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Tinto Talks #30 - 25th September 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, the time of the week when we give you new information about our entirely super secret upcoming game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will talk about how conquest works and how integrating the new locations you have conquered will work. With conquest, we are talking about how you take territory through warfare. For how the actual military campaigns work, I recommend reading Tinto Talks 22, 23 and 24.

Casus Belli
To start a war many feel that you need a casus belli for it, which we will refer to a CB for the rest of this talk. If you lack a CB and start a war you will gain some aggressive expansion and lose some stability. Now while this may not be something you may always want, it is a more lenient way to recover instead of spending precious paper mana like in EU4. However, there are multiple ways to get a CB in this game.

Now, Project Caesar does not have a ‘Fabricate Claim’ button that magically creates a CB on any nation, nor do we have a system of claims, but you have several different options to get a CB.

First of all, there is the super old school way of getting one from an event. This may not cater to everyone's playing style, as it is way too random, but if it was good enough for your parents back in 2001, it is good enough for.. Eh, n/m.

Secondly, we have the option of calling a Parliament and asking them to come up with a valid reason for war against a nearby country. This is powerful, but unless you have a high Crown Power, you may need to negotiate with your Estates for their backing. And Parliaments can not be called every month either, democracy is not even invented yet.

Finally we have the way of creating a CB, when there is a more or less legitimate way to one. First of all, creating a CB on a country requires you to have a spy network in the target country, similar to how claim fabrication works in EU4, but you also need to have some sort of reason to create the type of CB you want. If you let's say play Denmark and want to take back Skåne from Sweden, as you have cores on it, then you can create a ‘Conquer Core’ CB on them, or if they have used Privateers in sea zones where you have a Maritime Presence, you can create another CB on them. There are 50+ different CB you can create depending on circumstances, including everything from ‘Flower Wars’ for countries of Nahuatl religion, ‘Dissolving the Tatar Yoke’ for the tributaries under that International Organization, or ‘Humiliating Rivals’.

war_overview.png

31 allies and subjects for Bohemia, hmmm…

Just remember.. No CB is best CB!


War Goals
Whether you decide that a small border adjustment is needed, or you wish to wage a total war, you need to pick which War Goal you wish to pursue. Different casus belli will allow you to pick different War Goals and the War Goal you pick impacts the cost of conquest as well. A conquer CB will make taking land cheaper, while a ‘humiliation CB will make them more expensive.

A War Goal for a province requires you to occupy that entire province, while a Naval Superiority War Goal will give you a bonus score for blockading the enemy, and defeating their navy if possible.

If your War Goal is fulfilled then the warscore from it ticks up to a maximum of 25, and the total impact from battles in this game can be worth up to 50, while occupations and blockades have no cap and can reach over 100 warscore if possible.

In Project Caesar, therefore, not every war is necessarily a total war like some previous games we have made.

If the War Goal is not fulfilled, it is only possible to get 100% War Score if the winning side controls all of the losing side's locations, and the losing side controls no towns or cities.

This means that if you have your wargoal taken care of, winning some important battles and occupying some land, you will be able to force a reasonable peace on someone.

war_goal.png

Give me liberty or ehh.. annexation?


Integration
So what do you do then, when you have signed a peace and got some new land to your country?

First of all, it is not as simple as a location being a core or not, as Project Caesar introduces a new system of integration for locations. There are four states of integration in this game, first of all the conquered locations, which have a high separatism, lower control, and make pops unlikely to convert or assimilate. This is the state of any location you conquer that is not a core of yours. When a location becomes integrated, separatism drops to one fifth of the previous levels, and control has a higher maximum. When a location becomes a core, the minimum control is higher, and your primary and accepted cultures grow more, while minorities become stagnant. We also have the colonized status, which is after you have colonized a location, and it is not yet a core. A colonized location has lower maximum control.

What is separatism then? Well, it is the reduction of satisfaction for pops that are not of the primary culture. This is very likely to make the locations very unproductive for quite some time.

A location becomes a core automatically if it's integrated OR colonial, and at least 50% of the pops are of the primary or accepted cultures of that country.

core.png

It is beneficial to get your locations to become your cores…

How do you integrate a location then? Well, this is the challenge in Project Caesar, as you do not have any magic paper mana to spend on it, but instead you need to use one of the members of your cabinet to integrate it. At the start of the game, a cabinet member can integrate an entire province at once, but in the Age of Absolutism you have an advance that will let you integrate an entire area at once.

This integration is not instant, but depends on many factors, like the status and the population living in the locations affected, but on average integrating a province may take between 25 and 50 years.

integration.png

And what are all of these factors then?


Stay tuned, as in next week's Tinto Talks, we will talk about how peace treaties themselves work, and which ones we have.
 
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Will we still get free cores on things like ottomans on Constantinople through decision?

Edit: or I guess Castile free integrating Aragon or Poland free integration on Lithuania.
 
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regarding CB’s, how varied will they be?
Can we create CB’s on provinces of our culture/religion without having any cores? Like a “liberate our brethren” or something?
Or what about regular imperialism CB on weaker neighboring nations to bring them under our rule?
It would be nice if we got a list of the available CB’s or is that WIP?
 
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I'll admit I'm a little bit disappointed that integration is still something you actively do, rather than something that happens organically over time, but it overall sounds like a much better system than EU4.

Is there any situation in which integration is a choice you have to weigh up, or is it always a no-brainer to do when you have a free cabinet member?
 
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Glad to see that seperatism only arises from non primary pops. In EU4 it feels so awkward when playing as E.G. Karabakh and conquer armenian coptic provinces from QQ that said provinces then get huge amounts of seperatism to restore armenia.
 
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1. "A conquer CB will make taking land cheaper, while a ‘humiliation CB will make them more expensive." - So it's possible to take land with humiliation CB now (and with Naval Superiority War Goal and other such CB-s, where it is not possible in EU4, except for defender)?
2. When it comes to "lenient way to recovery", does that mean it's also cheaper to trucebreak a nation you lost to, unlike in EU4?

1 - yes
2 - no
 
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So there are no more automatic CBs? You always have to take a manual action to generate a CB before using it, even if it's for something like reconquest?

Yes, unless its given from an event or other content.
 
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Will we still get free cores on things like ottomans on Constantinople through decision?

Edit: or I guess Castile free integrating Aragon or Poland free integration on Lithuania.

No.
 
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Is integration only possible through the cabinet action?
What happens when you annex a subject of yours? How do those territories start out on the scale?

This depends on the level of integration the subject had, the culture of the locations and the type of subject.
 
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I'm not quite sure how this warscore system is different from EU4 and how it changes the total war level of each war. It seems like it still is going to encourage a lot of big wars.
Though I don't really know how you'd encourage limited wars unless you make unclaimed land cause *way* more AE than we see in EU4. I suppose we'll see in the coming weeks.
 
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Can we create CB’s on provinces of our culture/religion without having any cores? Like a “liberate our brethren” or something?

No, you need to use the best CB for that, unless you got religious casus belli creation capabilities.
 
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Is integration required for when we get land diplomatically, like through a royal marriage?

in almost all cases when you do a royal marriage no land is ever exchanged.
 
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hmm, the CB part isn't surprising

I am quite mixed about the culture stuff tho. Even if it becomes stagnating you still have quite a minority inside your nation. While I don't mind too much this procedure, I'd really like to see how you handle cultures and culture groups.

And that is to say, how do you accept new culture and minorities and how do culture groups and in general cultures work? Will we be able to create new ones?

I know this is stuff for another Tinto Talk, but only with knowing this we can have a precise idea how everything will interact
 
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pardon me for asking but this seems a little... slow? as in I feel like I wont be able to get any territory at productivity near my starting for a lot of the campaign.
I do think that's kinda the point of the system. Early game you'll be able to expand slowly and mostly within your culture group (but using tons of subjects may speed that up). Then eventually it will pick up as the action itself gets more powerful and you accept more cultures. It sure feels like a great tool for curbing snowballing and making you feel extra powerful in the first 100 years so you get bored of the campaign.
 
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Idk about "No claims" thing. I guess Cores work as claims in a way, but then how would some Agressive leaders be portrayed? Will they just use No CB or they will have some special "COnquest CB" so they can just agressively expand? And how would Ottomans would conquer Byzantium if they have no cores there? What's their CB for Byz is then?
 
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