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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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Hallo, i have a question. Will i be able to y'know paradox my way in dealing with a society of pops? Like uhh War crimes, and crimes against humanity. Y'know your average paradox experience
 
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So what do You need to vassalize the Hanseatic League? I presume winning the war - but how is it done? Do You need to kill their army? Fleet? Occupy land of their vassals? Destroy their buildings?

Considering they do not have land, do I need access rights from the owner of the location or maybe even be at war with them? Does the Hanseatic League have a capital or do I have to occupy all of their buildings/locations?
 
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If trading companies are going to be building based countries. How are they going to function?

If we go by example of the VoC, they were Headquartered in Amsterdam, and would funnel all their net trading goods to Europe, mainly Amsterdam. This meant that the Netherlands essentially had the monopoly on spices for a long time in Europe. Will we see something similar, where a trading company will funnel its goods to its headquarter? Will they have a headquarter building from where they originate? And seeing as they are building based, this means that they cannot own land themselves, will they have a way to then vassalize countries for its goods and trade control?

I very much find this whole mechanic very interesting, and I hope to see some huge trade companies boom like they did historically almost becoming more powerful than their own country.
 
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Maybe this was asked or answer before but can Societies of Pops be vassalized?
 
The system with landless countries being building/pop based is very great, also the army based ones. But I really hope we will have ship based prirate nations, like later in the carribean sea or even in Northern europe at the end of the 14th century the Victual Brothers with Claus Störtebeker. I would also like to see to be able to give out letters of marque to create those pirate nations targeting specific nations etc. and if they get to powerfull before you disband them that they turn against you and raid you as well ( examples are the Victual Brothers that became independent or Sir Francis Drakes raids against the Spanish). Thy could also maybe establish their own hide outs in some loctation via buildings if those countries the locations belong to are to weak to repell them or there is low controll in this location.
 
After the fall of Rhodes and before the landing in Malta, wouldnt Knights Hospitaller a navy based country? I say this as an example of sometihing that could be done in a peace treaty: leave your only location with your navy/army
 
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Might be too early to say, or too late to get a response in this thread, but are Red Turbans probably in as a SoP? As far as I'm aware their first recorded action was 1338 but that being the case it's not unreasonable to suppose that they existed in 1337, and including them would be a lot more fun both because it can set China on the historical path while relying on less event uncertainty, and because they'd be fun to play (whether at launch or the inevitable SoP DLC if that doesn't make it to launch). Red Turbans playable in 1337 would go a long way to assuage the disappointment that the only playable (landed) China is Yuan.
 
Might be too early to say, or too late to get a response in this thread, but are Red Turbans probably in as a SoP? As far as I'm aware their first recorded action was 1338 but that being the case it's not unreasonable to suppose that they existed in 1337, and including them would be a lot more fun both because it can set China on the historical path while relying on less event uncertainty, and because they'd be fun to play (whether at launch or the inevitable SoP DLC if that doesn't make it to launch). Red Turbans playable in 1337 would go a long way to assuage the disappointment that the only playable (landed) China is Yuan.
I don't think they'll portray the Red Turbans as an SoP. Check out one of the earlier Tinto Talks about situations, they intend to portray the fall of Yuan using that.
 
Like others have said, pirates would be good naval countries.

Vassal privateers could be created by decision/event, and their overlord would have to provide some funding/ships and would get some portion of the loot, and they would fight on your side in wars (all fitting the mould for most other vassal types).

Of course they continue to be a pain during peacetime, and they could become independent. But would you let them just become independent when the peace was signed because you no longer need them? Unless you have ports in the area...
 
I don't think they'll portray the Red Turbans as an SoP. Check out one of the earlier Tinto Talks about situations, they intend to portray the fall of Yuan using that.
I went and looked back at it. You're right; the way they described it does seem incompatible with using SoP or anything that's playable at game start. Unfortunate, since it means a complete playthrough of ethnic Han Chinese dynasty seems impossible.
 
I don't know if this has been mentioned already but isn't 'stateless society' a bit more descriptive and easier to grasp than 'societies of pops'
 
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Navy based country: the pirates of the Caribbean. Or the brotherhood of Nassau as i think they were called.
There is also this Chinese lady called Zheng Yi Sao that had a huge pirate fleet and dominated a huge chunk of the south asian trade and controlled gambling houses and other stuff in mainland China and I think Singapore.
Also the Victual Bros. and the Watergeuzen. The only thing an NBC (Navy Based Country) would require would be basing rights from at least one Settled Country in at least one port. Should an NBC capture and hold a coastal location itself (as the Victual Bros. did with all of Gotland and the Watergeuzen with Brielle), it could transition into a Settled Country.