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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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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
Let's say the wargoal is Barcelona against Aragon and we siege it and also win a decisive battle inside it,the war score is now around 40-50%

Do we need to take all of Catalonia for the occupation warscore to register?how much do we need to exactly occupy?if we only occupy Barcelona itself how long is it going to take on average for Aragon to accept our demands for the location?


On another note,please make sure the ticking warscore goes faster than EU4,what you said is possible in that game too but since it takes a long time(a few years) for it to work and during that time you can just take the entire country it doesn't work.Hopefully next week we see that the peace deal system has been improved.
 
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.

I disagree...the Ottomans conquered Egypt in a year or two. There should be processes in which one power expands rapidly (as well as others slowly) while large empires stagnate while others collapse rapidly. The game shouldn't be predictable: that's boring. There are countless examples of powers that arise quickly and suddenly, they are not always simple things that have to be constantly watered until after a long time they become a tree...
 
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@Linbot#6018 (since at this point trying to keep up with... whatever example we were arguing about wasn't actually going anywhere useful to the actual point, which is how to better represent the process of integrating foreign-conquered territories and my contrived attempts at justifying the dev's approach weren't helping matters), I think my issue is mostly that I don't like the "passive gain" idea, since it was by no means guaranteed that there would be an actual desire from a state side of things to integrate a given location.

Egh... can't really think of a good system, personally. Any ideas of how you think this should work, as a broader mechanic of "integrated" versus "unintegrated" territory (not counting cores which are a whole other can of worms)?
I think my real problem here is that this whole system involves "province micro". It could just use areas instead, but another idea is to have it work with cultures, i.e. you use a cabinet action to core that group of locations in which a particular culture is the majority. Though you could argue that if it worked like that it would not be sufficiently distinguished from the accepted culture mechanics, and actually to some extent I'm not even confident I believe those two things should be separate tbh.
 
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I know PC will probably be less blobby then EU4 and WC will be near impossible but a conquer all of Europe should be pretty doable. There should be an easy (easy but long time is more than fair) way to get CBs for any nation you border. If you’re say Cath Tuetons in 1500 and you want to invade France after you control all of the Northern European coast but Cath France isn’t your rival or anything like that there should be a way to get a cb.
 
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How does gaining warscore work in a war with landless countries? I understand that, for example, during a war with ABC, most of the warscore will come from battles, but if a BBC (building base country) or society of pops doesn’t have an army, and since they don’t have own any land we can occupy, how can we enforce our demands in a peace treaty?
 
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I think my real problem here is that this whole system involves "province micro". It could just use areas instead, but another idea is to have it work with cultures, i.e. you use a cabinet action to core that group of locations in which a particular culture is the majority. Though you could argue that if it worked like that it would not be sufficiently distinguished from the accepted culture mechanics, and actually to some extent I'm not even confident I believe those two things should be separate tbh.
Maybe I need to add "administrative divisions" in some capacity after all...
 
So, what happened to the obnoxious mechanic from EU3 where cores for tags that aren't the primary tag of their culture disappear after 50 years which makes certain historical outcomes impossible and was created to fix an issue that didn't even exist in EU4 despite sticking around in EU4. Is it finally kill?
 
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I disagree...the Ottomans conquered Egypt in a year or two. There should be processes in which one power expands rapidly (as well as others slowly) while large empires stagnate while others collapse rapidly. The game shouldn't be predictable: that's boring. There are countless examples of powers that arise quickly and suddenly, they are not always simple things that have to be constantly watered until after a long time they become a tree...
Maybe the system allows us to do something similar? With more warscore to work with and perhaps a better CB and some advances, taking land is not the hardest part (albeit I assume we no longer get special inherit CBs, but hard to say without knowing anything about special CBs or the missions), but making it function administratively, taxing it and making the land have excess productivity. How fast did the Ottomans do that historically? Very hard to nail down, obviously it was more of a gradual process (which the game for the sake of good gameplay and not over-complicating things makes a 25-50 interval). But the Mamluks still had some local power before Ali Pasha's takeover and reforms, and the primary military force of the empire remained Turks and converted Europeans, not Egyptians and Syrians.

 
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I think my real problem here is that this whole system involves "province micro". It could just use areas instead, but another idea is to have it work with cultures, i.e. you use a cabinet action to core that group of locations in which a particular culture is the majority. Though you could argue that if it worked like that it would not be sufficiently distinguished from the accepted culture mechanics, and actually to some extent I'm not even confident I believe those two things should be separate tbh.
For some context to my first reply, administrative divisions would be simple: a scripted GUI and targeted action towards any location to "create an administrative division centered at this location". You can then target other locations (or provinces) to "add to an administrative division" (targeting a province targets all locations in that province not currently in an administrative division" to add to an existing administrative division (no, not bothering with sanity checks; you want to do dumb administrative divisions, go for it, I won't stop you). The administrative division will start with a name based on the location you chose at the top, though if able I'd let you be able to rename them to whatever you want. Administrative divisions also have a capital; if possible I'd make it so that there are some buildings that only apply their bonuses in the capital of an administrative division, and possibly apply effects to the whole thing. If not possible, not the end of the world.

Each administrative division can be assigned a governor and a task, where the governor is any character and the task is pretty much any of those things that in the base game you'd have a cabinet minister assigned to do for a province or area, except in this case it's being done to the whole administrative division. The key is two factors: each administrative division increases your court cost by a fixed amount (to prevent micro-divisions to game the system), and each administrative division's effectiveness is proportionate to how many locations are in that administrative division (to encourage not creating one administrative division over all of France).

The downside to this approach is that it becomes much more easy to snowball in the sense that you're no longer so limited in terms of your ability to integrate foreign territory, but you still are limited in the sense that "faster integration" requires a steeper and steeper court cost. Given that these locations are likely not paying you much in the way of taxes in the first place (since you're going to have dissatisfied people and low control as a baked-in consequence to a lack of integration), you're going to have a seriously difficult time trying to solidify an empire you built overnight with sweeping conquests. Either you suffer in terms of costs (loading up on governors but bankrupting yourself due to the sheer volume), or you eat the inefficiencies of more reasonable-sized administrative divisions that are going to be spending much longer whittling away at integration, assuming you're even bothering with assigning them to integrate the area that they administer (depends on your goals).

And honestly I don't think "not enough ministers" is a good anti-snowball mechanic.
 
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Maybe the system allows us to do something similar? With more warscore to work with and perhaps a better CB and some advances, taking land is not the hardest part (albeit I assume we no longer get special inherit CBs, but hard to say without knowing anything about special CBs or the missions), but making it function administratively, taxing it and making the land have excess productivity. How fast did the Ottomans do that historically? Very hard to nail down, obviously it was more of a gradual process (which the game for the sake of good gameplay and not over-complicating things makes a 25-50 interval). But the Mamluks still had some local power before Ali Pasha's takeover and reforms, and the primary military force of the empire remained Turks and converted Europeans, not Egyptians and Syrians.

It is not hard at all. The Ottomans used their devshirme system to send governors specially educated in Constantinople. The Levant was rather integrated fast. Egypt was left to the Mamluks and stayed a semi-independent place until the rise of Muhammed Ali. Iraq was a frontier region and was neglected whereas the Hejaz region was indirectly controlled over the Hashimites. After Selim's conquest, some governors tried to rise up, but the Levant was in firm Ottoman hands under Süleyman the magnificant.

The reason why Egypt stayed semi-autonmous was also not because the Ottomans didnt have the means to enforce their rule, but because it was very conveniant. They get consistant taxes in return the Mamluks basically rule. Not that it was this easy (there was a constant power-struggle between janissaries, mamluks, the ottoman governor and various other players), but the Ottoman dynastsy was statisfied with the status quo and didnt want to bother for more.

With how thinks are, I just hope they dont use the EU4 system and make all Mamluk controlled land one eyalet. An event should trigger and give the Levant as cores (that have to be integrated) and egypt stays a semi-autonomous region, unless player intervention and action. Hejaz should also be controlled by the Hashimites as vassal (that doesnt join wars). Unless player intervention and action.
 
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Slightly off-topic, but still relevant:

I just hope the AE mechanics dont work the same as in EU4 and has some logic behind it. Some nations are meant to expand fast and rapidly, like the Ottomans. If I play the Ottomans like in EU4 and the AE mechanic is like in EU4, then I will be essentially blocked to play the game 100 or so years into the game. I dont mind coalition forming, but if I aggressively expand into Anatolia and then the Balkan and I generate AE across Europe (-200 or even lower AE as an example) and coalitons form at -50 with a static ticker, I will have the entity of Europe in a coalition with me that wont go away for the rest of the game, which is absolute nonsense. Fighting a coalition should reset AE and players should be able to reduce AE somehow faster. It should exponentially tick faster down, if I am not at war with a special region (e.g. I dont wage war in Europe for 30 years, so there should be no coalition left, while coalitions stay up, if I wage war every 5 years in the caucasus region with nations around the caucasus).
 
It is not hard at all. The Ottomans used their devshirme system to send governors specially educated in Constantinople. The Levant was rather integrated fast. Egypt was left to the Mamluks and stayed a semi-independent place until the rise of Muhammed Ali. Iraq was a frontier region and was neglected whereas the Hejaz region was indirectly controlled over the Hashimites. After Selim's conquest, some governors tried to rise up, but the Levant was in firm Ottoman hands under Süleyman the magnificant.

The reason why Egypt stayed semi-autonmous was also not because the Ottomans didnt have the means to enforce their rule, but because it was very conveniant. They get consistant taxes in return the Mamluks basically rule. Not that it was this easy (there was a constant power-struggle between janissaries, mamluks, the ottoman governor and various other players), but the Ottoman dynastsy was statisfied with the status quo and didnt want to bother for more.

With how thinks are, I just hope they dont use the EU4 system and make all Mamluk controlled land one eyalet. An event should trigger and give the Levant as cores (that have to be integrated) and egypt stays a semi-autonomous region, unless player intervention and action. Hejaz should also be controlled by the Hashimites as vassal (that doesnt join wars). Unless player intervention and action.
That war occured in PC after 170 years, hardly "EG" still, so I hope we'll have tools to better integrate by that time. Also, the various revolts, even if they were successfully put down, it would tend to show it wasn't "fully" integrated. I agree I'd prefer for systems to slowly progress and cabinet to increase them furthermore, but for the most part, integration ought to be something that requires state intervention to happen, barring some special cases / specific policies or advance.
 
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I've thought about it more and I really hope these changes don't add a lot of micromanagement. This is something EU4 specifically moved away from over time as it was a bother. Please don't make players need to build a spy network for every single casus belli, just specific ones. Reconquest or being pirated shouldn't need a spy network, these things fall in your lap. And don't make people integrate every province, make it happen slowly over time and allow the cabinet to speed it up, or allow automation of the cabinet action.
 
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That war occured in PC after 170 years, hardly "EG" still, so I hope we'll have tools to better integrate by that time. Also, the various revolts, even if they were successfully put down, it would tend to show it wasn't "fully" integrated. I agree I'd prefer for systems to slowly progress and cabinet to increase them furthermore, but for the most part, integration ought to be something that requires state intervention to happen, barring some special cases / specific policies or advance.
Not sure what you mean with "occured in PC after 170 years, hardly EG", but the first revolts in the Levant were by defacting Mamluks that were put down by other Mamluks. I would hardly portray this as the region revolting against the Ottomans. Clearly the region was loyal to the Ottoman throne. There were other revolts happening (e.g. mid 19th century), but they were directed at the governor himself, not the Ottoman dynasty. Various Ottoman sultans were quite popular among their arab subjects, getting prayers in friday-prayers and poems written for them by arab poets. It usually went along with the Ottoman conquest of christian territory. From Bruce Masters we also know for a fact that arab cities massively profitted from Ottoman rule in the first century of Ottoman rule. So I dont see a reason to dispute the fact of Ottoman ruler over the Levant. From Selim to Süleyman we are talking about ~10-20 years, entirely within the intended timeframe of integration (make it 25 years or 30 years for full control for all I care).

The Ottomans also hired local arab troops and built fortifications along the pilgrimage road. The pilgrimages were also organized by the Ottomans. Idk where the "not fully integrated" part would come in. You may argue that various governors did a bad job, but I dont see how that should be an exclusivly Ottoman thing, since feudal structure in Europe also had good and bad governors. Like the Ottomans have janissaries stationed in the Levant. They built fortifications wherever they seem them fit. They hired mercenaries and local troops and moved them around, however they want to. There was no local rule, but direct ottoman rule through governors that were specially educated and sent from Constaninople. Where is the "not integrated" part? You may argue that the local mufti was elected locally and that he had more sympathy among the locals or that arabs in general were not conscripted until the 19th century, but that is more related to the Ottoman style of governing than to not being integrated. The only area in the Levant, where you have a point, are the druze. They were left to themselves and governed themselves, however this also happened with the kurds in south east anatolia.

It would help if we knew more about the various governors, but such an analysis does not exist as of now. Hence, I would let the Ottomans incooperate the Levant, but make a special status for Hejaz and Egypt. The various maghreb states were also de facto independent, but that comes with proximity anyways. Or they can introduce a special eyalet system.
 
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I don't get why there should be less total wars than in eu4. As far as I understand the war score system is the same. And that didn't hinder the AI of fighting to the death every time over thefe
 
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