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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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Regarding the "society of pops":
I'm inclined to believe that it might be better for the game to not necessarily attempt to make all entities that exist within the game enjoyable to play or even playable.
That also holds true for very small or very poor countries.
If there are plausible ways to give them something fun to do, of course do it, but it should not come at the expense of making the larger countries that most people tend to want to play and that the game is ostensibly about too easy or of destroying immersion and verisimilitude - which Andorra going on a conquest spree, most stateless societies becoming actual location-holding states within a century or Greenland colonizing all of North America would in my opinion do.
 
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Can a extraterritorial country own location's? Can the Hanseatic league control a location completely as example?

No, they never own locations directly
 
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I loved idea but there are few questions for you.
1-Can these countries gain land without force of arms or by someone giving it to them?
2-Order of Teutonic Knights had both lands in Prussia and Pomerelia beside having a big network of castles in German lands in HRE. Will this mean they will have a combination of both or will one branch be vassal of other?
3-Teutonic Knights had their settlements founded on Germanic law , will this have an effect on game which will affect Teutonic Order in Prussia even though it had no direct subordination to HRE?
4- Will multiple non territorial countries have right to own a branch in same tile? (like both Teutonic Order and Hansa having a branch in Rostock for say)
2 - both
 
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Teutons own land. Calatrava is a building based one.
Are the teutonic order a building based country? they should be, as they continued to exist after losing their lands historically, and exist even today

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I hope you'll be able to represent the order's full extent
1724247499498.png
 
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Wouldnt be any pirate nation a navy based country? At the start of the game you can simulate that way the common piracy with hostile random countries as the barbeey pirates and so on until the caribean golden era of piracy beguns
 
Its not easy , and most likely a really bad decision to try to go from a few hundred bankers to taking over an entire location.
But then what's their primary gameplay loop? Providing and taking over loans to/from others, sitting on an ever increasing pile of gold? I imagine you could still hire mercenaries and go to war if someone defaults on their debts, but after a while even that gets old, I'm sorry to say.

Do they get anything that would allow them to manipulate the world as if they were a settled country? Diplomatically at least, like paying/making/forcing settled countries to do your bidding because of the economic leverage you have over them? Or employ your accumulated wealth to do something grand or meaningful, like IDK, singlehandedly winning back the Holy Land or anything on an epic scale? At the end of the day Project Caesar will be still part map-painter, so it'd be nice if even these types of countries could paint the map, even if more indirectly.
 
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I am a bit unsure about the Hanseatic League implementation and if I understand it properly. The way I understand it, you play as a landless country and your league members will be settled subjects? I love the idea of a landless HL, but them owning countries feels off? On the other hand on the map it seems like London is part of the league and I assume they are not a subject of the HL. So that would make sense in my opinion.
 
I love how societies/social entities that aren't "landed" are being made playable in the Paradox games. While these organizations might not have the kind of hard power a more traditional nation has, they still have historical and cultural relevance and opening them as playable entities is a great news indeed.
 
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So building based countries have no way to become settled? What about the Japanese daimyos, seems like they would be a good example of a building based country that should be able to settle, or at least take over whoever controls the settled nation of Japan?

How and why do you make the distinction between army based countries and societies of pops? Building based countries are definitely distinct, but the distinction between ABC and societies as both being relatively disorganized, nomadic nations seems more arbitrary
I’d not call the states that created the biggest empires on earth as being similar so minor tribes with a few thousand people who are close to stone age tech.
 
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Regarding the "society of pops":
I'm inclined to believe that it might be better for the game to not necessarily attempt to make all entities that exist within the game enjoyable to play or even playable.
That also holds true for very small or very poor countries.
If there are plausible ways to give them something fun to do, of course do it, but it should not come at the expense of making the larger countries that most people tend to want to play and that the game is ostensibly about too easy or of destroying immersion and verisimilitude - which Andorra going on a conquest spree, most stateless societies becoming actual location-holding states within a century or Greenland colonizing all of North America would in my opinion do.
Speaking of Andorra, this should allow me to do a rather fun thing. I can make all the various bishoprics of Europe into extraterritorial countries (limited by land-owning IOs as to where they can actually build buildings, to represent their diocese), and that would include making Andorra the subject of the Bishop of Urgell.
 
wow, several questions:
1. can SoP pay tribute to landed countries(like how the finnic tribes payed tribute to sweden and novgorod)
2.you said steppe hordes are ABC, will they be able to migrate too?
3. will the zaporozhian sich be a ABC or a landed country?
4. will you represent the holdings in europe held by the teutons?
 
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Not easy when they overlap with each other and themselves. You could have dozens in the same location
Maybe just a little 3D flag on the map? Thus when there are many, youd just see a little community of flags.

Or some kind of visual representation that there is some kind of stateless society there, at least one, and you have to click to see how many and which ones.

But would be good to be able to tell visually in some way
 
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ABC's sound perfect for non-secessionist rebels. I can imagine for example with China, rather than just popping out as a state the various rebels in both the yuan-ming and ming-qing collapse could start as ABC's before they establish themselves as a real state with its own bureaucracy. But also just rebels in general would fit well, IMO.
 
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