenburg and later in South Africa.
 
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Yes, though it will be harder to become a continental power in the new world than say Castile or England because their limited access to pops in their home locations could be a major limiting factor.

Will there be policies for natives such as eliminating, segregating, or intermarrying? Portugal, having a smaller population than other colonizers, had a more open policy regarding its colonists marrying the native women.
 
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Also I think we should remember that compared to America Europeans hadn't yet done that much colonizing in Africa and rest of the world during the game's time period. They pretty much just had a few bits of the coast in Africa, while Indonesia had only been partly colonized by 1800. Colonizing province by province in these places would probably also make more sense than area by area.
But highly populated locations with tropical diseases like in Africa will be so hard to colonize, that you're only going to want a few locations at best before canceling, so it doesn't really matter if it's by province or area?

I also don't see how colonizing by area would make Scandinavian colonization less historical, since you would still have to go location by location. In fact, based on your description, it would be more historical, since you're unable to spam-colonize multiple provinces at the same time and have to slowly take over a whole area instead.
 
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Maybe certain provinces that are considered underdeveloped could be open to colonization, like how many Germans went eastwards. A ruler with a small country but a lot of land could allow for specific provinces to welcome settlers. Same thing could apply to religious refugees during the Age of Reformation, as a lot of Huguenots ended up in Brandenburg and later in South Africa.
I think those are more likely to fall under the migration system discussed in TT#17
 
1) currently > 10.
2) no
3) we are still working on how ToT will work, that why I was so super-vague.
I hope that disregarding the Treaty of Tordesillas has more significant consequences for a Christian country than it does in EU4, where, if I recall correctly, it only strained relations with the affected nation, the Papal States, and slowed colonization efforts. Ideally, a country that defies the head of the Christian Church should face more severe repercussions, such as strained relations with all Catholic nations, consequences for trade with the offending nation, or even an embargo from multiple Catholic polities. While a larger nation might more easily evade these penalties, sanctions should still be a possibility.
 
Is England in colonial range of anything in 1337 if someone were to say accidentally have their maps of the Greenland or Canaries stolen by spies?

Well, canary island maps doesnt exist anywhere at the start of the game,
 
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I hope that disregarding the Treaty of Tordesillas has more significant consequences for a Christian country than it does in EU4, where, if I recall correctly, it only strained relations with the affected nation, the Papal States, and slowed colonization efforts. Ideally, a country that defies the head of the Christian Church should face more severe repercussions, such as strained relations with all Catholic nations, consequences for trade with the offending nation, or even an embargo from multiple Catholic polities. While a larger nation might more easily evade these penalties, sanctions should still be a possibility.
Something like excommunication?
 
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Will colonial cultures emerge in areas with a large non-"white" population? For example will latin American colonies form mixed racial classifications like they did historically? Or with the English colonies form cultures like Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American from enslaved Africans?

Also was wondering if non colonial landed states could conquer landless states without settling them, is this possible?
 
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Wow. This look amazing.

I got a weird question , but will be any differences between Colonies / Viceroyalty/ dominion?
If not, could we get Iberian Colonies with the name of Viceroyalty? This is just for a rol play of course. ( As I think will not be differences between them on a mechanic level)

And since I read that you kind of can "colonize" Europe, could be possible create something like : Colonie/ Viceroyalty of Naples? ( I may understood this completely wrong)

Thank you!
 
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yes, its one of the fun side effects
Can those european culture in the new world merge and form a culture of its own like for example: a group of english, irish, dutch, swedish settlers in east coast of north america will form "American culture" or a group of portuguese, indigenous south american, italian, germans in the coast of Brazil form Brazilian culture etc?
If yes, my question is can you name your culture in the new world or is it auto generative based on location of the colony?
 
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It probably isn’t for Mali but that’s because doing so would be expensive, and early-game Mali is supposed to be in a precarious state. That said Sweden and Novgorod can colonize at game start and this isn’t a special rule, nor do they have any institutions Mali lacks, so if you have the income to sustain colonial charters and have discovered the stateless regions of West Africa, colonization should be possible to start immediately.
We won’t know until they confirm.
 
Same religion group. And the likelihood of England being more than one age ahead in tech over Ireland is not likely.

You have to do it the historical way. Conquest.
England did colonise Ireland, though. The Irish plantations were the model they based the American colonies on, and are one of (if not the) most culturally significant things to ever happen to Ireland.
 
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Well, canary island maps doesnt exist anywhere at the start of the game,
If England manages to discover e.g. the Azores early would these be within England's colonial range at the start of the game or would it require certain advances?

What advances if any would be required for England to get sufficient colonial range to be able to start colonising the east coast of North America and when do they become available?

If I remember correctly, you have previously mentioned that trade winds and ocean currents will have an influence on range calculations. Can you share more information about the exact mechanic, the directions and the impact these will have on the different routes across the Atlantic?
 
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If England manages to discover e.g. the Azores early would these be within England's colonial range at the start of the game or would it require certain advances?

What advances if any would be required for England to get sufficient colonial range to be able to start colonising the east coast of North America and when do they become available?

If I remember correctly, you have previously mentioned that trade winds and ocean currents will have an influence on range calculations. Can you share more information about the exact mechanic, the directions and the impact these will have on the different routes across the Atlantic?

Looking at the sea areas/lanes in the North Atlantic bonus diary, I'm thinking maybe Madeira will be closer in terms of range. But I did have a thought, all these stepping stones islands are basically just fish, what kind of market access are they going to have? Can a colony just survive on fish, probably not, so don't get embargoed by Iberia. I wonder if market access is what leads to the population decline to 0 in Greenland (assuming that they've made that happen organically a majority of the time)