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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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What happens to foreign diplomacy / foreign country if a civil war spawns ?
- as a foreigner can I still interact with / declare war / fabricate CB or spy on both sides of the war ?
- is there a way to "support rebels" i.e join the war on their side even if I did not "fund them" to spawn beforehand (unlike EU4) ?

- What happens if the civil war "ends" before I managed to push my CB on the revolter TAG / on the main TAG ?
Does it "white peace" (weird CK2 mechanic with becoming invalid)m while all I invested was for nothing ? or does the war drag on with the winner TAG (more historical)
 
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Please allow the game tooltip to display negative values for the satisfaction. In the screenshot it appears to have a lower cap of 0.00, which isn't very helpful when in reality it is at -6.93.
 
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One could argue this is how states abuse of their armed forces irl to beat revolts.
Plus, an army you leave there is an army you can't use elsewhere... so it's not like it's an exploit without requirements.

IRL states also didn't have magic omniscience to know exactly who and when and where the revolt happens. IRL garrisons were not aware that all the shouting this time is actually an organized proto-state instead of yet another spontaneous food riot. IRL rebels could make specific plans to cut off and isolate hostile troops, with the advantages of surprise and initiative.

Using the exile flag is not a very elegant solution, but it can't just your troops camping there and fighting a regular battle either. Give them a hefty debuff to discipline or something, to represent scattered guard posts getting overwhelmed. An army deployed for keeping order looks very different from an army deployed for a field battle.
 
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They'll be nicely given the exile flag and have to walk home first.
That feels very odd. Surely defeating the troops which were putting them down should be the first challenge the rebels have to face. William Wallace didn't force the English in Scotland to walk to the border and back again, he fought the ones in Scotland.

It would also feel very annoying for Portugal to have East Timor rebel, then to have to pick up its troops from Timor sail them to Macao or Goa and then sail them back again.
How many pops and how powerful they are they have compared to the total country.
This "power of support" modifier was negative in the screenshot, slowing down how quickly the rebellion would start.

Does having lots of rebel pops mean a faster rebellion (that negative number becomes positive and then gets larger)? Or does the negative number get bigger, creating a slower (but much scarier) rebellion?

Yes, they are normal countries when they have spawned.
I assumed there were some very tricky problems to solve here. How are you sorting out all the tricky diplomatic scenarios that come from this? For example Austria is fighting the Ottomans, and the Austrians have occupied Bulgaria when it rebels.

What happens to that pre-existing war when rebels spawn? Does that hurt the Austrian warscore? Does Austrian occupation delay the rebellion starting? Do the Bulgarians automatically ally with the Austrians (and what happens if parts of Bulgaria are occupied by different countries, potentially in different wars against the Ottomans)?

Also what happens if after rebelling Bulgaria has got involved in a different war with Wallachia and are losing? Will they surrender to the Ottomans once their army has died, or surrender to Wallachia who killed their army and is occupying their land? What happens to that external war once the civil war is over? What happens to the Ottomans if the Bulgarians have surrendered some land to someone else during the civil war?
 
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Do pops always form behind the same pretender or is it possible for multiple pretender factions.

I'm thinking a War of the Three Henrys situation wherein there is Henry III of France, Henry of Navarre supported by Protestant pops, and Henry of Guise supported by the Catholics.

Or would Henry of Navarre be considered a Religious rebel rather than a Pretender rebel?
 
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Awesome stuff, like always! I never commented on the forums until now, but I wanted to participate in the brainstorm and the making of this amazing game, so here are two humble critics and associated propositions to help improve the historic plausibility of the game and the revolt/civil war system:



Critic #1 – In Imperator Rome, the instant location ownership mechanic disables the “automatic control” of the province, since the province capital location would change (which is not very plausible, especially 10 times in a single war). So, the player couldn’t avoid the grind and had to siege down every single location. Not much fun here.

Solution #1 – To avoid the grind, the same automatic sieging system described in TT#23 could be used for civil wars too, with the notable exception that the attacked would gain ownership of the province instead of only occupying it. It would be much less tedious for the player and consistent with the automatic sieging system you shared in TT#23.



Critic #2 – In Imperator, when the attacker gains instant ownership of a location, it would never translate in warscore against its opponent, since no “occupation penalty” is attributed to the defend who just lost a location or a fort. Even when you dominate them militarily, battle warscore would almost never be enough to enforce a peace deal: again, the only solution is to siege down every single location and make sure not a single hostile army escaped to capture a single location at the end of your empire.

Solution #2 – Historically, all civil wars didn’t necessarily end up with one of the belligerents securing a total victory. Indeed, many civil wars ended up in a stalemate and ultimately in a divided empire or state.

In gameplay terms: imagine that at the start of a civil war, a “territory score” (every location would give a certain score, depending on dev/pop/etc.) would be attributed to each opponent. As the war progresses and the belligerents would gain/lose locations, their “territory score” would increase/decrease with a proportional effect on their warscore. This way, civil war could use the instant ownership mechanic AND could be ended before a total victory in enforced.

This would open up a lot of possibilities: an inconclusive and bloody civil war stretched over many years could result in an empire split in two (hello dear Roman Empire). In the case of an oppressed people fighting for independence or slaves fighting for liberty, if they are unable to secure enough warscore for full independence or liberty, they could at least obtain autonomous/vassal status or privileges/partial liberty. The idea here is to multiply the potential results of revolts/civil wars, because otherwise, most rebellions will simply be crushed without any permanent or semi-permanent effect on the game.



Well, that was a much longer post than I expected… I hope it can contribute to the game in any way! Can’t wait to play it!
 
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Very interesting Talk! One thing however, Forts and Soldiers raising pops satisfaction is a bit... awkward? As we know people don't just be happier because their government is putting on guards to make sure they don't revolt. Maybe it can work better as a modifier that raise local threshold for joining a rebel faction?
 
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Does "Sunni nationalists" really sound better than "sunni separatists"? Doesn't make sense to me.
Sunni nationalism exist , check the pan arabism for example or the Ummah vision of a single nation of the muslims .
Daesh were a kind of Sunni wahabi patriots with dreams of reestablishing the old empire , this as i said and you "respectfully disagreed with" without giving a logical counter fits under the primordialism who is a legit nationalist ideal that exist since middle ages .
once more i will insist you lots here are talking out of stereotypes or shallow basics without reading a single thing about the types of medieval nationalism and their examples and events etc

to you the red turbans are just some revolters and not Han nationalists doing the first antimongolism acts
 
Sunni nationalism exist , check the pan arabism for example or the Ummah vision of a single nation of the muslims .
Daesh were a kind of Sunni wahabi patriots with dreams of reestablishing the old empire , this as i said and you "respectfully disagreed with" without giving a logical counter fits under the primordialism who is a legit nationalist ideal that exist since middle ages .
once more i will insist you lots here are talking out of stereotypes or shallow basics without reading a single thing about the types of medieval nationalism and their examples and events etc

to you the red turbans are just some revolters and not Han nationalists doing the first antimongolism acts
I'm not disputing the relevance of ethnic/cultural identity to political ideals throughout history, nor indeed ideals of unifying groups with a common such identity. This whole discussion is about terminology, not mechanics.

However, the term "nationalism" refers to a very specific ideology and specific relationship/shared identity between citizens and the state which I do believe only emerged in the latter half of the early modern period. Usually its emergence is linked to the Peace of Westphalia in a proto form and being more fully realized by the French Revolution, and then spreading around Europe and adjacent regions (eg the Ottoman Empire) during the 19th century. In the medieval era, although proto-national identities did exist in many places, AFAIK it coexisted with (and might be argued, played second fiddle to) tribal, local, feudal, etc identities.

By the way, your example of Sunni nationalism doesn't fit my understanding of the post, as those rebels are just going to try to form their own country from yours, and not unify all people of their religion in the world.

Finally, nitpicking here but pan-arabism cannot be said to be Muslim nationalism, especially when many (most?) of its most well-known supporters were secular and against the latter.
 
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Thoughts on changing it to separatist instead of nationalist? Nationalist feels just wrong in this time period as it wasn't a word or a thing until the victorian era, it didn't exist as a concept and it feels just... like incorrect to label rebels as nationalists when they just aren't.
 
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