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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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Hmmm, why not do the Hanseatic league as an IO? Also, could pirates be navy based countries?
Many/most hanseatic cities were not independent (e.g. Wismar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald), so who would be member of the organization there? If the membership depends on a building, then it potentially only covers specific locations and allows exclusion of non-urban areas. Also, the corresponding ruler (e.g. duke of Mecklenburg) need not be member of the league.
 
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later on you get Fuggers and more.
Take me to dinner first, sheesh!
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.
Will this be used to represent groups like the Jewish diaspora and the Romani?
 
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We have not YET come up with a way for that to look great.
Have you possibly considered simply having names on the map without any borders? I saw this being used in old Colonial Maps and I think it might kinda solve the issue.

One would just have to manage to code it so that names don't overlap while basically centering around that societies core territory and maybe add a feature that the territorial extent of the society appears if you hover over the name.

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Examples in this map would be how "Herero" or "Hottentotten" are simply overlaid as names without definitive territorial markers.
 
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The wokou would work better IMO as a navy-based country than Sō was portrayed in EU4. Definitely some pirate vibes from that idea!
Oh definitely. While sure some clans could probably partake in raiding-trading, representing Wokou as their own non-standard country(or countries) would be a lot better. They haven't gone into it but it'd be very cool if you could essentially leech pops from your "countries of origin" to grow yourself, with Wokou recruiting from across Japan(and Korea and China later on, with huge fleets of Chinese pirates eventually being their own thing). This would be important for making it so countries like the VoC and British east india company still end up recruiting Dutch and British workers too of course, so I hope it's a thing. Maybe it'd just be represented by some sort of "recruitment offices" building though.
 
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They just need their army to survive, but with no land, no mnapower or tax for it.

I was kinda expecting non Borjigin clans to be landless ABCs that are (viable) vassals of the hordes. :(
 
1. Will roma and jewish people be a Society of Pops?

I think settled societies that are without a state are best despicted as a building-based country.
 
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Do conquered peoples turn into "Society of POPs" until they become loyal? E.g., if the French conquered Spain, would the Spanish rebels unite into a "Society of POPs" allowing them to negotiate with their conqueror & other powers before attempting to declare their independence?
 
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What I hear is multiple gameplays happening in the same space, differing in objectives but the effects rippling through the others.
That should make for some really funny multiplayer experiences, where these connections collide in unintended ways.

Also, about banking countries pulling a medici, wouldn't that be portrayed properly by the couped country being a special type of vassal with your dynasty being set on the throne which grants advantages such as nepotism making your family richer. They didn't end the banking business after putting some of their family members on the thrones of Florence and the papacy, they still did banking and used the aforementioned family members to enrich their other members, it took their male line dying out for the banking state to end.
Think that's generally how a banking country and trade org would operate with the landholders, have them be your vassals with a special relationship.
 
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What an amazing feature !

I'm wondering, how the catholic church and the pope will be represented in the game. Will the Papacy be a building-base country with the Papal state as a vassal ? It would make sense, as the Church was a super rich entity that possessed estates all around the western christian world, but the game also has to represent the temporal power of the pope : the papal state !

As someone who like the history of christianism, I am hyped by the lvl of deepness we are gonna see in the game regarding catholicism especially. (and reform aswell in a second time)
 
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Is there any way to buy normal buildings off nations, or build your own as a banking tag. Would be extremely cool to use some of that hard earned cash to buy shares in mines etc
 
What about revolts and revolutions? Certainly they apply as army-based countries, right? They are basically armies and they go on controlling locations as far as they are successful. Each time there's a revolt, a new ACB forms? Can we switch to them if they come from our nation?

PS for the rest of future players: In Imperator, revolts were already tags you could interact with (they already control locations when they emerge) and I think they were still active as far as they had armies going around even if you retook the land.
 
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Now this is a real game-changer. Four questions, though:
  1. Will it be possible to play as a custom extraterritorial country at the start of the game? For instance, could I get some people together for each of us to create a custom trade league or bank and compete across the world? Or would that require a special mod with each of the extraterritorialities added in manually?
  2. You mentioned the Teutonic Order aren't like the building-based orders. Are they an ABC or a settled country?
  3. Building on that last one, you also said countries tend not to change types, particularly not the building-based countries. But what about those holy orders which start as buildings? Can they ever hope to become something like the Teutonic Order?
  4. Finally, what if a building-based country (not using an acronym for that one, sorry) tries to colonise land? Is it barred from doing so? If that's so, I assume the Hospitallers are also whatever type of country the Teutonic Order is, since they owned Rhodes and Malta at various times and also attempted to establish their own colonies in the Caribbean.
Altogether, this is incredible, truly groundbreaking stuff. Keep it up!
 
Society of Pops should only be able to change allegiance of another pops if it has the same culture, (advanced federation based ones or more peaceful tribal system would change allegiance to same culture group or religion, but it shouldnt be the case for most of them I guess), I hope those socities will be granular and represend tribal/cultural feuds somewhat, I wouldnt want to see one culture that hates and fights within each other so much represented as one society of pop