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Tinto Talks #28 - 4th of September 2024

Welcome everyone to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we talk about the top secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will delve into the most hated of all seasons, Winter. Luckily for us, we don’t have to live with it for the entire year…


Climate and Winter
So what impacts whether a location has winter or not? Well, primarily it depends on the climate, but also on the time of the year and the level of winter currently nearby. Of course, when there is winter it is different for the northern and southern hemispheres. Every day each location does its calculations for when it should be changing its winter level.

There are three levels of winter. Technically it is four, but “no winter” is not really winter is it. And during the course of a season, a location could experience all types of winter. We have mild, normal and severe winters.

What is common for all levels of winter is that they affect attrition for your armies, so winters will always kill off some of your soldiers.

Pops living in climates that regularly experience winters have a higher demand for fur.

Food in Winter
Food production is severely reduced when winter comes, while pops still eat normally. A mild winter is a reduction of 25%, while severe winters basically reduce food production to 0. So unless there is a lot of food stored in the province, a severe winter may cause starvation in your locations.

Constructions
One other drawback of winter is that normal and severe winters will impact constructions, and with impact, we are talking about stalling them completely. This affects everything from constructing a building to building a ship. It makes the gameplay experience in a country like Sweden or Norway a bit more difficult, as you have to plan around the fact that you lose several months of the year at times.

stalled.png

Placeholder icons for locking, but useful tooltips..

Freezing Seas
Narrows, Inland Seas and Lakes have the possibility of freezing over during winter. This can happen when a seazone has had severe winter for over a week, and will then last until winter is no longer severe in that location.

A frozen seazone can be traversed by armies and this allows greater military control over the lands it reaches; however, it will cause navies to get stuck until it thaws. Be careful when the weather changes, it can thaw with catastrophic consequences if an army is on the ice. Navies can also not enter any seazone that has frozen over.

frozen_over.png

When Storebælt and Lillebælt freezes, you don’t need navies to reach København…


Mountains
You already know that warfare during winter is a bit more risky, but Project Caesar adds another element to it. Any location with the topography of “Mountain” will be blocked for army movement during normal and severe winters. This can help create natural borders, and some interesting strategic gameplay.


winter_level.png


Tooltips are always helpful..

Sadly there will not be a Tinto Talks next week as we have a holiday that day, but after that we will be back and talk more about roads, development, prosperity and more..
 
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Fawr said:
Will that be a long term problem? In the control/proximity thread (diary #6) you said it goes down much faster than it goes up and you will suffer the consequences for a long time.
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The quote you added was about Maritime Presence which while it is a factor in control/proximity propagation there isn't anything here stated (yet) that would indicate that the former would go down while the later does in winter
 
So the consequence of this mechanic in harsh climate is sinosoidal control, crown power, market access, market protection, monthly promotion, sailors, levies and... income, which affects the ability to pay for stability, court, navy and colonies
 
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Johan said:
yeah well :p

unfortunate maybe, but absolutely hilarious if it happens to your opponent in an MP game..
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On this topic, would be interesting if we could set 'behaviors' to our units actions. For example, for armies, you could have selected ahead of time "quickest path, safest path, etc" so that when you give a move command, or they retreat, they adhere to that behavior.
 
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A short DD, but these are the types of things that make EUV a necessity, and why I wanted EUIV killed back in 2016 or so! Norway is the nation I play as the most and this is going to make it quite tricky and interesting, because honestly, I always ignored the seasons before. "Severe winter? No matter, gotta lift the Trondheim siege asap regardless!"
 
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Tavolo87 said:
it was the conflict lasting between 1502 - 1505 in which Spain annexed the kingdom of Naples
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Thanks for indulging my curiosity. Is there some useful name for the war (which I could use to learn a little more), or is it simply considered a part of some larger conflict like the Italian wars? I ask because I googled it, and first results for "tranzumanza war" were not enlightening. I'd like to place this in some context, but asking more than a couple of questions starts to be a bother. Not to mention veering maybe slightly off topic.
Tavolo87 said:
it also serves as a clear example that food production was affected by summer as well in hotter climates
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Good thing there's dev presence on the thread.
 
Johan said:
When Storebælt and Lillebælt freezes, you don’t need navies to reach København…
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Do the weather in any way change over the course of the game?, like do we have the small ice age to drop temps so more freezes later in the game than in the beginning?

Im slightly concerned about this not because it shouldnt happen but more due to the provinces, seazones and the historical context.

If we look at the map from the scandinavian diary
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Basically if Øresund Freezes its mostly fine. as you will get access from a few provinces on one side to a few provinces on the other side. I think the last time this froze was like 1953?

But Freezing in the seazone from south of Fyn / Lolland would give you access to both islands from a LOT of northern germany. While i dont know anything about this, sounds a bit ahistorical.

Same with the middle seazone. Like if you could walk from Aarhus or Kalø to Kalundborg that would be very ahistorical. Storebælt did freeze over about 80 years ago last time where people could walk over. although i wonder if it froze enough for an army train.

The Swedes didnt cross Storebælt really, they crossed the belt from Fyn to Langeland, then to Lolland, Then to Sjælland. Basically they crossed right about where the two seazones meet between Odense and Nakskov.

To make this even slightly real, you would need to add another seazone inbetween which could freeze while the two others probably shouldnt be able to.

Also in any case. Denmark will be a very interesting balance study for just this mechanic. due to how this should be more or less a freak chance and not something that happens loads.
 
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We don't know how retreats are going to work. But what will happen if your army shattered and retreated to a corner of your country that is surrounded by mountains? Is your country then easy picking until the winter ends?
 
Can you research and make your army better suited for winter conditions to have an edge against countries that do not suffer from winter?
 
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I love that we can march armies over frozen oceans, it's cool that the terrain mechanics are flexible enough that "only armies here, only boats there" isn't hard-coded. Just you wait England, the royal navy won't save you now when the Little Ice Age comes! I really hope you guys manage to represent it by letting the "average severity" of winters vary over the course of the came. Ideally in some fully moddable way that lets modders program in all sorts of crazy time-variant patters. The idea I have is to define "climate periods", so you could e.g. define "1337-1400 severity 0.8, 1550-1710 severity 1.2", something like that.

Does frozen ocean block trade? That is part of what killed Norse Greenland during the Little Ice Age.
 
Will there also be other climactic fluctuations (e.g. rainfall), or will food supply only be affected by climate through winter? Will there be long-term climactic effects that subdue the populations in certain regions? I think these effects are important for modeling the populations of certain regions, esp. in the New World where agricultural declines often meant the disappearance of settlements and transition back to hunting/gathering.
 
Still reading replies so my apologies if someone else has already asked this,

But since you mention that the hemispheres experience winter differently, how does the game map differentiate what’s north and what’s south of the equator? Since the southern hemisphere has flipped seasons, does the game have a way (even if something like “winter_NH” and “winter_SH” designations in the code) to know that “this province should have a severe winter in January” vs. “this province should have a severe winter in July”?
 
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Very tactically useful during war, looks good. Though, I can't tell if, during peacetime, I'm going to turn on max speed more often (to wait for things to thaw more quickly) or less often (to watch for when things start to freeze exactly).

Also, I hope building isn't totally restricted. If I were an actual ruler in the period and people were starving during a bad winter but a building could alleviate it, I would order it built anyway in all but the most severe of storms (with the understanding that it would take longer, be more expensive, and take a toll on the builders).
 
Why not allow Coastal Ocean locations to also freeze in winter? That could represent how icing over harbors makes maritime activities almost impossible part of the year in some places that aren't enclosed waterways.
 
Johan said:
Freezing Seas
Narrows, Inland Seas and Lakes have the possibility of freezing over during winter. This can happen when a seazone has had severe winter for over a week, and will then last until winter is no longer severe in that location.
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Wouldn't it be more realistic, if the end of severe winter just starts another counter, until we revert back to "not transversable" ? This period might be just one or two days, though (keep the mechanic alive, just less punishing in case there is a single normal winter day for some reason). It's not like ice thaws instantly.
For lakes, this is even more obvious, a frozen lake usually has no access to a warm water reservoir like the sea, so it takes longer to thaw (and normally doesn't take as long to freeze either).
 
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natevandrake said:
Will player/AI army pathing try to avoid routes that take winter attrition. Especially for shattered retreats, it would be annoying if my retreating army took a shortcut through Hoth and died on the way home
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Expanding on this, if I order an army to travel from, say, Sweden to Finland, will it naturally path over frozen water? Will pathing take into account risk of thawing?
 
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