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Tinto Talks #26 - 21st of August 2024

Welcome everyone to the 26th Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we tell you interesting information about our super top-secret game with the code name of Project Caesar.

Previously in Grand Strategy Games, playable entities, or countries as we usually refer to them, always required you to own land, and their existence was based upon owning land. You annexed and eliminated a country by taking all their land. Now during the four years since we created the first iterations of this system, things have changed, and you will soon have landless playable characters in Crusader Kings III.

Anyway, in Project Caesar we currently have four categories of playable countries.

country_type.png

This tooltip may make it 100% clear?


We have been talking about making a navy based country type, and it would be fairly easy to do, but we haven't really found any country that fits that category.

Settled Countries
These are countries that are based on owning locations. These function the same as you would expect a country to work in a GSG, these countries own land, they build buildings, have cores, raise armies, etc.

Army Based Countries
This type of country is very similar to the location based countries with a few differences. While they can still do everything that a location based country does, they also have one strong advantage and a strong disadvantage in comparison.

The advantage is the fact that as long as they have an army, then the country will still continue to exist, which we use to simulate REDACTED amongst other things.

The disadvantage, depending on your point of view, is that if the country does not have an army at all, it can shatter into multiple pieces.

Many of the Steppe Hordes at the start of the game are ‘ABC’, which fits nicely into their other mechanics. Yes, I do like the acronym ABC for “Army Based Countries”

Extraterritorial Counties
These are countries that are based around the buildings they own. They can’t own land directly, but can have subjects that own land. Their buildings often have pops directly linked to the building, and those pops are also tied to the country.

One risk with them is that they need to keep positive relationships with the places they have buildings in, or they may not be able to survive.

map.png

Various banks, holy orders and Hanseatic League holdings in 1337..

There are many types of playable entities that we simulate with these systems, and here are a few of them..

Banking Countries
There are a few of these countries in Europe at the start of the Game, with Peruzzi and Bardi, and later on you get Fuggers and more. They have main offices in certain cities and have the possibility to build more branches around the world.

Other countries can request loans from them, and they also have the diplomatic ability to take over any estate loan that a country has, and force that country to pay interest to them instead. They also have far lower interest rates on their estate loans, so they can easily become rich from other countries' debts.


banking_advance.png

This is an advance only available for banking countries.


Trade Companies
During the Age of the Reformation you can set up Trade Companies in overseas places, which will be a good subject to get trade going to benefit their overlord. We will go into more detail about these in a later Tinto Talks.

Hanseatic League
This is represented by a building based country which has a few subjects that are normal land owning countries. This is a playable country from the start, and one that is really fun if you want to focus on a purely trading game.

hansa.png

Maybe the trade monopolies estate privilege is less than good for us..

We also have Holy Orders, as a building based type of country, and while I can’t go into details about it at this point, at the start of the game, the Daimyos of Japan are using the building based country mechanic..

Society of Pops
This is one of the most challenging types of countries in the game, as most of the mechanics are not available to them. They own no land, but instead are entirely based upon the pops associated with them. As they own no land, they do not interact with RGO’s nor can build most buildings. Almost all of them start without advances for taxation, codifying laws or constructing cities.

A lot of the world has different societies of pops, where larger groups of people live but are on the fringe of more organized and advanced states. In the New World there are a mixture of settled countries and society of pops.

These types of countries can migrate their pops from one province to another over time, and they can also force the allegiance of pops to change to them through warfare with another society.

The borders between different societies and even settled countries are extremely fluid, and they can be in the same location as either of them.

They can raise levies directly from their pops, and their armies can live off the land anywhere, gathering some small amount of food from any type of land. Their armies can always force any pop of their culture and religion to swear allegiance to their society.

Amongst the ways they can stop being colonized is forcing colonizers to the peace table, forcing them to cancel their colonial charters.

A settled country can in a war force a Society of Pops to abandon pops that they own, and if they no longer “own” any pops, that society will no longer be an existing country.

A society of pops can attempt to settle if they achieve certain advances, after which they will take control over all locations where they have pops and are the dominant culture and religion, and then become a Settled Country.

Currently though, the gameplay experience is not where we want it, and unless that is improved by beta, they are very likely to be AI only at release.

kvenland.png

Here the Kven People have settled…

And to clarify, Society of Peoples and Army Based Countries have ways to become Settled Countries through mechanics, but there are no other normal ways of changing Country Types, except through special events.

Stay tuned, as next week we go into detail about buildings you can build outside your own country.
 

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May I suggest the addition of the banking country of the Roero family from Asti? They were very important in Piedmontese politics in the 13th and 14th centuries, and later at an international level as allies of the Savoy. By 1600 they had offices in Lucerne, Cologne, Bonn, Freiburg im Breisgau, Hainaut, Brabant, and Flanders.

By the way, Asti still incorrectly owns Acqui, and Piedmont still incorrectly owns Susa, despite having pointed this out a few times in the Italy threads
 
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While the US is irrelevan in that way t, Switzerland or the Netherlands aren't
Although I don't think they'll make confederacies landless, a mod where the Netherlands are a landless confederate tag could be really interesting. But it feels like needlessly complicating things for realism purposes. On the other hand, most of us like overcomplicated stuff. ;)
 
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Ok first of all this is amazing. Everything I was hoping for from the hints.
If it would be fairly trivial to implement navy nations as a type as you said could I humbly beg for you to do so to allow more freedom in modding (also it just sounds dope).
 
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Got to ask as it made me curious what are the current parts which make Society of Pop countries unsuitable to be playable by people at the moment? Is it aspects of interaction with systems being too limited or more with how things are shown to the player of their society when playing as that TAG?

Along with that are there specific systems/mechanics that you plan to talk about later which are the biggest issues facing this type of TAG from becoming playable which you could talk about as a part of their Tinto Talks segments to see if people with a outside perspective could provide some potential ideas that the studio has not thought up by that point? (Giving us some basic examples as a part of what the team has attempted to resolve this might help when you talk about these systems might help us understand better as to why it is potentially beyond the possibility of good gameplay for these types of tags)
 
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Very interesting and very innovating !

I have a few questions

1) since trading companies are represented as building based, how do you represent their transition to land based (e.g. how eventually the British took over India)? By the end of the game, the British East India company certainly held land directly.

2) do building based countries require permission to build in other countries' locations?

3) are monastic orders building-based countries too? They do act sort of like holy orders, but with a more educational/diplomatic/inquisition-related flavour.

4) are there events for historically relevant societies of people to spawn as countries even if they do not meet the usual conditions?

5) can hordes migrate of their own volition, or do they need to be left with only their army to attempt to conquer new land? Do the corresponding pops move location too? How does this relate e.g. with the collapse of the golden horde ?
 
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I love seeing Paradox finally represent the agency of non-settled polities!!

So, at first, we were told that Pops are differentiated by four factors: culture, religion, class, and location. And when only landed states were playable, that was enough - where the pop was determined what country it belonged to. But now it sounds like there's really a fifth factor: what country the pop belongs to - I don't know what to call it, maybe "citizenship" of a country (though that's an anachronism) or "ownership" (though that sounds like slavery) or "loyalty" (though a pop can belong to a country while being fairly described as disloyal). Maybe "allegiance?"

Anyway, I say this because it sounds like it's implied by this dev diary. It feels like you've now described situations where two pops can have the same class, religion, culture, and location, yet belong to different countries. For instance, maybe some of the Totemist Cherokee Tribal pops in Outer Banks North Carolina are part of the Cherokee Society, while others are now subjects of the English colonial authority in the area (maybe after a war, some pops were abandoned and have now assimilated). Or for a less complicated example, it sounds like some of the Catholic Pomeranian Burghers in Lübeck belong to the landed state there and others belong to the Hanseatic League. (All of these examples are off the top of my head, sorry if I've used the wrong specifics.)

I like this a lot, if this is the case. And if it is the case, then I wonder: shouldn't the population proportion being tracked for when a colony "flips" to control of the landed colonizer, be checking for the allegiance/citizenship of the pops, rather than just the culture and religion? To me, that would seem to solve not only the issue of PC not being able to represent colonies started by expelled minorities (on condition of remaining loyal to the crown), but also would solve the problem of two same-culture, same-religion countries trying to colonize the same area. Having pops be differentiated by country of allegiance makes this more fluid colonization mechanic of "send people there until it's reasonable to claim it's yours" make so much more sense to me, as well as enabling a much better representation of the complexity of different forms of human social organization coming into conflict throughout this period.
 
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A bit of an off-topic question, but is it possible to send weapons or goods to an ally or country at war that I might want to help? Or maybe make it so that they can buy goods from my country at a lower price to economically and logistically support them? Or is the only option currently to just send them money? Thanks :)
You're thinking of embargo evasion? I think just plain cash infusion would suffice, and if they implement embargo evasion this should massively damage the relations between the one issuing the embargo and the one helping the embargo being evaded.
 
Great work, it really seems this mechanic alone has a lot of potential for fun gameplay.

2 questions:
Why are Daimyos building based countries? Just for gameplay purposes, so the Emperor or Shogun basically owns the land, and they have to keep good relations to them?

Why couldn't pirates be Navy based countries? It isn't far-fetched historically.
 
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Hello dear Tinto-Team,

Sorry if my question is false in this dev-diary, but i have far more hope that it will be ansered here...

I recently revisited the dev-diary for Germany and i`ve noticed what i think must be an error: The small county of Berg (near cologe) has the dynasty "von Nassau". In 1337, there should be Duke Adolf VI. in charge, who was a member of house Limburg, a sideline of house Berg (hence the name of the county). The neighboring county mark is also of the same greater dynasty, also ruled by a sideline of house Berg (house "von Mark") which you have done correctly (altough - why the house-name and not the "dynasty" (Berg)?) Would make many things easier i think). To my knowledge there never was a "von Nassau" ruling in Berg.

Furthermore, in 1348, Berg got into a union with the neighboring jülich, henceforth the house of both nations would be called "jülich-berg". Thats because Adolf VI. had no children, which was already clear in 1320 when the sucession was decided, so well before the start of the game. Is there hope there could be an event for this or something like that?
When i`m at it, will we be able to rename our countries (like in ck3 for example)? This could often lead to a more historical map, for example brandenburg-prussia comes to mind (or, you can maybe guess where i live, the glorious duchy of jülich-berg)

Thanks again for the amazing things you show us each week!
Looking forward to the next one!
It can be posted to the German TM. And if you could post with some academic reference, I’m sure they will review this more quickly
 
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Excellent Tinto Talk, the idea of being able to play a country that doesn't own locations honestly makes me so excited for Project Caesar! I have one suggestion: if I am a banking country with an obscene amount of money, let me take the Liechtenstein route and buy my way into landed existence. I feel like after a certain point banking country players would get tired of pure Number Go Up and run out of stuff to spend money on, so letting me go to a big country that likes me and buy a location (for a huge amount of money) would serve as a natural "final boss" and make a previously pure money game a lot more interesting.
 
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Gold for mercs are damn useful. And having more than one branch is good to not be relying on a single country.
Are you telling me that it is not a good idea for the banking house of Bardi and Peruzzi to lend the English king every single ducat they have?
 
Can "Society of Pops" country types be present INSIDE the borders of a landed nation? Like a colonizer establishing a colony on the land of a SoP, or a SoP migrates into a landed country's land?
 
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