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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.

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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.

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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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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.
And to expand upon this, if you were a regional great power in the region of "Europe", that would certainly give you much better buffs compared to the region of "Africa". Also, just to reiterate the absurdity of having global powers in 1337: imagine being the King of France... what is the "world" for you? Who are your possible competitors? Is it an emperor in China thousands of km away that you barely heard of or is it the King of England? We can't look at the 13 hundreds with a lens of the 21st century.
Btw I'm really appreciating the general direction of PC thus far, but I think that the systems of great powers is simply too similar to the basic system of EUIV.
 
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Which continent is the Mamluks in? Ottomans?
Why couldn't a country be a great power in multiple regions? Ottomans could be a great power in Eastern Europe and in the Levant. Would be interesting mechanically for branching out your power and make each region feel unique and more personal...
 
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Which continent is the Mamluks in? Ottomans?
Just a thought, but maybe you could sort them like the super-regions in EU4. GPs (or perhaps even regional powers) could be the ones in that super-region and the ones bordering it. So Yuan would a GP in China, but also in south-east asia and north-east asia. If there's a persian nation that can be GP, it'd be GP in the Persia region, the Indian sub-continent and the Levant, etc.

I don't know anything about programming, so maybe it's not possible to implement, but I also think that the title of GP should be more confined to the areas the nations are in until the world becomes more inter-connected.
 
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I think its abit restricted that we can only create an empire reaching 1mil pop. Maybe it would be a nice feature to have more options with different requirments and benefits to shape our country. For example controlling X amount of provinces, vassals and maybe having a strong economy or perhaps forming a trade empire. If you choose to declare yourself a trade empire if you fulfill those requirments you could get certain benefits that would differ to being a an empire that was made through having alot of provices.
 
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What is the cost to change your Hegemony type (military, navy and economic)?
 
I guess it's because the Shogunate is portrayed as a technically unified country, and I guess Japan as a whole was far from poor in the 14th century (and therefore they get a good score in the game), but in reality we never think of Japan as a significant power in this age because the central government was very weak and the nation was locked in internal political struggles.

I also noticed when checking that the Shogunate IO gave as much bonus as the HRE.. nerfed it now.
 
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I agree there needs to be some type of population requirement for ranks but it should not be limited by primary culture due to all the granularity.

Also, 100k population can be a requirement for both a Duchy or a Kingdom, but the Kingdom needs something else as an additional prerequisite IMHO. There's just too many examples of historical Kingdoms within the hundreds of thousands of population, it's hard to justify such a steep requirement of 1 million...

Perhaps the Kingdom rank can have 100k prerequisite as well but also have some level of economic output (perhaps a % of market share in the region?) prerequisite or something vaguely relating to prestige?
 
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Did I understand correctly, now instead of the decision "Create country Russia/Spain etc" you need to go to a certain rank and you will become this country? If so. then the requirement "1 million pops of your primary culture" is logic
 
You would not be able to form a Kingdom if you don't have 1M of your primary culture.
I think this is a mistake. Can accepted cultures also be included at the least? It seems odd that a nation of a small culture could conquer a large swath of territory but be unable to form a Kingdom because their primary culture is too small. That would rule out so many real-life kingdoms.
 
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I feel like the whole "Catholic Countries have to get approval from the Emperor to become an Empire" thing could be expanded further. For example, maybe just in general for you to ascend to a new rank other nations must recognize you as being a higher power(either by force or through diplomatic power). And frankly the Pope's approval should probably also be required to found a new kingdom, and not just an Empire. Like to my knowledge Lithuania basically saw itself as a kingdom in its own land, but was considered a duchy and referred to as such by everyone else basically just because it wasn't recognized. It should have to start beating other kingdoms or diplomatically influencing them(which fits in even more, given that rank seems to mostly figure into what diplomatic actions you can take!) to accept them as a kingdom and eventually Empire.

A similar thing can be done in china, where powers around China can seek approval and request seals from the Chinese Empire in order to shore up their claim to being a kingdom or empire, though at the cost of placing themselves in a tributary relationship with the middle kingdom. Of course, you can refuse to engage with them and simply claim to be a kingdom/empire in your own right, but this may displease them and it'd be harder to get other countries to recognize you as such.
 
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Thinking about it, it feels like there's a major disconnect between the country rank names and their historicity. There are so many examples of counties, duchies, kingdoms, and empires which don't match those population limits, and it feels like those should be more of a cultural distinction. Having something like Minor Power, Regional Power, Major Power, Great Power as the actual rank feels more natural to me.
 
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Maybe the solution to ‘regional powers’ is to have secondary powers like in Victoria 2. Or, something a bit more dynamic like Victoria 3 where the number of great powers and major powers can change?
 
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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).
I was about to write a long post here and imagining your expected answer and countering your expected arguments... and then realized that that would derail the discussion quite far from the subject of this thread.

Let's than just say that for the purposes of the game what was viewed as the tsardom was closer to the kingdom rank than the empire rank. Would you be willing to accept that?
 
Thinking about it, it feels like there's a major disconnect between the country rank names and their historicity. There are so many examples of counties, duchies, kingdoms, and empires which don't match those population limits, and it feels like those should be more of a cultural distinction. Having something like Minor Power, Regional Power, Major Power, Great Power as the actual rank feels more natural to me.
I agree. The terms Kingdom and Duchy don't exactly mesh well with the system to begin with even within Europe, but outside of it it is even more unfitting in a lot of cases.
 
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For regional powers, would it be possible instead of having them in a predefined geographic region to instead run a distance calc between two capitals in a set radius (which can scale with each age) and if the country in question is more powerful than every country in that radius apart from great powers, that they can become a regional power?
 
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