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Tinto Talks #35 - 30th of October

Hello everyone and welcome to another Tinto Talks, as it's a Happy Wednesday, the day of the week where we spill information about our super-mega-fantastically-secret game with the code name of Project Caesar.

Today we’ll talk about three relatively related topics, relating to Country Ranks, Great Powers and Hegemonies.

Country Ranks
There are four ranks that countries can have in Project Caesar. It is more similar to EU4 than Imperator in that changing country ranks is something you actively do on your own. Besides having various rules on what a country can do, they also give some benefits, and rather importantly to the player experience, they impact what the countries are called.

The code supports multiple types of ranks at the same level, so modders could in theory add dozens of variants of a duchy rank if they so desire.

The default rank is the County Rank, which all countries default to, unless set up to be something else.

The first rank above that is the Duchy Rank, where you can now guarantee other countries, and a little bit higher diplomatic capacity and power projection. Countries that start on this level include the Duchy of Brittany or the Duchy of Lithuania. To be able to upgrade from a county to a duchy, you can not be in any International Organizations that disallow rank changes, but you also need at least 100,000 pops of your primary culture.

The next rank above that is the Kingdom Rank, which requires 1 million pops of your primary culture and gives a larger diplomatic range and other abilities. This includes countries like the Kingdom of Sweden and the Sultanate of Delhi

The final rank, the Empire Rank, which is the hardest to promote to, allows for a wider variety of diplomatic actions, and other abilities. At the start of the game there is only one Empire in Europe though, the Eastern Roman one. A country must become a Great Power before they are able to attain this rank, and there are special restrictions on Catholic countries from pretending to be emperors without the Pope’s permission.

become_kingdom.png

Yeah, Livonian Order with about 380 Prussians has a bit of a challenge here..

Great Powers
A great power is a country that through advances, population, land area, development, and other factors has risen to be one of the most powerful countries in the world, and as such gains the ability to influence other countries simply by throwing its weight around.

The countries with the highest great power score become great powers. Subjects and countries fighting for their independence may not become Great Powers.

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The countries you’d perhaps expect to be Great Powers in 1337 right?


Currently there are always eight different countries that are the Great Powers, but this is not a design we are 100% satisfied with. We have been talking about making the amount variable per age, or by using a threshold. We’ve also talked about mechanics for regional powers, but all designs so far have some severe drawbacks, for example how we would define the geographical area to make it feel good.

gp_benefit.png

There are some advantages to being a Great Power after all…


Hegemony
This is another feature that was introduced in the ‘Emperor’ DLC for EU4, but here will be a part of the base game. In that game this was a late game mechanic that would pit the most dominant countries against each other. This created a mechanic that most people never saw, and if they saw it in single-player, it was merely a tool to make the player even more powerful when he had already won the game.

In this game, however, the Hegemony mechanics unlock through an advance in the Age of Discovery.

We currently have three types of hegemony, Military, Navy and Economic, in the game, similar to EU4, and you can only be one type of Hegemony at the same time. We could be open to adding maybe a Cultural Hegemony as well, as the next few weeks Tinto Talks will show things about Culture-related systems.

To proclaim a Hegemony you need to be a Great Power, and then have a bigger army, navy or economy than all other great powers. After you proclaim it, you get a bonus where most of it scales with how long you have held the hegemony.

In a game where a casus belli is not always easy to get, the fact that you can always create a Casus Belli on any hegemon, if you are not one yourself, can be beneficial.

If you ever lose a war as a hegemon, you will lose your hegemony.

And remember, if you lose your hegemony, your prestige and diplomatic reputation will suffer.

hegemon.png

This one is kind of fun to have..

Stay tuned, as next week, we will do the first development diary about our new cultural mechanics in Project Caesar.
 
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OK I've gotta ask, why is the Japanese shogunate considered a Great Power?

Also I hope you go with a less rigid system, I think it's best that, if there's like 10 powers of roughly equal power they can be all Great Powers, while on the inverse if you only really have 4 powers that are "great" and then a massive gap between the other 8 then it should just be 4 GP's.

Also as an aside, I think it'd be good if you couldn't see Great Powers if you did not have knowledge over them. Like as France I should not know the Yuan Dynasty are the top GP if I don't have vision over them. More of an immersion thing than anything, and probably pretty minor.

Unsure how I feel about hegemonies. Them being able to get unlocked earlier is fun, but I worry how it'll be balanced and how "video-gamey" it'll feel.
 
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Something very nice I'd love to see implemented would be the ability to use the alpha channel when it comes to flags, here allowing for the Mongol flag to be a triangle. Note that this doesn't require creating a new model, just making parts of it invisible.

at least 100,000 pops of your primary culture.
I;m not sure if I like it. Maybe 1M of primary and ACCEPTED cultures? It feels like a pretty arbitrary limit, as if a minority couldn't rule over majority.

Also as an aside, I think it'd be good if you couldn't see Great Powers if you did not have knowledge over them. Like as France I should not know the Yuan Dynasty are the top GP if I don't have vision over them.
IMO it should still be shown that there is some great power in that position but as "unknown power" or sth.
 
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Let´s say Romania has 10% romanian population and 90% hungarian. Let´s also say it has 1 milion population. When the kingdom will be created, will it also change the name from Romania to Kingdom of Hungary?
 
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I can't say I'm a fan of conflating "rank" and literal noble ranks like that. Can I as a modder rename them to be something else? I can spin up my own "noble title" thing if I wanted; having it be tied to state size is just weird.

The Pope didn't particularly give a damn about how many people resided in Serbia when he gave Stefan Nemanjić the crown. Bulgaria is certainly an Empire in the title sense even if it doesn't at all meet the population requirement.

I've never liked how EU4 conflates these two things, and would really rather not have PC also do so. I don't care about the base game; just let me fix it myself.
 
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If i am a hegemon, and my ally calls me into a war, will i loose my hegemon if my ally lose the war?

How is great power score calculated? Will advancements and institutions play a role in the score? Will score from development (or population) be scaled by control?
 
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The EU4 distribution, after all, was designed after Diplomacy and Naval matters being fed from the same Diplo-points mana well.​

The Diplomatic one is harder to quantify.. How do you become the hegemon in Diplomacy?
 
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Are historical kingdoms with small populations like the kingdom of Navarre kingdom rank? They definetively didn't have a population of 1 million.

yes.
 
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Thanks for a great TT!

A couple of questions on the topic and older topics:

  1. Can you declare war on hypothetical early hegemon Yuan as a European nation if you have not discovered China?
  2. Can a nation lose its Government rank?
  3. What about using characters as diplomats instead of abstracted '0.1 diplomats'?
  4. We should be able to liberate the slaves of all accepted cultures, not only primary culture. As France we should be able to bring home Languedocien and Provancale guys, not only those from around Paris :D
  5. What about adding the request 'Sell province' to the peace deal to simulate the bilateral peace deals when you want to buy the land? This way it will be formally one-sided peace deal and easier for UI. The price will be defined by some unified algorithm.
 
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In terms of the new country ranks, they seem to be well-structured, although I'm not sure what the idea is behind not automatically promoting to a higher tier. I think that worked in Imperator: maybe automatic upgrades for everything except Empire rank?
I think this is because in certain specific situations you shouldn't be able to increase your rank, such as trying to become a kingdom in the HRE. So if it's automatic, it'll leave some players wondering why their rank isn't going up when it normally would at that point.
 
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I like the idea of great powers requiring some kind of threshold depending on age, or perhaps depending on power relative to the #1 great power.

It is silly in eu4 when you do a world conquest, and right at the end the four Hawaiian nations all become great powers.
 
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View attachment 1209374
Something very nice I'd love to see implemented would be the ability to use the alpha channel when it comes to flags, here allowing for the Mongol flag to be a triangle. Note that this doesn't require creating a new model, just making parts of it invisible.


I;m not sure if I like it. Maybe 1M of primary and ACCEPTED cultures? It feels like a pretty arbitrary limit, as if a minority couldn't rule over majority.


IMO it should still be shown that there is some great power in that position but as "unknown power" or sth.

I agree according to Manchu sources there were only 300,000 of them when they invaded the Ming and proclaimed the Qing dynasty
 
Meh. Okay. Nothing exciting or new really. Most exciting and different mechani for me is the Pope having to give permission to be promoted to empire as a catholic. That is really cool.

Cant wait for you to reveal culture
 
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The Diplomatic one is harder to quantify.. How do you become the hegemon in Diplomacy?

Perhaps by successfuly mantaining a large legion of vassals and very high stability? Or successfully allying to a high total of Great Nation points for a long time?

After all, the true empire is the friends we made along the way. ;)
 
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I like the idea of hegemons against other countries, but I don't like the fact that hegemony gives flat boni like in eu4. It goes a bit against the idea of this new game.
 
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