Tinto Talks #3 - March 13th, 2024

[trooper828]

All I can ask for in terms of suggestions for the topic of pops is to make sure the avenues for modders to change pops, be it the types or how they function within the game time, are easy to access and understand if possible.

 

[saltyfish]

Hopefully the bomb growth of calculation will not be impacted by the poor single CPU core.
It's will be thankful to develop the New Project with multi-core calculation.

 

[ValhallArchitect]

I find it amusing that people call for "plausible history" but then moan about the start date because the plausible outcome of the 100 years war of an English victory and eating France is something they don't want happening 80% of the time. Rather disingenuous of them.

I agree the issue is having mechanics that make sense so bizarre occurrences like you describe don't happen (as in make systems less arcady) but railroading for example a French victory or Muscovite rise against the Tartar Yolk should not be a thing if it compromises the simulation. "Lucky Nations" or as Otawai would describe it his ""Top 10"", were a terrible way to handle it in EU4 for example.

I personably never asked for railroading.
I have the new EU4 mission system in horror because of that, I’m tired of seeing Spain getting permanent claims Over burgundy and Milano just because… well why exactly ? Since they do not marry them in this game run ?

On the contrary, I like the sandbox side of games like CK3 or HOI4 (although for the latter I have very strong issues with the lack of adaptability of the nations tree to the general context). I have no issue with the reconquista not happening, France splitting in 4 kingdoms due to succession laws etc.

That being said, I do not think a French defeat in the 100 years war should have a 50/50 outcome. Neither a tartar victory on the Ugra river. There are fundamentals behind these, reasons why it happened the way it happened. French large population for #1, a starting sense of national unity and the desire of the nobility to reject a foreign king (after all, that’s why they refused the succession through female line), a popular unity behind the king to stop the rampancy of mercenary groups pillaging the country etc.
That’s what I call « plausible », respecting the reasons, while still allowing for alternate scenarios, making it no so frequent occurrences and requiring a special involvement of the player (making it less frequent for the AI).
In a way, it’s kind of similar to why Byzantium can get a winner’s play, it’s possible for the player, but the context is very hard for an AI to assemble the rights conditions to get their country back up together.

For the same reasons, I have nothing against Portugal not colonizing Brazil, Sweden being #1 colonial power, etc. Though, it has to follow certain conditions and rules which explained why it was more likely to see a French and British North America, than a French California and Patagonia. Namely, tradewinds.
I do not want to see a Moroccan America in every single game however, because this has few reasons to happen (although the tradewinds were as favorable as for Castile, as Muslims they did not look for the same tradegoods as Europeans, did not look for a way to Asia since they could trade more easily with the mamluks and ottomans, and had their own trade hegemony on the Sahara slave trade).

Surely though, small regional changes will have an impact on its neighbor, ultimately generating a general unbalance of the world which will give an alternate history. That’s how the game logics works and that’s fine, and desirable.
I do believe that they are taking some good steps towards this though. Population being the main reason behind military manpower and tax economy is one fundamental. The trade system we can imagine taking shape with the new « passable but not colonizable » locations is another.
There will also be some other background mechanics like terrain and attrition (hopefully supply chain too) which will counterbalance the sole strength of number. Ie why the Ming never conquered Mongolia despite being 50x the population

 

[ValhallArchitect]

There are 3,272 provinces in EU4. In Project Caesar there are 27,518 locations. Suppose the average was 4 locations per province, that would be 6,880 provinces which is more than double of EU4. The average might be higher but still one would expect more province density in Europe, the Levant, North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia

Especially China. The poor child of Eu4, with barely 100 provinces for a country which had about 1/3 of the world population, and which was so sufficient in its own that it did not even want to trade with the outer world

 

[evilon]

This is Johan's redemption arc, i can't believe MEIOU and Taxes will be turned into a real game, is this a dream?

And here I was thinking: I'm really looking forward to what the M&T team or similarly minded people will make of this

 

[SauronGorthaur]

Personally, I'm not of the opinion that pops are this magical panaceum that automatically makes a grand strategy game better. Victoria 3 did not become the main breadwinner of PDX, they did not prevent Imperator from getting axed and they split Stellaris' playerbase on the issue. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for representing population, but I think in many cases simpler population counters that show spread of things like cultures and religion separately from each other.

In the timeline of CK3 and totally-not-EU5 especially the standard design of pops would lead to having 990-ish peasant pops for every 1000 pops in every province location. Then there's also the topic of there being very low social mobility in the covered periods. But if I'm getting this right, here we get just 1 pop of each combination and they just differ in size which tackles at least one of the issues with pops regarding this time period, so - following the example picture at the end - you may get one fat Greek Orthodox peasant pop and one scrawny Arvanite Catholic noble pop.

Still, I'm not entirely sold on how even this level of granularity is needed vs having simpler separate population splits on cultural, religious and class levels. How often is this even going to come into play? If you oppress the peasants and cause them to rebel, are the Orthodox peasants going to sit the rebellion out because the ruler is also Orthodox, even though statistically they are the most likely to suffer from your anti-peasant policies? Likewise on the other end of the spectrum, if you manage to somehow specifically piss off just Arvanite Catholic nobles, do you just get one dude (who is more likely to be a lowly baron on top of that) rise up in rebellion?

That being said, the single-pop-per-combination with just different sizes of pops (and, consequently, different weights to them in relevant areas) seems like the best implementation of pops so far. I would say I'm optimistic, but given how much the more recent PDX games have burned me, especially in regards to sequels (especially CK3, which downgraded CK from my favorite PDX series because while it does hold great promise for an amazing game with the way its system had been build, the vanilla release and each consequent DLC keeps under-delivering on that promise, most recent case being how they handled legitimacy), that would have been a lie.

Let's say I'm warily intrigued and I hope totally-not-EU5 will not follow suit.

 

[Dylanwaw]

Simulation, not Board Game.

i find this very worrying one of best parts of eu4 is how much freedom it has you can restore the norse faith, form tibet and become a horde, restore the roman empire are these things unrealistic yes are they incredibly fun again yes would you be allowed to do this in a simulation probably not, the best part eu4 is that it is so much like a board game.

 

[HaxMode]

i find this very worrying one of best parts of eu4 is how much freedom it has you can restore the norse faith, form tibet and become a horde, restore the roman empire are these things unrealistic yes are they incredibly fun again yes would you be allowed to do this in a simulation probably not, the best part eu4 is that it is so much like a board game.

I really have to disagree on that one. I love small-scale roleplay where I unite my home region/culture and work towards being the #1 GP by say, 1700. I like pretty borders and a slow underdog story. I keep my economy stable and don't immediately do the meta thing of going to 0% crownland and maxing out priviledges. I often don't care about absolutism because I almost never really want to expand that much by then.

But then to have an actually fun game like this I need to consciously play massively suboptimally, because the most effective thing to do would be constant truce juggling warfare and a perpetual debt economy. Which just feel realy dumb of a playstyle but that's what the mechanics facilitate.

There's a reason why the most common complaint is that noone ever plays till the Age of Revolutions, or even to Absolutism sometime. People like their local conflicts, defeating their nemesis, and feeling accomplished. But then there's still 200 years of the game left but all your goals are already done. If the game has a more realistic progression people will actually enjoy playing it all the way to the end date.

 

[viola]

That being said, I do not think a French defeat in the 100 years war should have a 50/50 outcome. Neither a tartar victory on the Ugra river. There are fundamentals behind these, reasons why it happened the way it happened. French large population for #1, a starting sense of national unity and the desire of the nobility to reject a foreign king (after all, that’s why they refused the succession through female line), a popular unity behind the king to stop the rampancy of mercenary groups pillaging the country etc.

To me this seems like looking at how things went historically and making up reasons a posteriori to explain why our course of history was always the most likely to happen, but if England was the one who ended up on top in the 100 years wars we would very likely see different takes, like how France was the most decentralized kingdom in Western Europe though the Middle Ages, with weaker central authority compared to the Holy Roman Empire before the Golden Bull, and a country with such a weak government was never going to win against a more centralized power like England, and it was especially inevitable in the context of European countries becoming ever more centralized.

History is more like the combination of both complex and slow-moving trends, be they political, social, economic, environmental, etc. and a series of complete freak events and human unpredictability that can work in tandem or against these trends. The 100 years war was something that lasted more than a 100 years, and in 1337 it could have gone down in countless possible directions. Maybe bad weather at the worst time or some other accident causes the English to never get their early victories going, and the war just fizzles out, or maybe the French kings get a really bad series of unfortunate events that leads the Plantagenets to get the French throne like they wanted.
At a certain point of the conflict the English had occupied all of Northern France and were sitting in Paris, the French were in a really bad spot, and then a French teenager came out of nowhere, claiming to have been ordered by God to free France from the English, and then through charisma alone she starts a series of event that reignited the French counter-offensive that would eventually result in repelling the English. There were overarching trends and things like the development of an early national identity and centralization were things that were going to happen, but at the same time Joan of Arc possibly changed the course of European history and if she wasn't historical we'd be calling it the worst piece of writing ever.

 

[Roman Shikula]

Will project Caesar be multi-threaded? More so than EU4? How many threads? The talk mentioned how Vic 2 wasn't multi-threaded, and I am hoping the threading can be done to efficiently use multiple threads that would allow users with more cores to have a greater performance. Hope late game will not be a power point simulator with this massive influx of information from pops to locations.

 

[ValhallArchitect]

Personally, I'm not of the opinion that pops are this magical panaceum that automatically makes a grand strategy game better. Victoria 3 did not become the main breadwinner of PDX, they did not prevent Imperator from getting axed and they split Stellaris' playerbase on the issue. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for representing population, but I think in many cases simpler population counters that show spread of things like cultures and religion separately from each other.

In the timeline of CK3 and totally-not-EU5 especially the standard design of pops would lead to having 990-ish peasant pops for every 1000 pops in every province location. Then there's also the topic of there being very low social mobility in the covered periods. But if I'm getting this right, here we get just 1 pop of each combination and they just differ in size which tackles at least one of the issues with pops regarding this time period, so - following the example picture at the end - you may get one fat Greek Orthodox peasant pop and one scrawny Arvanite Catholic noble pop.

Still, I'm not entirely sold on how even this level of granularity is needed vs having simpler separate population splits on cultural, religious and class levels. How often is this even going to come into play? If you oppress the peasants and cause them to rebel, are the Orthodox peasants going to sit the rebellion out because the ruler is also Orthodox, even though statistically they are the most likely to suffer from your anti-peasant policies? Likewise on the other end of the spectrum, if you manage to somehow specifically piss off just Arvanite Catholic nobles, do you just get one dude (who is more likely to be a lowly baron on top of that) rise up in rebellion?

That being said, the single-pop-per-combination with just different sizes of pops (and, consequently, different weights to them in relevant areas) seems like the best implementation of pops so far. I would say I'm optimistic, but given how much the more recent PDX games have burned me, especially in regards to sequels (especially CK3, which downgraded CK from my favorite PDX series because while it does hold great promise for an amazing game with the way its system had been build, the vanilla release and each consequent DLC keeps under-delivering on that promise, most recent case being how they handled legitimacy), that would have been a lie.

Let's say I'm warily intrigued and I hope totally-not-EU5 will not follow suit.

We will have to see.
I gues though, that the specific combination of religion AND culture AND social class will help avoiding the situation you describe. It feels normal that a heretic oppressed peasant would be more upset than a faithful orthodox peasant (also oppressed) subject.

One example could be tartar serfs being more oppressed than russian serfs (although relatively, since both were oppressed). One could understand that one gets more inflamed about oppression than the other, but that does not mean the mechanic could not allow a union of interests.

It seems also logical if you are oppressing muslims andalus and moroccan as Castile, that they should join forces.

Given that the "pop" system seems derived from Vic3, I guess the devs will be taking advantage of the "interest groups" somehow, where certain interests of different pops would converge.

Real example could be the French revolution, where burghers and peasants united in demanding reforms (against the Clergy and Nobility Orders), yet displayed different interests afterwards (not all were agreeing with a secular state for example).

 

[ValhallArchitect]

Will project Caesar be multi-threaded? More so than EU4? How many threads? The talk mentioned how Vic 2 wasn't multi-threaded, and I am hoping the threading can be done to efficiently use multiple threads that would allow users with more cores to have a greater performance. Hope late game will not be a power point simulator with this massive influx of information from pops to locations.

I hope indeed there will be some interface grouping made so that your 30 different cultures, 3 different religions (and their subgroups) and 4 social classes will not appear as 360+ Pops types in your British india VOC administration.

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

It was a dead end because noone cared. People returned to give the game a second chance without mana, but "noone" stuck around because the game was just as bad as with mana.

Your use of "dead end" is misleading. You acknowledge the mana issue was something that kept the market away and once it was resolved, they came back. That there wasn't enough appeal to keep them around is a separate point. A valid point to make, ambiguously phrased with just those two words.

Will project Caesar be multi-threaded? More so than EU4? How many threads? The talk mentioned how Vic 2 wasn't multi-threaded, and I am hoping the threading can be done to efficiently use multiple threads that would allow users with more cores to have a greater performance. Hope late game will not be a power point simulator with this massive influx of information from pops to locations.

Underlying flawed assumption: "More threads is always better performance". Threads achieve better performance when they can cooperate such that the cost of coordination and communication among threads is dwarfed by the gains of parallel processing. Not all types of work can infinitely scale with more available threads. The hope at the end is still valid.

 

[ValhallArchitect]

• Culture, ie, if they are Catalan, Andalusi, Swedish, or something else.
• Religion, ie, Catholic, Lutheran, Sunni etc. Nothing new.
• Social Class. In Project Caesar we have 5 different social classes.
  • Nobles - These are the people at the top of the pyramid.
  • Clergy - These represent priests, monks, etc.
  • Burghers - These come from the towns and cities of a country.
  • Peasants - This is the bulk of the people.
  • Slaves - Only present in countries where it is legal.

Do you plan to differentiate peasants from serfs or to represent local variations like the indian Cast system, or will it be represented differently ?

Western european free peasants vs central/eastern european serfs after the post-Black Death economic reforms made quite a difference in the land economy and the need for political rights, way until 1917.

 

[S.Duka]

View attachment 1094402

Just to be more accurate:

If you will use Arvanite and not Albanian/Arber, then you might as well use Vlaxi instead of Aromanian, and Vulgari instead of Bulgarian because that is how they are called in Greek.
If the game language will be English, then you should use the same standard for all cultures.

 

[Linbot#6018]

I have thought more about the cultural system, and have decided to further upon on it.

Why are Finnish and Hungarian in the same group?

They aren't. I have chosen colours that resemble ethnolinguality, they are for eye pleasure.

BUT

They do have similarities. I do know that a Hungarian is probably more related to a Romanian both genetically and culturally, but we can have both Hungarian similarities with Finnish AND Romanian, instead of going with one.

You see, I have added a small thing called influence zones. Influence zones work just like cultures. For Example:


Ungaric Languages:

Erdely (Influenced by Romanian), Hungarian (Influenced by Romanian)

First of, yes, I am too bored to make a graphic about this. But one may understand what I have tried to do here. Every subculture in this game gets revamped and becomes a culture isolate. A culture isolate can be totally influenced by another culture, say, Hungarian and Romanian, or just be partly influenced in some localities, like Turkish.

An ethnicity cannot influence itself, like Danish can't influence Anglo-Frisian since they are cousins.

A culture with the same macrogroup-- for example, Germanic-- does not have much buffs when they conquer a cousin ethnicity's land, just a bit less painful from a different totally unrelated subgroup. But when they manage to conquer most, if not all, of their cousin ethnicity's land, the fun begins.

Every macrogroup should get their own formable nation, in my opinion. Sounds cliché, but, Arabia for the Arabic, Budun for the Turkic, Germany for the Germanic, etc. When a macrogroup's nation gets formed, every subgroup gets merged into one huge macrogroup, slowly. (By slowly, I mean a century or two, but even then, it may be unhistorical with ones like Sinitic).

If you still have things to tell such as ''You can't just expect that Maari people understand people from Hungary better than they do for the Russians.'' or that ''The game would be unbalanced'' or ''Indo-Europeans are culturally unrelated'' please, I beg you, read the whole text again, head to the start.

In my humble opinion Hungarian should be in a culture group all by itself.l

All I can ask for in terms of suggestions for the topic of pops is to make sure the avenues for modders to change pops, be it the types or how they function within the game time, are easy to access and understand if possible.

I can only cross my fingers that because Johan is developing this game we will not end up with the awful Vic3 system where in order to do something as basic as changing the owner of a province you need to find that province in 3 separate lists (state regions, pops, and buildings) and change each one of them.

Personally, I'm not of the opinion that pops are this magical panaceum that automatically makes a grand strategy game better. Victoria 3 did not become the main breadwinner of PDX, they did not prevent Imperator from getting axed and they split Stellaris' playerbase on the issue. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for representing population, but I think in many cases simpler population counters that show spread of things like cultures and religion separately from each other.

In the timeline of CK3 and totally-not-EU5 especially the standard design of pops would lead to having 990-ish peasant pops for every 1000 pops in every province location. Then there's also the topic of there being very low social mobility in the covered periods. But if I'm getting this right, here we get just 1 pop of each combination and they just differ in size which tackles at least one of the issues with pops regarding this time period, so - following the example picture at the end - you may get one fat Greek Orthodox peasant pop and one scrawny Arvanite Catholic noble pop.

Still, I'm not entirely sold on how even this level of granularity is needed vs having simpler separate population splits on cultural, religious and class levels. How often is this even going to come into play? If you oppress the peasants and cause them to rebel, are the Orthodox peasants going to sit the rebellion out because the ruler is also Orthodox, even though statistically they are the most likely to suffer from your anti-peasant policies? Likewise on the other end of the spectrum, if you manage to somehow specifically piss off just Arvanite Catholic nobles, do you just get one dude (who is more likely to be a lowly baron on top of that) rise up in rebellion?

That being said, the single-pop-per-combination with just different sizes of pops (and, consequently, different weights to them in relevant areas) seems like the best implementation of pops so far. I would say I'm optimistic, but given how much the more recent PDX games have burned me, especially in regards to sequels (especially CK3, which downgraded CK from my favorite PDX series because while it does hold great promise for an amazing game with the way its system had been build, the vanilla release and each consequent DLC keeps under-delivering on that promise, most recent case being how they handled legitimacy), that would have been a lie.

Let's say I'm warily intrigued and I hope totally-not-EU5 will not follow suit.

I think the game should have either the system it has right now, or just not track populations at all. The system you are proposing is the worst of both worlds, where the Ottoman empire will slowly be overtaken by Christian Turks.

 

[SauronGorthaur]

We will have to see.
I gues though, that the specific combination of religion AND culture AND social class will help avoiding the situation you describe. It feels normal that a heretic oppressed peasant would be more upset than a faithful orthodox peasant (also oppressed) subject.

One example could be tartar serfs being more oppressed than russian serfs (although relatively, since both were oppressed). One could understand that one gets more inflamed about oppression than the other, but that does not mean the mechanic could not allow a union of interests.

It seems also logical if you are oppressing muslims andalus and moroccan as Castile, that they should join forces.

Given that the "pop" system seems derived from Vic3, I guess the devs will be taking advantage of the "interest groups" somehow, where certain interests of different pops would converge.

Real example could be the French revolution, where burghers and peasants united in demanding reforms (against the Clergy and Nobility Orders), yet displayed different interests afterwards (not all were agreeing with a secular state for example).

Yeah, but out of these examples only the first one requires splitting population the way Paradox decided to do. In the Castille example the only factor at play is the religious, so there is no need for calculating Muslim Moroccans and Muslim Andalusians separately and all that is required for the game to look at is the religious split of the population.

Ditto for the French revolution, where the focused factor are (certain) social classes, so the game would just need to look at the social split here. And nothing about treating each axis separately would prevent burghers and peasants from joining forces. It would just not require treating Catholic French peasants, Catholic Burgundian peasants, Catholic French burghers, Catholic Burgundian burghers, Lutheran French peasants, Lutheran Burgundian peasants, Lutheran French burghers and Lutheran Burgundian burghers (spiraling into more and more combinations the more cultures and religions are in France at the time) separately in a situation where the class of the population should be the relevant factor for their decision-making.

I think the game should have either the system it has right now, or just not track populations at all. The system you are proposing is the worst of both worlds, where the Ottoman empire will slowly be overtaken by Christian Turks.

And what precisely would make it so? Especially the Christian part. And even if you Christianize the country, why would that also turn everyone into Turks? Also, the homogenization of a country relies on the strength of the conversion mechanic and there's nothing about the proposed pop system that would inherently prevent homogenization. Ditto for EU4, where most countries religiously convert all provinces and by the end game also invest into cultural conversion. Even more so for the player.

 

[Demorag]

peasants with x and y

Assuming the game is set to start in the late medieval era and progress into early modernity I think that the progression between slavery, serfdom and free peasants, together with the decline of feudalism is imperative to make the game feel believable and immersive. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest strengths of MEIOU and Taxes, that you have strong internal political and economic players pursuing their own goals. This makes centralisation and the abolishment of feudal privileges and institutions a big goal for players and makes the world more immersive.

In general, internal politics and internal agents working towards their own goals is something that otherwise only CK has and what made me spend thousands of hours in CK2&3 already.

 

[ValhallArchitect]

Yeah, but out of these examples only the first one requires splitting population the way Paradox decided to do. In the Castille example the only factor at play is the religious, so there is no need for calculating Muslim Moroccans and Muslim Andalusians separately and all that is required for the game to look at is the religious split of the population. Ditto for the French revolution, where the focused factor are (certain) social classes, so the game would just need to look at the social split here.

Sure, they could display it per religion and per culture as well, for what we know so far.
But perhaps they made it that way because there are other features which we are not aware of, as of yet.
Let’s see.
At least they said they had no performance issue

 

[Brynjar]

Your use of "dead end" is misleading. You acknowledge the mana issue was something that kept the market away and once it was resolved, they came back.

It was a dead end, as in it was a complete waste of time to address the very loud crowds. Mana was never the issue with imperator. The issue was, and still is, that it is a boring game, with or without mana. Removing it was a complete waste of developer resources. Its removal was caused by the outcry.

That there wasn't enough appeal to keep them around is a separate point.

That's the whole point. Anyone able to see past the "hurr durr mana" crowds would have seen that mana was never the problem. Removing mana got us nowhere, i.e. it was a dead end. Anyone who still thinks Imperator's failure was caused by Johan's insistence on releasing the game with mana and single consuls deserves another DOA game. If project Caesar launches with an AI as passive as Imperator, as bad a trade system, terrible UI and the majority of tags having no interesting game mechanics, it will be a very bad game, just like Imperator.