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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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First off: amazing! Each dev diary just keeps on delivering fantastic features which are clear improvements of old ones!
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.
How quickly does the sea thaw? I hope it's not the moment it goes to "normal winter", but that it instead becomes a bit of an RNG-moment: normal winter has x% chance each tick to thaw, mild winter 2x% per tick. A normal winter is still below 0°, and a mild winter can be so for most of the day.
 
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Will Pops have a "favourable climate" e.g. a Swedish Pop (and therefore army) can more readily handle the cold than an Egyptian Pop for example? (and visa versa) or is this too granular even for this game? or not worth the CPU use?
 
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is this real though? Are there any example throughout history where an amry has walked great distances across a sea on ice

the Kronstadt rebellion comes to mind

St Petersburg to Kronstadt is a much shorter distance than Helsinki to Tallinn (which is where the Scandinavian map says Narrows cover) or Turku to Stockholm.

Walking to Copenhagen or Gotland seems a stretch to me, but I'm curious what events it is based on.
 
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we have some plans for storms yes.
I realize that I am part of a weird masochistic minority here, but I think storms sometimes just killing your ships and devastating your fleets would be a cool feature.
 
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its a normal fight :)

So it's a perfectly valid strategy to lock the enemy army into a battle shortly before the ice melts, causing both armies to drown?

Can battles take as long as in some entirely unrelated games set in approximately the same era, like, for example, EU4? Because I can totally see an EU4 battle happening that starts in January and ends in March not because one side is defeated but because the Baltic Sea melts.

Also, how clever is the pathfinder? If I order my army to go from northern Norway to Poland in late February shortly before the ice melts, does the army understand that it should probably go for the land route or do they path straight south, only to be surprised by the unexpected body of water near Stockholm, cancelling the marching order?
Or do they go, "well, an order is an order" and try to swim across the Baltic?
 
I like this idea (winter impacts your campaign).
 
In the original French dev diary the Strait of Dover was shown as a Narrow (see snap below). Is this still the case, because this would suggest that there is a risk of the Strait of Dover freezing over in winter. This has never happened even during the mini ice-age, even when the Thames froze. The English channel has strong tidal currents that would make it highly unlikely for traversable ice to be able to form and the distance between France and Britain is also 32-33 kilometers where is is at its narrowest, compared with 4-8 kilometers for the Great Belt and Oresund. I really like the idea of the proposed mechanic but please change the Strait of Dover to coastal ocean so that the English channel will still be the effective moat it was historically.

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I love what you're doing with topography, climate etc. making the gameplay unique instead of just being modifiers. First the difference with visibility in woods/forests and now impassable mountains in winter. It will 100% make fighting wars a lot more interesting.
 
so you need a siesta?

you can work during night and in shade... you can't build stuff if the ground is frozen solid and your materials gets snowed and iced in.
well

tbf you have things like Transumanza in southern Italy tho, where sheep herders moved from the coastal narrow plains to the appennines exactly for that. Spain and France even went to war because of it.

So even though you said it as a joke, food production definitely was affected in the southern Mediterranean in summer months
 
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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.

As a Norwegian, I'm a bit confused about this. Would you stop construction in Winter? It's a great way to stay warm, and spend time you can't use for plenty of other things. :p
 
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Will ice/snow melting have an impact on troops movement speed and attrition while moving? During early spring armies would move much slower due to ungodly amounts of mud. This is also why some wars started in winter to move their troops in position before spring mud. E.g. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth attacked Muscovy in September 1609 so they could already start the siege and position their troops. Starting the siege in winter meant that Russo-Swedish troops would not came for the rescue until summer, because they were to far to came to Smoleńsk during winter and during spring Polish troops were shielded by mud. After mud dried up Russo-Swedish army start their march to relieve Smoleńsk, Commonwealth troops massacred Russo-Swedish army near Kłuszyno, hence Commonwealth's army felt confident enough to for Moscow, which fell in September 1610, even though Smoleńsk was still defending. Smoleńsk eventually felt in June 1611 so Commonwealth's army was besieging this fort for two whole winters.

In other words besieging a fort build near your border during winter was not that big of a deal, because you have secure supply lines. But spring mud meant that you practically could not move your troops even in your country.
 
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