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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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Would it be possible for micronations too small to be represented on the map (e.g. Monaco, San Marino, smaller imperial cities in the HRE) to be represented by something like this? Perhaps not at release but maybe in an update. I can think that they could have a mechanic to take over the wider location they are in if they are able to muster enough power to challenge the current owner.
 
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We have not YET come up with a way for that to look great.
I have sometimes seen on maps people groups with no established borders be shown with gradients, so that the central area is a solid color and then it becomes more and more transparent towards the edges. This could work ingame by having locations where 100% of the pops are of one society be 100% of their color, but a location where only 50% of the pops belong to that society would have 50% of that society's color and 50% of whatever other society exists there. That could look good.
 
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I love what I'm seeing, the concepts are excellent! There's a few questions I'd like to ask as well:

1. Are societies of pops more or less "culture-based"? Is it possible for there to be a society of pops with pops of different culture or religion associated with it? Can there also exist multiple societies of pops with the same culture and religion? Let's take the Sami people as an example. I presume that settled countries like Sweden, Norway, and Novgorod deal with the Sami people as a collective whole if all Sami pops are part of a single society of pops. But would it also be possible, hypothetically, for there to be multiple Sami societies of pops with which the surrounding countries deal with separately?

2. Can settled or extraterritorial countries send missionaries to convert the pops of a society of pops to their religion? What, then, would happen to these converts, if association with a society of pops is conditional on following a certain religion? I imagine that the society of pops could also interact with the missionaries/countries sending the missionaries in various ways, either moving towards accepting the new religion, simply letting the missionaries be, negotiating for something in exchange for giving the missionaries freedom to operate, or trying to resist the proselytization of the strangers.

3. Can settled countries "own" pops as well? Could there be extraterritorial pops of one settled country in another settled country's territory?

4. Are all pops not within the territory of a land-owning country necessarily part of a society of pops?

5. How will societies of pops exist in relation to the tribes estate of settled countries? Let's say that, as the Ottoman Empire, you were to own territory in Eastern Anatolia with a variety of Kurdish tribes. If these tribes are represented as societies of pops, would their pops also be part of the tribes estate of the Ottoman Empire?
 
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I love the idea if ABC. Will you consider other "BLANK based counties"? The most obvious one is navy based countries like pirate republica, but there could be others. "City based coutries", where the nations identity is based around a singular city and will collapse if they lose it. The obvious answer is city states, but others like Venice, Muscovy, and Novgorod exists.

Also, if a trading republic like Genoa or Venice sieze to exist, will they turn into an extraterritorial trade company?
 
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So instead of making tribes, each culture will have one tag right?, and they may not even be playable at release lol, it looks like very lazy work honestly. Instead of using tribal feuds as colonizer now you will only deal with one inefficient blob
 
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Is the Papacy related to the extraterritorial system? Like if someone conquers all Papal land will they continue to exist as an extraterritorial country based on churches?

Edit: Papacy instead of Catholic church so as to not confuse it with the IO.
 
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Do Ilkhanate civil-war participants, such as the Jalayirids, Chobanids and Gurgan start as ABC-countries? It feels a bit mixed, as in 1337 they would essentially be civil-war semi-nomadic commanders with mobile headquarters, rather than settled rulers, but also not hordes at the same time. Gurgan might be an exception, as they would have a very high nomadic population.

Ilkhanate Mongol Noyans, such as the Jalayirids and Chobanids and Gurgan were semi-nomadic in the sense that they (and their tümens) had assigned winter- and summer pastures, but didn't roam beyond those (other than in wartime, such as in 1337).


 
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how do you even click on an extraterritorial country in order to play it, just thinking on how the ui could work for that would it just be click on the vassal and find the extraterritorial country throught he vassals ui, would it be choose a different map mode, would it be ck3 style with it being a special screen just for that group of countries
 
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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.
Just to pre-empt this: Some of those trade companies did end up owning locations, which you state extraterritorial countries cannot. Any plans for that?
 
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What if society of pops show up as small flags above the places where they exist in a specific map mode, and when the flag is selected it highlights the extention of where they are located? Is that more doable, since in theory it would be a different map mode?
 
Amazing dev diary, super excited about how innovative all this is!!
On a different note, holy order map in iberia is quite inaccurate
Orders_of_knighthood_Iberia.svg (1).png


Red: Santiago
Purple: Calatrava
Green: Alcántara
Yellow:Montesa
Brownish Yellow:San Juan (Hospitallers)
Pink: Portuguese branch of the Hospitallers (ultimately should be same country as the castilian one and the general Hospitallers one)
Orange: Christo (used to be templars)
Brown(in Portugal): Avis
Light red: Portuguese branch of the order of Santiago
 
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So do the Mexica start as a society of pops, to represent their migration down to the Lake Texcoco to form the Aztec empire? I suppose that migration has ended by the time the game starts, at least for most of the Mexica.

When we look at data for a given location or country, does it include everything or double-count? E.g., if I'm Britain, and I look at my population, will I see banking pops highlighted? Otherwise it seems like I'm not getting data on some very influential pops.
 
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So instead of making tribes, each culture will have one tag right?, and they may not even be playable at release lol, it looks like very lazy work honestly. Instead of using tribal feuds as colonizer now you will only deal with one inefficient blob
Hopefully there’ll be internal administration and via diplomacy you can mess with another country’s administration, like the Portuguese did with Kilwa, and this’d also be applicable to societies