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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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What sort of temperatures do the levels of winter represent? From the Finnish perspective, even a mild winter means frozen lakes.

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.

Ice does not melt instantly when weather warms. And even when it's too fragile (that does not equal thin) for walking it can still hinder shipping. Keeping track of every location's ice thickness and hardness would likely be overkill, but I do feel that having the lakes and seas clear for shipping the moment severe winter ends is not good. So, how about some of these?

Freezing happens with one week of severe winter or a month of normal winter.

Thawing happens when winter is no longer neither severe nor normal, and takes some time to happen.

Two levels of frozen, hard and soft ice. Both prevent shipping (unless late game brings steam powered icebreakers), but only hard ice supports armies. Severe winters produce hard ice, normal winters produce soft ice. When thawing, hard ice first turns to soft ice.
 
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Have you considered allowing coastal land tiles to freeze over? For example, St. Petersburg freezing over and not allowing ships to enter/leave port happening more quickly than the entire gulf of Finland freezing solid?
 
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This really deserves a wow, great job!

Only one question, will certain cultures, or tags, have higher tolerance on winter, or something similar, like Scandinavian nations or Russians?
 
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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.
On the other hand, during summer the production of video games will grind to a halt.
 
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This really deserves a wow, great job!

Only one question, will certain cultures, or tags, have higher tolerance on winter, or something similar, like Scandinavian nations or Russians?
To represent their attunement with the climate with cloth making and building methods that limit heat losse accordingly ?
 
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This is also for attrition more generally but can an ill-advised journey in a severe winter destroy an entire army? Maybe give a pop up saying “this path will end with everyone dead in a mountain pass”?

Though I like this concept as it gives geography some real teeth.
 
and control/proximity propagation is far worse as well..
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.

Maritime Presence
In every coastal location around your locations, or where you have special buildings, you have a maritime presence. This is slowly built up over time based on your ports and other buildings you have in adjacent locations. Placing a navy in the location helps improve it quicker, but blockades and pirates will decrease it quickly, making it absolutely vital to protect your coastlines in a war, or you’ll suffer the consequences for a long time.
 
So EU4 already had some seasonal mechanics. Winter had province modifiers. And there was the monsoon in the Indian subcontinent... but I'm not sure I personally ever interacted much with that. Those playing at speed 5 (I never do) will likely experience winter every... 2 minutes? Isn't that too much?

On a separate aspect, having food production linked to seasons would be neat. I understand the performance issues, but at least the Invictus mod for IR had modifiers for food production based on seasons, so summer produced more and winter less (I've painfully seen some cities disappear because of my careless management of seasons).

Edit: I'm saying the first point because we will experience 800 winters over the game.
 
Are there some sort of "upgrades" for troops to survive the winter or at least make for example, Russian armies have better odds surviving winter than, let's say, some French armies that found their way to Russia for some weird reason?
It's amazing how you manage to shoot a question on the DD 2-3 minutes after your initial 'wow'. I bow.
 
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Are there going to be Winter HQs for your armies where armies will automatically retreat in winter? Like a buildable building even in occupied foreign land?
 
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This is awesome. Will we also have the same things with storms, floods, and other weather patterns? Like for example, devastation when the Nile or the Yangtze floods too much? South-South East Asia in general would do best with expanded monsoon mechanics from EU4.

Or droughts and dry spells?
 
I've not noticed any armies killed by melting ice yet, so its really really rare.
Will we get a popup warning that ice is about to melt / winter is about to end? Or instead is there a rotating season dial so we can easily track the seasonal change? or do we have to rely on dates / visuals?
 
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Damn lemme play with tropical countries for the first few games cuz this genuinely feels like a lot more work. Hopefully I'll learn to play with the winter mechanics soon enough, great stuff as always though! One final question - will there be a similar mechanic for monsoons in tropical locations like south and south-east asia, carribeans and the amazonian regions?