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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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"Navy based country"

PIRATES. Please oh please theyd be perfect for pirates. Ultimately pirate nations felt really underwhelming in eu4 because it was just a regular nation with the ability to make money out of thin air every 5 years. Navy based country sounds exactly like describing the great pirate confederations like the Brethren of the Coast or the armada of Zheng Yi Sao. You could also extend the concept to the trade companies, as their power came from their navies and overseas coastal possessions. Heq you could loosely fit the polynesians into such a category as wayfinding is a pivotal part of their culture. This could make the long underwhelming yet pivotal caribbean and pacific regions far more relevant and fun to play in
 
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Couldn't you display the name of the Society of Pops (same as for a settled country), but just don't display the borders? Then you'd get a similar effect as old maps where various non-settled societies are just labelled in a general area.
How would that work when 20 different names are overlapped atop eachother? In maps it works because the labels are so broad and vague that you just throw down the dominant group. Here it doesn’t work so well.
 
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Have you thought about intertwining navybased countries with Societies of Pops?
For example, a religious or ethnic minority might decide to "take to the sea" and find a new homeland, like huguenots going to South Africa or Jews fleeing from oppression.. Or let's say the Kvens feel the pressure of Sweden swallowing up their land, decide to become a navybased pirate nation, with pirate hideouts in various places, collecting wealth and ressources and then later on migrating to North America and try to settle there?
I guess it's not a flushed out Idea yet, but I think it has potential for fun and challenging gameplay..
This might also make polynesian tribes more interesting to play with
 
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We have not YET come up with a way for that to look great.
What about something similar to Vicky 3’s decentralized nations or EU4’s tribal land, but when multiple different tags would share a border (not in the sense of bordering eachother but actually having the same border) the edge alternates between them. Main problem is that to give an extreme example, if a dozen “societies of pops” (I’m not a fan of this name TBH, same for “countries not tied to land” since the phrase country literally means land) exist within a single location that border would be eye bleeding. Plus I’m not sure if it’s technically possible. Still this was the least-bad solution I could think of and even a dedicated map mode would have similar issues. Your point about the occupation lines breaking down if more than 2 of these tags are present in the same location is a problem regardless of if the main map mode displays them, if it doesn’t that just removes the 1-2 colors from location owners and occupiers.
 
Are non-settled countries able to extract particular raw materials (for example horses for steppe nomads considered as ABC countries) from certain provinces and manufacture particular goods in buildings unique to them (say a building representing the metalworking capacity of steppe nomads)? Would certain countries be particularly good at harvesting certain goods, for example would hordes be particularly good at "harvesting" horses?

How does trade between a non-Settled Country and a Settled Country work (if it exists at all)? For exampIe, sticking with the horse theme, would the trade between the various Chinese dynasties and nomadic groups in which the Chinese would receive horses in exchange for them providing the nomads with various other goods be able to be represented in the game, with its presence or non-presence meaningfully impacting the relations between the two parties? Also, can settled countries extract a sort of 'tribute-in-kind' from 'society-in-pops' countries, which may be enforced through diplomacy/war (e.g. the Russian Empire receiving furs from Siberian groups as tribute)?
 
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Would a new type of coutry make sense?
Dynastic country type???

It depends on the ruler dynasty if there is no above aberage claim strength heir left, the coutry fragments like army based ones when they no longer have army.

This type of coutry may simulate various sultanates like Ottomans, Timurids, Safavids, since it doest make sense to have a dynasty other than Osman rules the Ottomans right?

(There may be advances for dynastic coutnries to eventually turn to settled and even early advance for Ottomans since Crimean khanate Giray dynasty was considered heir dynasty and if no male Ottoman house member left they would succeed the Throne and if there is no Crimean Khan, then it would collapse unless it reforms into settled
 
I hope Conquistadors are army based countries, and we dont see Soain sends it army from Iberia but instead new world conquest occur more via those army based country conquistadors and if they succeed they nay becoem settled country viceroyalty
 
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Agreed. The word 'Country' has its origin in land, as the word 'Nation' has its origin in people. 'State' is probably the correct generic term. It brings to mind Governments in Exile; while outside the scope of PC, these would be modeled in this state as Extraterritorial, owning buildings which service related Pops in various countries.
The way I would do it is that all of these things together are called "polities" (a word which already exists and basically fits what we want). Also Society of Pops tags should be called Stateless Societies.
 
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This makes me think about tags that at times did not hold land but were still titular titles like the kingdom of jerusalem after cyprus fell. Freshly wiped countries could still be around as long as their last ruler exists unless that ruler sells his title or dissolves it or (s)he and every related claimant that was alive when the country still existed died out.
 
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For representing societies of pops on the map, how about models or images instead of "occupation lines"/solid colors? Like, say little images or models of villages, which are colored with the color of the country? You could make them small enough that you could have multiple in the same location, and given how loose the concept of territory really is for these countries it's okay that it's not 100% clear, because all you really want is a general vibe of where each one is. And in locations with lots of them (too many to show even this way) maybe you could just represent the 5 or so largest populated in the location, perhaps showing more and less on different zoom levels?
 
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Will Bank or building-based countries be able to fund Colonial charters and have the locations turn into a vassal? Or would that be a Trade Company?
To fund a colonial charter, I presume, would require having a location for which to draw population from. Given that they don't own locations, I imagine these countries will not be doing much in the way of colonial charters, at least with the mechanisms presented.
 
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We need to add the support.

Please do! There are quite a few examples of completely naval-based (read "pirate") nations during the timeframe of the game, similar to the army-based ones. Not just the classic "Golden Age of Piracy" in the Caribbean, but also in various places around Africa and in East Asia too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_Sao). It would definitely be a popular choice to add in, just from the posts I've read so far.
 
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This looks like a very interesting system, and VERY creative.
Does anyone else get bugged by the fact that they haven't said the name to the top secret game yet?
And out of curiosity, when did you guys start planning this game? #Johan
 
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.
Dear Johan, historically there have been such "countries". For example, in Russia it is Dobroflot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobroflot
There must have been something similar in other countries. And if these "countries" have any possibility of colonization, then it will be similar to the case of the "new Moscow".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagallo
And what type will the Welsers and their Klein-Wenedig colony belong to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein-Venedig
Or are Tinto not planning to add them yet?