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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: 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 brothers, for example
 
It would be nice to have an option to see Pop Societies on the map instead of 'empty' land to be colonized. It could be just outlines like tribal lands in EU4 or maybe just very faint coloring/dashed lines over the locations kind of like occupations. Especially if they are very dynamic and change a lot, it would be nice to see unsettled regions with names floating around. They would feel more alive instead of the stale grey we're used to now.

We have not YET come up with a way for that to look great.
 
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Are the Knights Hospitaller (whose population is greater than the population of Rhodes) an extraterritorial country with a vassal settled country that owns the island of Rhodes, or is that related to what will be discussed next week?
 
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could it be possible to create a new banking country/vassal from your own territory like in a gold producing province. or even force a country to release a banking country

No for banks atm. Some countries have unique things related to them though.
 
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I can't wait for next week TT and hopefully trading posts stuff such as : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima

This kind of gameplay is the best thing that ever happened. I'd hope banking countries can influence land based countries through investments, money, mercs to shape the borders and geopolitics the way they want it. It would be so refreshing from standard conquest gameplay.
 
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Sad. Those tags are probably highly dependent on events and characters rather than buildings. I think they need a lot of events like we are colonised by country A or location B is revolting.

Do they have diplomacy? Can they ally with other people? can they federate like in EU4?
Can they exist under settled countries? (Both settled and society of pops own one location)

They got normal diplomacy.. society of pops cant own locations,
 
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Does "ABC" countries, will have a mécanique of "march into the province and a few month later the province ou location switch to your sideCOMPLETLY / no peace deal switching province or location", like some mods in EU4 with some scripetd event or buff ?

(Because when you say "Hordes", it sound like it to me...)

We will talk more about the hordes later
 
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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.
please let that be civil wars / rebellions
 
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So, I understand how land based works. I understand how ABC (nice acronym) works. I can even understand how pop based works.

It seems like, for the most part, the majority of these countries are trending towards becoming a land based nation state.

What I don't quite understand is Extraterritorials. It feels like they exist outside of the framework. I usually approach things from a Multi-player perspective - So, I want to ask: What role do you see Extraterritorials playing in a MP setting? Will players probably just seize their banks or whatever? Is the playstyle "strong", or more of a roleplay type of thing? Is there any reason for me as a landed country to allow the Fuggers to hang out in my land? What ultimate 'goal' do I work towards as a an extraterritorial?
 
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Do we get some buffs if bank's main office is our country and if we have bank family members in the cabinate, so Florence and Genoa at the start.

Yes, there are some benefits
 
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They will be similar to eu4, imperator and v2.
Maybe add your allies having demands as well so you can't just use allies like in eu4 don't think that's historicaly accurate. Have them want some land but can be haggled down to less land plus money or something like hoi4 turns in peace deals.
 
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No for banks atm. Some countries have unique things related to them though.

Does that mean that the existance of banking countries is scripted at the game start and no others can be created? That is a bit dissapointing. I understand why take that away from players as you can easily cheese the system but I would hope banking countries would be able to emerge organically under certain cricumstances. Surely if London or Amsterdam become the trade capital of the world, a banking country will emerge somewhere around there right?
 
You could then do the "occupation lines" the same as you do already.

The thing is that as it stands now, it looks as if some lands are just empty, which is just not the case.

And how do you differ it from occupation? And how do you show 3 different ones?
 
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Are there modifiers for the culture and religion conversion rates of pop of a society of pops for the country owning the location ? Are they harder to convert as they already belong to a political entity ?