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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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Meh. The recent DDs show the more "gamey" and less immersive part that's going to be inherited from EU4. That's disappointing.

> [Country Ranks] having various rules on what a country can do
Why artificially tie the gameplay functionalities to ranks? IMO everyone should be able to, for example, guarantee independence of others. If your country is small and weak... you will probably just fail when you're called to war.

> There are four ranks
Why four and not, say, five or three?

> mechanics for regional powers
Global great powers make little sense and are immersion breaking. How can my country be compared to some other one that is not in my diplo range? Or to one that I haven't even discovered?

> Hegemony
Some as above.
 
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I think it makes sense for there to be a fourth type of hegemon, with a cultural one being a good type, considering you are going to add cultural mechanics. Austria has kind of always been kind of a cultural or diplomatic hegemon during much of this time period. If you really want to add a diplomatic hegemon, you could maybe make the sum, median or average of all the opinions of countries of the great powers, multiply that by the diplomatic reputation and the greatest one is the diplomatic hegemon. Just throwing ideas to see if that inspire you guys to make a better system.

A regional power mechanics could simply be: rank nations with capitals within each region and those above certain threshold in power are considered regional powers. For instance, take the median of whatever metric you use to rank them and then the threshold of power becomes something like having double that metric, for example. Just some way to make sure that the regional powers are regionally powerful, even if they are really weak compared to other regions. You can't expect the regional power of Kongo in the XVIII century to compare to a regional power of Prussia, but that does not stop them both from being regional powers.

I also suggest that you consider something like a "threat system". You have always had a coalition system, based on recent actions, represented by aggressive expansion, but even if a big country is relativelly peaceful (manages AE well), it does not stop them from being seen as threat by its neighbors. I believe there could be an option for a more permanent modifier of threat, scaled by size, where if countries feel above a certain level of threat from another country, they band together defensively against it. In EU4 you already kind of calculated it when measuring a lot of diplomatic actions, like alliace, threat war, offer vassalization etc. Then, the only way to stop a country from joining this defensive alliance against your country, is to have over 100 relations or some kind of treaty for example (like giving guarantee, alliance, royal marriage, truce).
 
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Can a country lose rank? If yes how?

not through normal mechanic.

It was still called the Byzantine EMPIRE, even when it was reduced to basically a city-state.
 
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possible amount of artist +1
Do I understand correctly that the artists will be in the game?

You will all know more during November, but you win the prize of being first one to notice it :)
 
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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.

If you lose a war, you are not a hegemon.
 
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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).

This is a different game than EU4 though.
 
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How about scaling the treshold around the #1 great power?

Somthing like Yuan has 1000 score, anyone within 10% is also a great power.

So than any country with more than 900 score is considered a great power?

And let's be honest, if we're talking about global powers, that has to be the way. If France comes nowhere close to Yuan, does it even matter if they're #2?
 
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I think the population threshold to set rank is problematic. Imagine a small primary culture owning a huge empire, but maybe not having enough primary culture to pop the Empire threshold. I feel like it would be nice to have diplomatic means to change title and not to conflate it with rank. After all, there are numerous examples of tiny nations being kingdoms. Perhaps, it could come with some malus to the neighbouring nations to declare oneself a king from a duchy or emperor from a kingdom, since this naturally comes with some elevation of claims and status.
 
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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
Power projection was explained in a TT already-- colonisation I think?
 
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Will European Countries try and keep a balance of power between the Great Powers particularly in later ages?

And will secondary rate powers for example Scotland, Denmark or Novgorod try counter the Great Powers near them.
 
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