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Tinto Talks #3 - March 13th, 2024

Welcome to the third week of Tinto Talks, where we talk about our upcoming game, which has the codename “Project Caesar.” Today we are going to delve into something that some may view as controversial. If we go back to one of the pillars we mentioned in the first development diary, “Believable World,” it has 4 sub pillars, where two of them are important to bring forward to today.

Population
The simulation of the population will be what everything is based upon, economy, politics, and warfare.

Simulation, not Board Game.
Mechanics should feel like they fit together, so that you feel you play in a world, and not abstracted away to give the impression of being a board game.

So what does that mean for Project Caesar?
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Every location that can be settled on the maps can have “pops,” or as we often refer to them in Project Caesar; People. Most of the locations have people already from the start of the game. Today we talk about how people are represented in our game, and hint at a few things they will impact in the game.

A single unit of people in a single location can be any size from one to a billion as long as they share the same three attributes, culture, religion, and social class. This unit of people we tend to refer to as a pop.
  • 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.

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There are a few other statistics related to a Pop, where we first have their literacy, which impacts the technological advancement of the country they belong to, and it also impacts the Pop’s understanding of their position in life.

Another one is their current satisfaction, which if it becomes too low, will cause problems for someone. Satisfaction is currently affected by the country’s religious tolerance of their religion, their cultural view of the primary culture, the status of their culture, general instability in the country, <several things we can’t talk about just yet>, and of course specially scripted circumstances.

There are also indirect values and impacts from a Pop on the military, economical and political part of the game as well, which we will go into detail in future development diaries.

Populations can grow or decline over time, assimilate to other cultures, convert to religions, or even migrate.

Most importantly here though, while population is the foundation of the game, it is a system that is in the background, and you will only have indirect control over.

What about performance then?

One of the most important aspects of this has been to design this system and code it in a way that it scales nicely over time in the game, and also has no performance impact. Of course now that we talked about how detailed our map is with currently 27,518 unique locations on the map, and with many of them having pops, you may get worried.

14 years ago, we released a game called Victoria 2, that had 1/10th of the amount of locations, but we also had far more social classes (or pop-types) as we called them there. That game also had a deep political system where each pop cared about multiple issues, and much more that we don’t do here. All in a game that for all practical purposes was basically not multi-threaded in the gamelogic, and was still running fast enough at release.

Now we are building a game based on decades of experience, and so far the performance impact of having pops is not even noticeable.


Next week, we will talk about how governments work a bit, but here is a screenshot that some may like:

1710317019801.png
 
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Looking through like one video of "every year in India" maps I would think 1310-1330. Definitely enough information to figure it out for someone who knows more about this history though.
i checked a video on history of indochina and I think it will be between 1368 and 1380
 
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Curious to see how it will handle new world populations like, i sweeden colonized brazil, and afterwards britain took that colony could we have a quebec situation ? where there would be 2 types of brazilian pops ? or 4 if you count slaves
I am also curious how colonial pops will be handled. Will they remain their original culture? Or will they assimilate into a new colonial culture? And if so who assimilates to what culture and how is divided regionally if at all?
 
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Could be the state of Morea or another place right after the fall of Constantinople before Turkish migration. Could also be somewhere in the Second Bulgarian Empire before its collapse in the late 1300s.
I feel like Morea would be a stretch. I'm fairly certain they didn't have a population of 1.26 million during the time period this game likely covers.

Edit: Especially with the large Bulgarian population present. Seems more likely to be the Byzantine Empire towards the end of its existence.
 
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This is just disappointing, i don't care at all for the focus on simulation i want an actual Grand Strategy game not a population simulator like VIC2. I actually like EU4 and would rather a "hypothetical sequel" be more build on EU4, rather than VIC and I:R systems. Though I'm sure it will be popular on the forums here, since everything that emulates VIC2 and lately I:R is "good" despite those games being very unsuccessful.
 
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i totally love this not eu5, although i love eu4 so much it'll be sad to see it go
EU5 (or not, it's a mystery after all) so far seems to have stronger foundations than EU4 and is seemingly learning from prior entries in the EU series, Imperator and even Victoria.

While the sheer wealth of content EU4 has accumulated over the years may keep it ahead for a little while, the more interesting mechanics this game is already displaying (informed by decades of experience) suggest to me it will indeed eclipse EU4 rather handily.
 
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Very controversial dev diary.

EUV will have pie charts*

* Actually they're donut charts, which are just as bad
Donut charts are better than pie charts as it makes it easier to get an idea about the size of the smaller bits.



I would say that 'People' have 4 attributes that make them discrete as they are separated by location as well.
 
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Wow, just wow. Imperator:Rome sacrifice won't be in vain, and V2 fans will get something for them too... Isn't it too good? Thanks, Johan and Tinto!
 
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As we all know the Industrial Revolution was kickstarted by the invention of Population in 1836. Before that, there were just a few hundred guys in the world, ruling over their Development and commanding a handful of their pals to convert some of their Development into a different religion, make diplomatic pacts with the other guys etc. But on January 1st 1836 suddenly there were millions of people everywhere and the world changed forever.
Don't forget the missing 16 year period Population spent in development!
 
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Wow, I somewhat expected a pop system, but I though it would be a little more abstracted with individual units akin to Imperator, not more granular population values. Does this have to do with better historical estimates for the time period? Love the pops basically being of different estates now!

I'm interested in what this will bring for conversion and migration, and I'm sure it'll be a game changer for colonisation!
 
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This is just disappointing, i don't care at all for the focus on simulation i want an actual Grand Strategy game not a population simulator like VIC2. I actually like EU4 and would rather a "hypothetical sequel" be more build on EU4, rather than VIC and I:R systems. Though I'm sure it will be popular on the forums here, since everything that emulates VIC2 and lately I:R is "good" despite those games being very unsuccessful.
Just for you to know, EU3 had "numbers" of population and EUIV at its release didn't have Dev, but base tax. What you claim as being an integral part of EU has only been there for a few years.

I for one am glad the game will lean towards more simulation and less unrealistic mechanics, and I look forward for next week DD.
 
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In the top map, Sri Lanka has a population of 899,000. The island didn’t have a population of around 1 million until the early 1800s. Unless something serious happened that reduced the population beforehand.
 
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27518 provinces, using eu4 definition of that word, sounds both insane and super fun. Now please tell me that terrain wont be visible when zooming in political map mode and im preordering, because pretty political map is one of the key aspects in grand strategy games for me.
 
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Pls dont make byzantium op at the start because of combined dlc purchase ability of byzaboos, historical accuracy please :D
 
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ahh... tasty map modes <3

*edit*

ohhh... even more tasty... the graphic for pops ... it is flat... beautiful flat artwork... please be everywhere
 
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Just for you to know, EU3 had "numbers" of population and EUIV at its release didn't have Dev, but base tax. What you claim as being an integral part of EU has only been there for a few years.

I for one am glad the game will lean towards more simulation and less unrealistic mechanics, and I look forward for next week DD.
Quoting myself, just so I can show this :
1710341243387.png

Absence of pop? I don't think so.

And here is a screenshot from the Art of War era (2014)

1710341377518.png

Do you see development here? I don't!
 
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27518 provinces, using eu4 definition of that word, sounds both insane and super fun. Now please tell me that terrain wont be visible when zooming in political map mode and im preordering, because pretty political map is one of the key aspects in grand strategy games for me.
tbh, I hope we get a terrain map mode like in Imperator, so pretty AND functional
 
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