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Tinto Talks #36 - 6th of November

Welcome to this week's Tinto Talks. Please stop trying to guess the name of the game, it's going to land us in trouble when you figure it out.

I'm @SaintDaveUK, and this week I'm going to delve into Cultures and some related mechanics like Language.




Culture​

Culture is a tricky topic because it is so abstract as a concept, but also it’s an area of our games that people have quite strong opinions about, especially when they have real-world connections to that culture.

As such we would appreciate it if the discussion on this thread is limited to the mechanics of the culture system as presented here, and direct your specific feedback for the culture setup to the relevant regional Tinto Maps where it will be much more helpful.

So, what is Culture? Culture is the culmination of vernacular, music, food, identity, ethnicity, art and various other hard-to-define ideas. It is something possessed by countries, pops, and characters. It contains two main dimensions: Culture Group and Language.


culture_maratha.png

A fairly typical example of a Culture, consisting of a Language and a Culture Group.


Culture Opinion​

For the most part, cultures all consider each other to be neutral, but they can also have natural preference or aversion to specific cultures.

This is represented with cultural opinions, which in ascending order are: enemy, negative, neutral, positive, kindred. This mainly gives modifiers in various places, for example, country opinions of each other, or how expensive they are while Accepted.

Most of these will exist from 1337, but there is a Diplomatic Action to change an opinion over time.


culture_list_aragon.png

A list of cultures present inside Aragon, with two-way opinions relative to the primary culture Catalan. Please note that these opinions are WIP, and might not be final.

​

​

Culture Capacity​

Cultural Capacity represents the maximum number of cultures a country can tolerate or accept. For most countries it starts quite low, but there is an Advance every age to increase the maximum, as well as various other sources like Government Reforms and Policies.

accepted_cultures_of_aragon.png


Each culture costs a different Cultural Capacity, depending on relative size, opinions, culture groups, and languages.

cultural_cost_andalusi.png
cultural_cost.png





Non-Accepted Cultures​

By default, every culture in the world is Non-Accepted to you. It is the default state, and at best means you ignore them. Non-Accepted pops are pretty miserable in your country but also don’t provide you with any benefits.

Tolerated Cultures​

If you have the cultural capacity, you can elevate a culture to a Tolerated Culture. This will make the pops a little more content. Tolerated pops will grow as normal, and they will also be a bit happier.

Accepted Cultures​

You can elevate a culture further into being Accepted, at which point they gain special rights.

Even though an Accepted Culture costs 3x more capacity than Tolerated, it’s usually much more desirable as they will give you more levies and sailors. Accepted Cultures also count towards whether you can core a province, and whether a colonial charter will flip to your ownership. Countries whose primary culture is one of your accepted cultures will see you more favourably.

However, Accepted pops cannot be slaves, and you cannot Accept a culture with "Enemy" culture opinion.

Primary Culture​

At the very top of the pyramid is Primary Culture, of which every country has exactly one. This is the principal culture of the apparatus of state, and it is favoured in many calculations. It is not necessarily the largest culture, you can find several countries where a small elite of nobles or clergy rule over the peasant masses belonging to different cultures.

Primary Culture is an important gate to a lot of gameplay content, such as Advances, Unit Types, Government Reforms and so on. It’s impossible to list it all here, but just know that the primary culture you have can affect many parts of the game.

You can swap your primary culture with an accepted culture if it fulfils the requirements, such as if it becomes the dominant culture in your country or if it is the culture of your ruler. There is also a game rule for it to be of the same Culture Group.





Language​

Attached to cultures is the Language system, which is spread across 3 tiers: Dialect, Language, Language Family. Of the three, Language is the most important and where most of the gameplay takes place.

Language Families​

The largest subdivision, many Languages belong to a Language Family, for example Arabic belonging to Semitic. The Indo-European family is split into its sub-groups like Germanic and Romance, because otherwise it is simply too large. Languages like Basque are isolated, and so do not exist in a Language Family. This mostly offers a small opinion bonus and also slightly minimises cost for things like culture acceptance and market attraction.

language_groups.png

Note that this is WIP and examples like Iranic and Indic language groups haven’t been set up.


Languages​

Every culture has a single Language which represents the most common vernacular amongst its people. Languages are often larger groups that are comparable to an EU4 culture group in size, if anyone here has played that game. For example, Iceland to Sweden all use variants of the Scandinavian language, while everyone from Vienna to Hamburg will use variants of the German language.

Languages have Language Power, which is impacted by many sources such as which countries use it as a court language, common language, and liturgical language. It is expressed as a percentage of the most powerful language in the world, and impacts the intensity of bonuses you get from it.

tooltip_language.png

Un ejemplo.


languages.png

The dominant language in each location is shown.


Dialects​

To add diversity within a Language, we have a system of Dialects (though we aren’t especially set on that nomenclature). They represent vernaculars that in Project Caesar’s time period broadly formed a dialectical continuum, and are an effective way to differentiate them without weakening them by splitting them into full Languages.

Dialects are purely for flavour and have no gameplay effect; two dialects are considered identical for most purposes such as opinion bonuses, and they share stats like Language Power. For example, both Leonese and Castilian are considered the same Spanish language and so share the same Language Power, but may have different character names, location names and potentially other light flavour too.
dialects.png

A map showing the dominant dialects in each location. The current setup is WIP, for example we haven't split up South Slavic or Italian.


germanic_language_group.png

Here is a sketch showing the structure of the Germanic language group and its languages and dialects.



Countries have several different ways of interacting with Languages.

Common Language​

The Common Language of a country is simply the language that is used by the primary culture. It can’t be chosen or changed without affecting the Primary Culture.


Liturgical Language​

Every country has a Liturgical Language, which represents the language that the Clergy use in their rituals and scriptures, and by extension what scholars use in their academic works. Some religions allow a country to choose whichever liturgical language they like, (for example, Eastern Orthodox countries variously use languages like Greek or Church Slavonic) whereas Catholic and Islamic countries are forced to use Latin and Arabic respectively.

In general, you will want to adopt a liturgical language with high language power, as it affects your research speed.


liturgical_language.png




Market Language​

Markets also have a Market Language representing the Lingua Franca used between the merchants, which is based on the dominant language of the burghers in the Market Capital. The higher the market power, the higher its contribution to the Language Power.

Locations will have a higher attraction towards markets that share their dominant language, and a slightly smaller bonus if they only share a language family.

market_language.png




Court Language​

Every country also has a Court Language, which represents the primary vernacular used in formal proceedings in the government, for example it might be the language spoken in parliament or written in legal documents.

Unlike the others, Court Languages can be changed almost at will. The possible languages are drawn from your Primary and Accepted Cultures, your ruler, or your Overlord country. The exact court language you have affects the satisfaction of the various estates: Nobles want you to have a more powerful language, meanwhile peasants just want it to be the Common Language. Burghers are happy if you use the same as the capital’s Market Language. The Clergy of course want everything to be in the Liturgical Language.

Most countries start with the same Court Language as their Common Language, but significant examples of where it is different in 1337 would include Norman French in England and Church Latin in Catholic theocracies.

court_language.png




Culture Group​

A Culture Group is a set of Cultures that have some sort of shared identity towards each other. Culture Groups are usually independent of language and current diplomacy, but rather represent a more geographic or genealogical connection that is difficult to represent without abstraction.

A good example would be the British culture group. The diverse cultures of Great Britain have 3 different languages, across several different countries, and yet they are still united by their shared history and cultural influence that transcends the borders.

cultrure_group_british.png

An important culture group.


In gameplay terms, Culture Groups give small opinion bonuses and make culture acceptance a lot cheaper, but also various pieces of content are gated behind Culture Group instead of Culture. For example, your primary culture needs to be in the British culture group to form the Great Britain tag. The game rules can be set to also prevent you from changing your Primary Culture to one in a different Group.

One change we have made from EU4 is that cultures can belong to multiple different Culture Groups, or if they are isolated enough, none at all.

culture_norse_gael.png

Norse-Gael is the most extreme example of multiple Culture Groups, but the median will be closer to 1 or 2.



That’s all for now, but our talks on culture don’t stop here. Next week the artist currently known as Johan will make a song and dance about some deeper aspects of Culture that are brand new for Project Caesar, such as Works of Art and Culture War.
 
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Metz said:
Will the game synchronize names from different cultures if for example a Henri of France becomes king of England, so he would be Henry (or Henri III) of England instead of Henri I of England? Or a John becomes John I in Russia when he should be Ivan II?
Click to expand...
Yes. The John's name in the database is actually name_john and Russia will compare against their previous name_john rulers (Ivans) when choosing which regnal number to give him.

The spelling of the character's display name is then selected by their culture's language or dialect like this:

Code: 
 name_john: "John"
 name_john.catalan_dialect: "Joan"
 name_john.east_slavic_language: "Ivan"
 name_john.scandinavian_language: "Johan"
 name_john.spanish_language: "Juan"
 
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This in overall is good for the tall game, instead of always needing to expand like in EU4, you have to focus on consolidating your conquered population via language and culture shift and hopefully core them once everything is set in place.

Beyond language and culture, will there be customary laws that need to be changed to conquered places as a way to synchronize local administrations to [an emerging] central administration? At least once you get into the 1600s (absolutism).
 
Honestly, this is amazing. So much more than I hoped for.

The only thing I am curious about now is if there is any process for culture unification (i.e. faster assimilation) based on culture group, language and/or language family.
 
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SaintDaveUK said:
Yes. The character's name in the database is actually name_john and Russia will compare against their previous name_john rulers (Ivans) when choosing which regnal number to give him.

The spelling of the character's name is then selected by their culture's language or dialect like this:

Code: 
 name_john: "John"
 name_john.catalan_dialect: "Joan"
 name_john.east_slavic_language: "Ivan"
 name_john.scandinavian_language: "Johan"
 name_john.spanish_language: "Juan"
Click to expand...

Custom names are disabled right? So you can't name a child/heir: XYZABC123?


How will regnal numbers work for personal unions? Will both countries be ruled with the name being used in the senior partner or will we get something like James I of England and James VI of Scotland?
 
SaintDaveUK said:
Currently no. Interested to hear opinions of how that could work though.
Click to expand...
One option is going all out and doing all combinations of likely colonizers and regions (i.e. spanish, english, french and so on variants on Mexican culture). An interesting "generic" solution instead could be making those colonial cultures tied to the region, and change their culture group and language based on the colonizer (so a culture named "Mexican" always forms, but its culture group and language depend on the colonizing country). If a colonial national expands over multiple regions, the first one that develops would become the common culture. Dialect I would also retain, but given that the language can remain, I think it might be reasonable to give them their own language. In the case of, for example, hispanic america, no one would argue that Mexicans or Argentinians speak Castillian dialect (well, now in 2024 they might speak their own dialects of Castillian rather, but this is history). However, for example the Boer colonies developed Afrikaaner, which in this case would be a dialect of German I imagine (or Dutch if it was made a language), and it is difficult to generalize why some develop and the other one does not.

In any case, it is a complex topic. The formation of the colonial regional identities (coalesced primarily based on the settler criollo upper class) across the new world is definitely one of the main cultural changes in the world during the era.
 
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Metz said:
How will regnal numbers work for personal unions? Will both countries be ruled with the name being used in the senior partner or will we get something like James I of England and James VI of Scotland?
Click to expand...
Their primary country will be used for the normal display name, but you will be able to see the character's other titles and their regnal numbers in a tooltip.
 
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SaintDaveUK said:
Welcome to this week's Tinto Talks. Please stop trying to guess the name of the game, it's going to land us in trouble when you figure it out.

I'm @SaintDaveUK, and this week I'm going to delve into Cultures and some related mechanics like Language.




Culture​

Culture is a tricky topic because it is so abstract as a concept, but also it’s an area of our games that people have quite strong opinions about, especially when they have real-world connections to that culture.

As such we would appreciate it if the discussion on this thread is limited to the mechanics of the culture system as presented here, and direct your specific feedback for the culture setup to the relevant regional Tinto Maps where it will be much more helpful.

So, what is Culture? Culture is the culmination of vernacular, music, food, identity, ethnicity, art and various other hard-to-define ideas. It is something possessed by countries, pops, and characters. It contains two main dimensions: Culture Group and Language.


View attachment 1212047
A fairly typical example of a Culture, consisting of a Language and a Culture Group.


Culture Opinion​

For the most part, cultures all consider each other to be neutral, but they can also have natural preference or aversion to specific cultures.

This is represented with cultural opinions, which in ascending order are: enemy, negative, neutral, positive, kindred. This mainly gives modifiers in various places, for example, country opinions of each other, or how expensive they are while Accepted.

Most of these will exist from 1337, but there is a Diplomatic Action to change an opinion over time.


View attachment 1212048
A list of cultures present inside Aragon, with two-way opinions relative to the primary culture Catalan. Please note that these opinions are WIP, and might not be final.

​

​

Culture Capacity​

Cultural Capacity represents the maximum number of cultures a country can tolerate or accept. For most countries it starts quite low, but there is an Advance every age to increase the maximum, as well as various other sources like Government Reforms and Policies.

View attachment 1212049

Each culture costs a different Cultural Capacity, depending on relative size, opinions, culture groups, and languages.






Non-Accepted Cultures​

By default, every culture in the world is Non-Accepted to you. It is the default state, and at best means you ignore them. Non-Accepted pops are pretty miserable in your country but also don’t provide you with any benefits.

Tolerated Cultures​

If you have the cultural capacity, you can elevate a culture to a Tolerated Culture. This will make the pops a little more content. Tolerated pops will grow as normal, and they will also be a bit happier.

Accepted Cultures​

You can elevate a culture further into being Accepted, at which point they gain special rights.

Even though an Accepted Culture costs 3x more capacity than Tolerated, it’s usually much more desirable as they will give you more levies and sailors. Accepted Cultures also count towards whether you can core a province, and whether a colonial charter will flip to your ownership. Countries whose primary culture is one of your accepted cultures will see you more favourably.

However, Accepted pops cannot be slaves, and you cannot Accept a culture with "Enemy" culture opinion.

Primary Culture​

At the very top of the pyramid is Primary Culture, of which every country has exactly one. This is the principal culture of the apparatus of state, and it is favoured in many calculations. It is not necessarily the largest culture, you can find several countries where a small elite of nobles or clergy rule over the peasant masses belonging to different cultures.

Primary Culture is an important gate to a lot of gameplay content, such as Advances, Unit Types, Government Reforms and so on. It’s impossible to list it all here, but just know that the primary culture you have can affect many parts of the game.

You can swap your primary culture with an accepted culture if it fulfils the requirements, such as if it becomes the dominant culture in your country or if it is the culture of your ruler. There is also a game rule for it to be of the same Culture Group.





Language​

Attached to cultures is the Language system, which is spread across 3 tiers: Dialect, Language, Language Family. Of the three, Language is the most important and where most of the gameplay takes place.

Language Families​

The largest subdivision, many Languages belong to a Language Family, for example Arabic belonging to Semitic. The Indo-European family is split into its sub-groups like Germanic and Romance, because otherwise it is simply too large. Languages like Basque are isolated, and so do not exist in a Language Family. This mostly offers a small opinion bonus and also slightly minimises cost for things like culture acceptance and market attraction.

View attachment 1212069
Note that this is WIP and examples like Iranic and Indic language groups haven’t been set up.


Languages​

Every culture has a single Language which represents the most common vernacular amongst its people. Languages are often larger groups that are comparable to an EU4 culture group in size, if anyone here has played that game. For example, Iceland to Sweden all use variants of the Scandinavian language, while everyone from Vienna to Hamburg will use variants of the German language.

Languages have Language Power, which is impacted by many sources such as which countries use it as a court language, common language, and liturgical language. It is expressed as a percentage of the most powerful language in the world, and impacts the intensity of bonuses you get from it.

View attachment 1212055
Un ejemplo.


View attachment 1212057
The dominant language in each location is shown.


Dialects​

To add diversity within a Language, we have a system of Dialects (though we aren’t especially set on that nomenclature). They represent vernaculars that in Project Caesar’s time period broadly formed a dialectical continuum, and are an effective way to differentiate them without weakening them by splitting them into full Languages.

Dialects are purely for flavour and have no gameplay effect; two dialects are considered identical for most purposes such as opinion bonuses, and they share stats like Language Power. For example, both Leonese and Castilian are considered the same Spanish language and so share the same Language Power, but may have different character names, location names and potentially other light flavour too.
View attachment 1212058
A map showing the dominant dialects in each location. The current setup is WIP, for example we haven't split up South Slavic or Italian.


View attachment 1212420
Here is a sketch showing the structure of the Germanic language group and its languages and dialects.



Countries have several different ways of interacting with Languages.

Common Language​

The Common Language of a country is simply the language that is used by the primary culture. It can’t be chosen or changed without affecting the Primary Culture.


Liturgical Language​

Every country has a Liturgical Language, which represents the language that the Clergy use in their rituals and scriptures, and by extension what scholars use in their academic works. Some religions allow a country to choose whichever liturgical language they like, (for example, Eastern Orthodox countries variously use languages like Greek or Church Slavonic) whereas Catholic and Islamic countries are forced to use Latin and Arabic respectively.

In general, you will want to adopt a liturgical language with high language power, as it affects your research speed.


View attachment 1212060



Market Language​

Markets also have a Market Language representing the Lingua Franca used between the merchants, which is based on the dominant language of the burghers in the Market Capital. The higher the market power, the higher its contribution to the Language Power.

Locations will have a higher attraction towards markets that share their dominant language, and a slightly smaller bonus if they only share a language family.

View attachment 1212061



Court Language​

Every country also has a Court Language, which represents the primary vernacular used in formal proceedings in the government, for example it might be the language spoken in parliament or written in legal documents.

Unlike the others, Court Languages can be changed almost at will. The possible languages are drawn from your Primary and Accepted Cultures, your ruler, or your Overlord country. The exact court language you have affects the satisfaction of the various estates: Nobles want you to have a more powerful language, meanwhile peasants just want it to be the Common Language. Burghers are happy if you use the same as the capital’s Market Language. The Clergy of course want everything to be in the Liturgical Language.

Most countries start with the same Court Language as their Common Language, but significant examples of where it is different in 1337 would include Norman French in England and Church Latin in Catholic theocracies.

View attachment 1212062



Culture Group​

A Culture Group is a set of Cultures that have some sort of shared identity towards each other. Culture Groups are usually independent of language and current diplomacy, but rather represent a more geographic or genealogical connection that is difficult to represent without abstraction.

A good example would be the British culture group. The diverse cultures of Great Britain have 3 different languages, across several different countries, and yet they are still united by their shared history and cultural influence that transcends the borders.

View attachment 1212063
An important culture group.


In gameplay terms, Culture Groups give small opinion bonuses and make culture acceptance a lot cheaper, but also various pieces of content are gated behind Culture Group instead of Culture. For example, your primary culture needs to be in the British culture group to form the Great Britain tag. The game rules can be set to also prevent you from changing your Primary Culture to one in a different Group.

One change we have made from EU4 is that cultures can belong to multiple different Culture Groups, or if they are isolated enough, none at all.

View attachment 1212064
Norse-Gael is the most extreme example of multiple Culture Groups, but the median will be closer to 1 or 2.



That’s all for now, but our talks on culture don’t stop here. Next week the artist currently known as Johan will make a song and dance about some deeper aspects of Culture that are brand new for Project Caesar, such as Works of Art and Culture War.
Click to expand...
Why is Frissian not part of German but Dutch is and why is it not called Germanic? German isnt a thing it this period it are all different dialects, modern German comes from just one of these dialects. I also do not understand why it would be a problem if the Indo-European language family is big when , you know, it is also so in real-life?
 
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Regarding titles, will only the well-known cultural titles be used such as Kaiser, Tsar, Basileos, Sultan? Meaning the top titles or will you get Konig for King and Graf for Count? Sometimes it is a hard line to know when to not cross as it would be better to use King in Spain and France than Rey in Spain or Roi in France.
 
add culture/language divergance, if you own a location of your culture, but it has low control, then it will start diverging into a new culture, for example if you colonize america as england, i would assume it would have low control and it would diverge into american over time.
If you create a colonial nation the same could apply if his locations are far away from yours and they diverge to a new one.
 
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luo said:
Maybe here's some example.

In 1487, a Chosen government official called 崔溥.

Due to a shipwreck, he fled to the Ming Dynasty and relied on writing Chinese to communicate with the locals, ultimately successfully returning to Korea. He wrote a book called 漂海录 (Record of wandering in the sea).

Perhaps you think that everyone in the Ming Dynasty was familiar with written classical Chinese?

Another example, in the period of the Japan-Chosen War (壬辰战争), a Chosen government official called 鲁认, also use this way to turn back to the Korea.
Click to expand...

They used classic Chinese for that too. Plus, The fact that they could write Chinese characters in that era proves that they had studied enough to be able to write classical Chinese since Illiteracy was high at that time, and official Ming and Early Joseon Dynasties documents were written in classical Chinese.
 
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Metz said:
Regarding titles, will only the well-known cultural titles be used such as Kaiser, Tsar, Basileos, Sultan? Meaning the top titles or will you get Konig for King and Graf for Count? Sometimes it is a hard line to know when to not cross as it would be better to use King in Spain and France than Rey in Spain or Roi in France.
Click to expand...
We have a soft rule where if a ruler title is commonly used in English, or it represents a distinct concept from the English equivalent, we can use the unique cultural term. There is essentially no conceptual difference between the English King and French Roi so we don't translate, but Tsar and Sultan do exist in English.
 
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SaintDaveUK said:
View attachment 1212048
A list of cultures present inside Aragon, with two-way opinions relative to the primary culture Catalan. Please note that these opinions are WIP, and might not be final.
Click to expand...
I am assuming the percentages listed is of that culture inside Aragon.

SaintDaveUK said:
Click to expand...
Here it appears that the relative size is depending on 'world wide' values, base on looking at the percentages shown above. Wouldn't it make more sense to have it be based on the relative size inside the country? Shouldn't it be cheaper to tolerate a group that is a small part of your nation and have the cost increase as they are a larger part of your country?

Lets assume that you have two cultures, A and B, both of a world-wide size of 1M each. You have two nations, Y and Z, both with a primary culture of A and the rest of the pops are of culture B. Nation Y has 100k A and 900k B, while nation Z has 900k A and 100k B. As I understand it, it would cost the same capacity for both nations to accept B. Is this intended? Does it not make sense that it should take more capacity to accept B in the 1:9 ratio situation than the 9:1?

SaintDaveUK said:
Non-Accepted pops are pretty miserable in your country but also don’t provide you with any benefits.
Click to expand...
To clarify, this is in reference to the benefits listed in the other ranking right? This is the 'baseline'. They are still considered for crown and estate power, good consumption, etc.

SaintDaveUK said:
To add diversity within a Language, we have a system of Dialects (though we aren’t especially set on that nomenclature).
Click to expand...
Maybe call them 'variants', might be a more neutral term.
 
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SaintDaveUK said:
We have a soft rule where if a ruler title is commonly used in English, or it represents a distinct concept from the English equivalent, we can use the unique cultural term. There is essentially no conceptual difference between the English King and French Roi so we don't translate, but Tsar and Sultan do exist in English.
Click to expand...


Where would Landgrave/Landgraf and Margrave/Markgraf fit? As they were used exclusively in the German-speaking HRE however they both have a translated English equivalent (yet they wouldn't be used outside the German HRE).
 
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