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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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What will determine the rise of new bank in families? Is it strictly the historical ones through DHE, or can dynamic non-historical families appear given a country or location meets certain criteria?
 
How does the game handle the Medicis, who I would guess are a landless bank, becoming a landed dynasty and creating a monarchy? Can you do this as a banking county?
 
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Amazing dev diary, super excited about how innovative all this is!!
On a different note, holy order map in iberia is quite inaccurateView attachment 1177840
I need to do a proper pass on them, as they were implemented as 'placeholder-WIP' feature, and there are some errors to be corrected, indeed (like having the seat of Order of Santiago not in Uclés, as it should be); but we decided to wait until getting some more functionalities until doing this pass (which will most likely be this autumn).
 
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Prediction: Timur will be an ABC which spawns sometime after 1370 and the nearby human players will get the option to play as him if they meet certain conditions.

You need to start as Chagatai
 
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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.
Huge pirate not-stonks.

Forcing colonizers to the peace table does bring the stonks back up a bit, though.

I feel like you should at least have the category ready-to-go in the code base for modders to use, but I understand that you may want to prioritize the actual game that you’re selling. I just know there’s some stuff like the Anbennar Remnant Fleet (although that’s too early for Caesar) that could be simulated with that.
 
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Will building based countries have a relationship indicator with the local population? Maybe if they are more loyal to an order than to the ruler, they might opt to seperate and give the order land to become a country.
 
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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.
So like what's the goal of playing as a banking country, or a building based country in general? To spread your buildings to every province in the world? Gather money? Become influential in every landed nation?

Also, how do I select an ABC in the start menu if it doesn't own any land (assuming there are ABC's that don't own land at start).
 
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I love this, awesome TT! For Navy Based Countries, how about pirates to simulate the Golden Age of Piracy? Just some wild ideas, but they could have a special building (pirate hideout) in specific locations, which might be hidden to other entities (i.e., you need to discover them somehow), but they are not directly associated with other actors. You could also have privateers that are directly associated with countries and that own a base (or several) in those countries, or maybe have access to all their ports, etc.

*edit* Many had the same idea, good community brainstorming.
 
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if pirates won't be represented as ABC, or rather, NBC (which frankly would be the perfect way to represent them) how will they be represented? As Extraterritorial countries? How do you plan to represent pirates?
 
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I need to do a proper pass on them, as they were implemented as 'placeholder-WIP' feature, and there are some errors to be corrected, indeed (like having the seat of Order of Santiago not in Uclés, as it should be); but we decided to wait until getting some more functionalities until doing this pass (which will most likely be this autumn).
I suspected them of being a place holder, no worries then. ^^
Could I ask if you could post their final updated state somewhere once you are done? (In case some feedback is needed)
 
Will be Cossack's be represented as a landless country? Territory of our days Southern Ukraine was under very loose control of any country until 18 century. They sound like ideal candidates for this system.
Peoples of slavic origin were living in the steppe mostly self governed. Periodically raiding neighboring states, and was using knowledge of terrain to their advantage to hide from enemies.
 
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Amazing DD as is tradition by now.

Questions:
1. Do we plan to have pirates as a non land based country? Would they be an example of a navy based country? Or are pirates another system and do not constitute countries?
2. Shouldn't Portugal have the Order of Christ, survivors of the Templar Order? It does not seem like Portugal has anything on the map about Extraterritorial Counties.
3. Can Extraterritorial Counties do the normal things a landed country does? I.e. wage war, vassalize countries, have armies (levies and standing), create navies, tax, have alliances, etc?
4. Can a banking country similarly raise an army and forcefully collect their debts?

1) most likely as navy based
2) yes they do, in the south iirc
3) yes
4) hiring mercs yes
 
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what’s the gameplay loop like for bankers? accumulate ducats managing loans and diplo? is there some vanity project we can spend it on like palaces in ck2 republics?

Green numbers go up!
 
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Upon reading, I'm wondering why the posts with the idea about federations being a type of extraterritorial country are all so heavily downvoted. Why would that be a horrendous idea?
 
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