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Tinto Talks #32 - 9th of October 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks , the Happy Wednesday, where we talk about our upcoming, unannounced, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will talk about what happens when some of the pops in your country are not entirely convinced of its greatness.

Rebel Factions

There are five different categories that a rebel faction can belong to.
  • Nationalist, for all independence movements.
  • Pretender, for when they want another ruler.
  • Slave, for when they want to be free.
  • Religious, if a different religious group they want independence, else they want to convert the country
  • Estate, for when they are really unhappy and want their society to change.

patriots.png

A fair number of pops, and 12 locations, this could be a challenge..

Pops and Rebel Factions
Now let's go back to Tinto Talks #17, where we first mentioned that Pops have satisfaction, and when that is low enough a pop will join a rebel faction. The levels at which a pop joins or leaves a faction have some different factors, but the way to keep a pop from joining a rebel is to make sure they are satisfied with life.

Now, let's take a look at some Sardinian peasants in Cagliari, which has recently been conquered by Aragon, just before the start of the game.

sardinians.png

For some reason people tend to be a bit upset when conquered.

Sadly we can not make the commoners estate more happy in Aragon, as they are already at 100% satisfaction, so the +25% bonus is the maximum we can get. Otherwise to make the estates happy you can always reduce taxes or grant them more privileges.

One obvious solution here is to make them integrated which would reduce the conquered penalty of 50% to 10%, however that will take about 25 years, which may not be quick enough to avoid an uprising. If we build a castle we could add another 10% of satisfaction, and we could also station an army there to keep the peasants in line.

As they lack access to wine and legumes, and currently trade in a muslim market, we could try to deny market access to Al-Jazair, and they would be slightly happier as the wine would be easier to get from an Italian market.

All of this would make the satisfaction positive at least, but we need to get it above 29.74%, which is not feasible right now.

join_reb.png

A stable country has a higher threshold for rebels to join..

Sadly we can not yet use the Pacify Population cabinet action which you can get in the Age of Absolutism which reduces the threshold for joining rebels by 5-10% depending on the competence of your monarch and cabinet.

If we go back to rebel factions again, they have a progress value, where when it reaches 100%, and here the rebels, which will take about 23 years, so the uprising is likely to happen before the integration is done, unless you can weaken their power, or increase control over their territories so they get less money.

rebel_progress.png

Sadly Sardinia is a bit too far away for a road from Barcelona..

So what happens when a rebel faction has progressed to 100% then? Well, one of two things will happen, either there will be a civil war or a revolt. First the rebel faction forms a new country, with a relevant name, and takes ownership of the locations where it has a strong support.

Revolts
If they are a rebel type that wants to be independent, then they will start a revolt, which is almost a war where the defender can re-annex any revolter without further aggressive expansion and can always afford the peace cost.

If the culture of these revolting countries is from a country that exists on the map, they will call in the country they used to be a part of it into the revolt, and if they join, and the war is won, the revolter will become a part of the country that they belonged to in the past.


Civil War
These are started by pretenders, some religious rebels, or estate type rebels. Civil Wars work differently than other wars in that you do not have to negotiate a peace. In Civil War, as soon as you would have taken control of a location from a siege or occupation, the location would immediately flip ownership of that location instead.

This means that Civil Wars are almost always fought to the bitter end, and only one country can survive.


End of a Civil War.
As this system has a few similarities with the Civil War systems of Imperator Rome, we have to alleviate some concerns here. In Project Caesar there is no Game Over if you lose a Civil War, but instead you have the option to continue as the winning side. One thing to consider here is that the winner will have different rulers, maybe a different religion, perhaps a new government type, dramatic changes to societal values, reforms and/or privileges.

After all, if the peasants revolt and win, you will not keep your glorious full serfdom monarchy as it once was.

civil_war_lost.png

You don’t have to continue, you can pick the other option for the game over screen!



Next week we will talk more about Diplomacy, and that will for most of you be something you already are aware of, but it will list quite a few new aspects.
 
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Good dev diary, a return to form from the past few I hope. I have some questions. Firstly, will rebels receive a malus to the formation of a full-blown uprising if one has already been put down in the past? Like, if you put down one uprising, will it make another less likely to form in the future / before the state is integrated? In Victoria 2 there is a system where once a rebellion is put down the pops that took part then receive a large reduction to militancy and this system avoided repeat rebellions rather effectively. My second question is about where you mention that other countries could potentially be called into rebellions if they're nationalists and that the rebels could rejoin the country should they win the war. Will this apply to the player as well? If you lose territory and they rebel will you get the same choice to intervene and get that territory back? Will there be any other options for either the player or ai to intervene in rebellions aside from direct and full-scale military intervention through joining the war? For example, perhaps the ai could be given an option to either intervene in the war, support them with condottieri / smaller scale military intervention still utilizing their own forces, perhaps also a third option to support them through mercenaries using money instead of their own forces and manpower, and finally the option to not intervene in any way. I think it feels really shallow that it's either full scale intervention or nothing. And can ai / player not intervene on any rebellions other than those? Perhaps they could do so at the cost of AE? It feels really weird that you would only ever be able to intervene in these types of rebellions when proxy wars happened through minor rebellions many times throughout history, and the people backing rebels don't really care if they have a great reason to do so it just needed to weaken their enemies.
 
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yeah, but if integrated and high control, its less of a problem.
I agree that having high control and therefor stopping rebels from getting funds feels like a very cool feature (in terms of realism and gameplay), but maybe I didn't understand something. Is the conquest unrest malus tied to the fact that in this example, Sardinians are a non-accepted culture, or is it something that's always going to happen ?
I would really prefer for unrest to come only from non-accepted status and control growth rather than having a flat value of unrest due to conquest.

But again, I'm a big fan of how control affects rebels ! I just wished that control growth also affected unrest

Edit : now that I know that the separatism unrest only applies to non accepted culture. My question is simply, why does this separatism get better with integration ? Wouldn't be more realistic, but also engaging to have non-accepted pops stay a significant problem that you'll have to deal with through other means than integration ? (like creating a subject, trying to change your laws, trying to make accepted pops migrate in the region, wait a long time for the unaccepted pops to culture convert thanks to high control...) This would also act as a supplementary limit to expansion and force you to find creative and unique ways to deal with each situation rather than just using a cabinet member to solve the problem
 
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Will it cost aggressive expansion to (re)conquer/(re)integrate the lands that were released by the rebels?

Edit: nvm, pointed out below I suck at reading.
 
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It'd be great if we had the true satisfaction number in parentheses next to the 0% so we know how much we actually have to increase satisfaction by to reach the loyal threshold, so in the example given it'd be 0.00% (-6.93%). In fact, I think this should be done for most, if not all, values that have a cap/floor.

Yes please. Very important.
 
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Will unsatisfied pops also take into consideration how big is their chance to enforce their demands before revolting or determining their goal? For example, I feel like it is super implausible that cretan orthodox pops would revolt against Venice with the goal of converting Venice to orthodox religion. Maybe more tolerance, independence or possibly even a transfer to a nation more tolerant of orthodox christianity like the Ottomans would make more sense as demands.
 
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I agree that having high control and therefor stopping rebels from getting funds feels like a very cool feature (in terms of realism and gameplay), but maybe I didn't understand something. Is the conquest unrest malus tied to the fact that in this example, Sardinians are a non-accepted culture, or is it something that's always going to happen ?
I would really prefer for unrest to come only from non-accepted status and control growth rather than having a flat value of unrest due to conquest.

But again, I'm a big fan of how control affects rebels ! I just wished that control growth also affected unrest
The "conquest" unrest is, I believe, the "separatism" malus that was talked about for any unintegrated location.
 
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As this system has a few similarities with the Civil War systems of Imperator Rome, we have to alleviate some concerns here. In Project Caesar there is no Game Over if you lose a Civil War, but instead you have the option to continue as the winning side

I wish it was more like in Stellaris with Machine Rebellions, where you get to choose the side. I feel that Impertor's gratest sin was that you couldn't be Ceasar.
My biggest issue with how it was done in older games was that parts were designed so that you as a player would intentionally do what you can to trigger it, throw your armies into a corner and intentionally lose. Which is fine if you choose to do so, it is your single player game it, but some previous games actually expected you to do this instead of waging a proper civil war, in other words it felt like you were forced to play in a non-sensical way.

Since this will be most prominent in Revolutionary Era, I hope that the Revolution can either be "Rests the Revolution" or "Support the Revolution, resist the conservatives" depending on your choices, rather than "Trigger the Revolution and intentionally lose by not wasting any of your soldiers". That is, I hope that you can choose the side and if you lose, it's a worse outcome than if you supported the other side.
Though I guess we shall know when the Dev Diary about Revolutions comes in...
 
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All revolts/civilwar factions are unique dynamic tags.

btw, Project Caesar is no longer merely using 3-letter tags like SWE or ENG, but can be 3 to 5 letters. Dynamic tags start at "AAA00"..
And they can even include numbers!

Makes my life so much easier for all the dumb crap I plan on doing to this game.
 
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