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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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These new country types are great, lots of potential added to different mods imo.
Also, navy-based countries sound fun, maybe you could tie it to pirates somehow? Starting their operations before occupying a place and becoming a "pirate republic".

It was mentioned that extraterritorial entities have entities and that trade companies are being created overseas.
Is it possible for such an entity to be created (or modded, depending on how rigid it is to add/modify country types) for an experience where you are modeling a company/corporation not necessarily linked with VOC or such equivalents? Say, you want to have a United Fruit Company equivalent, own tons of plantations, and keep a substantial political and economic influence where you own land.
Of course, this example happens after the time covered by the game, which is why I'm also asking how far it is possible to mod these particular experiences into the game.
 
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ok

cool as hell honestly

will we have more banker countries to spawn throughout the game? Can a land based country make a EC (extraterritorial country) to spawn as a subject / through an event chain?

Lastly, can an Extraterritorial country be the leader of the HRE? Or being in a PU?
 
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Is it possible to flip a country from one type to another via effect, both to owning land and away from owning land, via effect? That is, if I so chose I could make it so that if the Pope were to have the last of their territories be conquered, that they would flip to an extraterritorial country and still stick around?
 
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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 :)
 
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A couple modding questions:
1) Would it be possible to add a navy based country for mods, even if you can't find a reason to have them for vanilla?
2) Will there be an effect to change countries to different types for modders to use?
3) Will modders be able to make the society of pops playable if they aren't in vanilla?

1) no, we have to code the system.
2) yes
3) doubt it
 
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What determined for you where the Hansa would own buildings? Because I'm surprised there aren't any in the modern Netherlands, despite me hearing about several hansa cities here, such as Deventer or Tiel
 
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So how does a banking country play? What do you do? What are your goals besides getting rich?
That and also, what's preventing other nations where you are to just decide "OK, I don't want you anymore, die" ? Are your tools limited to "but look at what I can give you" or can you "hurt" them somehow ? A bit the same for countries such as the Hansa, how are they to keep their subjects should they decide it's time to become independent ?
 
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I love the ABC

will mercenaries (and / or pirates) bands be represented as ABCs as well? For example, Wilhelm of Orange at one point was effectively landless and had to live by being a mercenary captain
 
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Very very happy to see this, especially ABCs

Though since it has been mentioned already, I hope we will see navy based nations too for pirates (perhaps scripted to spawn if piracy in a region goes unchecked for too long?) and maybe something similar for polynesians ? (Im not well versed in polynesian history so just throwing this out there)
 
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To start: is it possible to mod in other types of countries, or are these four categories (plus whatever may come in later) strictly hardcoded?

Strictly hardcoded, as its so much of the core.
 
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That’s really interesting. So are you playing as an ethnic group? How do you ensure historical state formation?

Historically a decentralised group would be made up of lots of villages/chiefdoms, and one of these villages would amalgamate the others with their dynasty of chiefs becoming kings. Could a society have a capital (like an itinerant court) and a core province around it? You could have the core being where you raise levies from and the periphery has debuffs and low control. I take issue with what’s meant to be a decentralised tag having high levels of control. I think if instead of going from society to landed tag in a click of a button, you get a slow process of centralisation (opportunity to add a couple more institutions?) so that when you immediately become landed, you just get one location, your capital, and then you have to amalgamate the rest of the territory, which can still split off and form its own kingdoms.

Most stateless societies were settled, could you split it into nomads (which have a path to become ABCs) and settled (which have a path to become landed tags, and can only really be forced to migrate)
 
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This is a very interesting iteration of country system!
Can ABC's also become settled like Society of Pops?
Also, is there a possibility for countries to small to be one location minors (like Monaco, San Marino), to be instead represented by "Extraterritorial Counties"?

Abc that are steppe nomads have a way to become location based monarchies,
 
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