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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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@Johan Could you please shed some light on how development is calculated? We had some ideas of our own, but we could be quite a bit of the mark.
Pavia already elaborated; development was done on an ad-hoc basis. The "most developed" cities were given the highest development, other notable centers were given lower development based on comparison to those highest-development cities, and then things flowed outward from there.
 
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Didn't expect JAPAN of all countries to be a great power at this time. Sure they defeated the Mongols but not the first country(or.. any number of consequent countries) to come to my mind when I think of '1330s Superpowers'

They have a high population and is kind of united at that point.
 
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100k and 1 million certainly seem like a very very high amount, for the time period. Unless theres some diplomatic way to advance your rank this should probably be lower? I doubt luxembourg had 100k people at any point in its upbringing, and its still the "duchy of"

Of course, if it is balanced, then who cares. But thats a very imposing number
 
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If my culture group has way less than 1 million pops worldwide, will I be stuck at duchy rank for the next century or so waiting for them to multiply? If so, do you have any potential alternatives for these requirements and can they be modded?


On a different note, did I read correctly, byz is the only empire rank, what about Yuan?

Edit: my bad, byz is the only empire *in Europe*, dunno how I missed that part.
 
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If you ever lose a war as a hegemon, you will lose your hegemony.
This seems odd. If I'm the economic hegemon and I lose a small conflict with another country, in which I lose only a couple of poor locations, while leaving intact all of the territories and resources that make me the economic hegemon, why should I lose the title? An hegemon being defeated in a war should, at most, reduce some of the variables/score that contribute to it being the hegemon, instead of automatically making it lose that title altogether.
 
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I found the fact that naval and economic hegemon in EU4 were different to be quite strange, really. Especially since in the late game, your economy is going to be rich off of trade and production sourced from bird mana things, not taxes like administrative(which will probably only be a third or less of your income later in the game).
 
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Very interesting. I always thought that EU4's Great Power system was far too binary, either you're a GP (and can do all the GP things) or you aren't, regardless if you're the 8th or the 1st. Is this still the case in Project Caesar?

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?

We talked about scaling the GP bonus depending on your rank, it might be something we'll do.
 
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@Johan Could you please shed some light on how development is calculated? We had some ideas of our own, but we could be quite a bit of the mark.

if region x add A
if city add B
if terrain X add C
etc.
 
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I agree with others, the hegemon mechanic is already quite "gamey" and doesn't fit in PC, but having it give modifiers in the area that this country already excels at makes it significantly worse.
 
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I'm still not a huge fan of the portraits to be honest, I think they need a bit of stylisation.

They look a bit out of place, especially when they are popping out of frame like that.

The 2D art in this one looks phenomenal though, great stuff.
 
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not many at the start, but there will be a few more during gameplay.
So… does number of great powers grow in the span of the game?

Because

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

So I understand it as there can not be more empires than great powers. Or you just won’t be demoted?
 
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1. Are there any pop requirements to become an empire or simply have 1 million primary culture subjects and be a great power?

2. What does power projection do? In EU4 it just gave some buffs if I remember correctly, is it the same for PC? It would be nice if it affected AI behaviour, making them more likely to accept deals, demands and alliances etc with the player

1) 5 million of primary culture.
2) it impacts if you can colonize those of lower projection, and if you can build buildings in their territory etc.
 
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