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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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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.
Don't HOI4's Governments in Exile count as landless countries?
 
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Strictly hardcoded, as its so much of the core.

so what you are saying is these 4 categories are hardcoded, but anyone can easily add/remove or change current countries (and their attributes) of these categories? if yes, and it is easy to mod goods - then im pretty sure within 2-3 months of release we will have actual victoria 3 :D
 
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Смогут ли некоторые страны быть несколько одновременно? Разве Тевтонский орден не должен иметь возможности контролировать здания, армию и землю?
Йохан уже ответил на этот вопрос: да
 
So if I understand you correctly, how the system currently works, you could mod in a poor oppressed herd of polar bears and have them brutally maul all would-be Swedish colonizers en route to becoming the Polar Empire of Sir Bearington, ruled of course by Sir Bearington
JAN MAYEN WILL RISE AGAIN
 
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Yes thats doable.
Seems like a good idea for a vanilla event, honestly. Probably for other heads of faiths, too, like the fall of the Caliphate (in the previous century, but I expect it could happen again).

It *might* make sense for any theocracy to survive being conquered, actually. The archbishopric of Mainz will still exist, and maybe even still be an elector, even if their real estate is reduced to a single cathedral.
 
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We have not YET come up with a way for that to look great.
I understand you guys have been having trouble changing 3d map assets mid game, like vegetation, so maybe this idea is just ridiculous, but...

What if the way you viewed stateless societies on the map was not via colored provinces/locations but a 3d asset of a village that appears in any province with stateless societies. For every unique stateless society in a given province (locations would probably be too small to support this), there would be an individual hut in that 3d village asset. Therefore, if a stateless society migrates to a new province, a new hut would appear in the village on the map (or a brand new village if they are the first stateless society present). Then you assign each stateless society a color. When that society has a hut in a given province, it is accented with their color, which would give the player a visual indication of what societies are present in a given location just by glancing at the village. Then you could mouse over each colored hut in the village to get specific stats for that society, and maybe it would even highlight all the locations in that province in which the stateless society you selected exists

This system has the added benefit of enabling the display of a landed nation/colonizer (a colored province) at the same time as stateless societies (a 3d village asset sitting on top of the colored province) using a single map mode (political). It would look doubly good if uncolonized provinces looked like terrain when using the political map mode, like EU4 does now, so that you could see these villages sitting amongst the wilderness before the standard nations roll up.

Furthermore, if you want to represent the various religions of stateless societies present in a given province in the same way you could simply create some sort of tribal temple/church model for each religion, and if a certain number of pops in a given province follow a faith, that faith's temple would also appear in the village

Finally, I think doing something like this at the province level is a good way to populate the map with something but not overload it, and it gives the impression that a given stateless society is less organized and not necessarily dominating the land they occupy, but still a factor in a region's ecosystem
 
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honestly all in all there are some good and bads to this

the good :

the enormous level of detail that can be represented

the bad :

1)I'd rather prefer a blunt honest "pirates aren't ABC because we want it to sell as a separate dlc later down the line" than just a "it can't be done", because both pirates and condottieris would literally be that kind of gameplay. Heck, most minor county sized countries would be

2)it makes no sense for a banking family to not be able to purchase land and to switch over a particular type of signoria / plutcracy. Like, why shouldn't they be able to do that, just why?

3) I'd much rather have the Hansa to be an IO than a playable nation. And that goes for about every trade league. Like, cool, what should be my grand achievement if I play as the Hansa? Not taking any lands, cause I can't. Making my subjects stronger? I can't cause if they get too strong they'll just leave. And with what units should I wage war? Surely not with my subject ones. And how would another generic trade league be represented instead? Will I be able to centrilize and annex my subjects?

It's like, creating a grand strategy in our modern day and have the EU being a playable nation. It's not a very fun prospective
 
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I don't know if it was asked before, but by seeing the map regarding the "Various banks, holy orders and Hanseatic League holdings in 1337", I can see that Portugal don't have represented neither of its three main Orders (which were the order of Avis, created in Portugal; the order of Christ, which was the portuguese reorganized branch of the templars and finally the portuguese branch of the order of Santiago). Is it a choice? Are they something different from the other Iberian orders depicted?
 
HOLY SH*T

I just realized building based countries means that you can play as CORPORATIONS in EXTENDED TIMELINE!!!

OH BOY STANDARD OIL WORLD DOMINATION HERE I COME
 
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Any chance any of these mechanism would be used to describe the Jewish people's diaspora across the world? Through the years of the game, Jewish people were still in a state of being spread across the many countries of the world but maintained a single identity as the Jewish people. It is a common misconception to think of Judaism as strictly a religion. The Jews themselves think in terms of the Jewish people and it would be absolutely wonderful change of perspective if they would actually be represented in this game.

Probably not because they weren't really unified, and implying the Jews of Portugal, Poland, Syria, Germany etc all worked together would have... implications.

Maybe their diasporas could have this, one for Sefardim, another for Mustarabi, and so on. But I do not like the idea of minorities being represented like this.
 
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