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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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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?
Precisely.

If a country is sitting there with 10k great power score.

And the closest competitor is only at 1k can you really even consider them an opposing force? Maybe a regional power…

But I’m sure PC is complex enough to have competitiors close enough in score so that this sort of calculation makes sense.
 
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I dont know if this is perhaps not a good Idea:
Instead of just one list of great powers, every single political entity has one list, so lets say you play as Yuan, you are the gratest power in all of the world(the part Yuan knows of) si it is great power number 1. France however doesnt know about the gratnes and riches in the Yuan dynastiy so they are also number one great power.
 
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The next rank above that is the Kingdom Rank, which requires 1 million pops of your primary culture

I feel like this should be culture group or something instead, considering how granular some of the cultures are being made based on small dialect differences in the map reviews
 
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Are there any downsides to upgrade your government rank? Or things that are better in lower ranked forms? If not, it's not really a decision to upgrade though and should really be done automatically. A Duchy could be more efficient at stuff than an empire for example.

In EU4 it's just something you do without actually deciding. It's just bonuses for free because you blobbed and reached 50/75 prestige.
 
Will country/ruler ranks take into account if we control the entire area the supposed title encompasses? "King OF Prussia" vs "King IN Prussia"?

As for the special restrictions you get from declaring yourself an empire without the Pope's permission... does it have to be THE Pope or A Pope?
 
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Is there a way to mod Great Powers requirements same way like there is for Country Ranks and not just by tweaking the numbers for population, land area, development etc (and I guess even adding additional/alternative conditions to become Great Power)?
 
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I find the 1m primary culture requirement for Kingdom rank kinda strange and arbitrary. Does this effectively mean that if somewhere sparsely populated manages, through opportunistic wars, to conquer a large, wealthy area, they can't crown themselves King? Say if something like Guge invades Kashmir and then Punjab, moving it's capital down to Multan, could they not become a Kingdom because there's only say 150k Tibetans?
 
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Can countries tier lowered if the requirement is no longer met? Or is there any penalties applied to make it more reasonable. Let just say Byzantine Empire was reduced to a one-county rump state. It should not be able to guarantee Mamluk Sultanate and should no longer get benefit of increasing diplo range, or power projection.
 
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Yeah, Livonian Order with about 380 Prussians has a bit of a challenge here..

Clearly this Pop limit is quite stupid. It should be tied to not only primary culture but also cultures similar to primary culture. It should not matter if you have x ammount of Prussians or y ammount of Saxons. They should all count toward that numbers, because in the end of the day they are all Germans. Also, pop limit overall doesn't make any sense what so ever, because nobody looked if that country has more than million of their primary culture or not.. it is non-sense. It should be tied to how powerful a country is... be it's development, military power, overall population number etc. It is disappointing to see that devs thought that this approach is even remotly good or at least decent.

Historically Navarra didn't reach million pop before it was known as kingdom. It is stupid that in game similar country to them needs to reach million before they can be known as kingdom.
 
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I don't think it fits the times the idea of having "global powers". At the beginning there should probably be a system of regional great powers and then with new ages you unlock the mechanic of global powers. It doesn't really make any sense at all to have the Kingdom of France compared with the Yuan Dynasty in 1337... they barely knew of the existence of each other and they weren't really competing against each other. Ofc that would be completely different in - let's say - 17/18th century.
 
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Tsardom is the equivalent to kingdom, not empire (see: Peter the Great "promoting" himself from tsar to emperor).
My understanding is that this was to "Westernize" the status of the Russian Emperor to make abundantly clear that he saw himself equal to the emperor of the HRE. It wasn't a promotion, but a rename.

Tsar very much meant emperor. Bulgaria considered itself equal to the Byzantine Empire, though the Byzantines had to tweak this a bit in order to be willing to make the concession in the first place. Which is to say, any emperor other than the Byzantine Empire was considered "lower" in rank than the Byzantine Emperor, including ones that they recognized as having the right to call themselves an empire (i.e. Bulgaria).

See, also, Serbia proclaiming itself the Srpsko Carstvo ("tsardom") from its previous status of kingdom (with their original, kingdom crown originally having been granted by the Pope, no less).
 
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Can countries tier lowered if the requirement is no longer met? Or is there any penalties applied to make it more reasonable. Let just say Byzantine Empire was reduced to a one-county rump state. It should not be able to guarantee Mamluk Sultanate and should no longer get benefit of increasing diplo range, or power projection.
Hopefully not, because you could lose population by means other than losing land. If a great kingdom is hit by a temporary famine or illness, is it no longer a kingdom until it's repopulated?
 
Kingdom needs 1 million primary pops? Norway, Navarre and Scotland, to name a few, didn't have that many at the time...

I think Duchy and Kingdom can both have 100k as a requirement, but Kingdom needs something else in addition to that.
 
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It seems like both France and England are too high on the list of Great Powers. Is this an amount of boosting from their advances/institutions? Surely the Mamluks, Delhi, and the Golden Horde have greater regional and global impact in 1337
 
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