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Tinto Talks #38 - 20th of November 2024

Hello and Welcome to another Tinto Talks. The day of the week where we spill information about our top secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will delve deeply into the world of Societal Values.

Societal values describe the attributes of a country. Different countries start with different societal values, creating a unique and different experience. Please that values are all subject to testing and balancing.

The societal value ranges from -100 to +100 , where a -100 value is completely to the left, and +100 to the right of the value.


They change slowly over time, primarily influenced by the estate privileges, government reforms or laws that the country has. However, if you feel that you can’t wait for your society to change, you can always have a member of the Cabinet focusing on attempting to nudge a societal value to something else in your country.

cabinet.png

A character with good diplomatic skill is useful for this action..


There are 13 common Societal Values that all countries have from the start, and currently one unique for countries in and around China, which will be talked about in a later TT. We have another one added in the Age of Absolutism as well. Some of these societal values you may recognize the name, or the design intent from previous games like EU2 or EU3, but they almost always have different impacts.


Centralization vs Decentralization
A centralized country may be more efficient, while a decentralized country is more resilient.

cent_v_decen.png

Centralization increases crown power dramatically, but being decentralized has other benefits.


Traditionalist vs Innovative
A traditionalist country prioritizes stability and tradition over all other values, while an innovative country wants a more literate population and faster adoption of any new institution.

A Traditionalist country will have a higher estate satisfaction, stability will grow faster and a bigger cultural tradition growth, while institutions will be far more costly to embrace.

An Innovative country will have a higher maximum literacy, bigger cultural influence growth, cheaper institution growth but stability will be much slower to grow.


Spiritualist vs Humanist
A spiritualist country is pretty much organized around its Clergy, while a humanist country is much more tolerant towards heretic and heathen religions.

A spiritualist country will convert pops faster, increase the amount of clergy in towns and cities, and increase the tolerance of the true faith, while reducing the speed of assimilation.

A humanist country will assimilate pops faster, increase tolerance of heathen and heretics, but reduce the speed of conversions.

Aristocracy vs Plutocracy
An aristocratic country is about having the leadership from those with noble blood, while a plutocratic country takes their leadership from the richest and most powerful.

An aristocratic country will increase the amount of diplomats you get, the amount of noble pops of cities, increase the power of the nobility and the expected cost of the court.

A plutocratic country will increase the amount of burghers in cities, reduce the cost of the court, increase trade efficiency but dramatically increase the power of the burghers.


Serfdom vs Free Subjects
A country with high serfdom is about exploiting the peasants as much as possible, whereas a country with free subjects treats peasants as human beings.

serfdom.png

Magna Carta and Yeomanry will make England slowly go towards Free Subjects.


As you can see a serfdom focused country increases possible tax for peasants, the raw materials they produce, and the supply limit in your country, while it also increases the amount of food your peasants will eat.

A country with free subjects on the other hand will increase monthly prosperity, make pops promote faster, reduce the food consumption of peasants, but reduce the amount of tax you can collect from the peasants.


Belligerent vs Conciliatory
A belligerent country is a country that does not worry about the opinion of other countries. A conciliatory country appeases others, either due to being weaker, or it just believes that it's easier to catch flies with honey.

A belligerent country will create casus belli faster, get cheaper warscore costs, and faster spy network constructions, but the diplomatic reputation will suffer significantly.

A conciliatory country will increase the efficiency of the cabinet, the loyalty of subjects, and improve the diplomatic reputation, but casus belli will be far more difficult to create.

Quality vs Quantity
An army that focuses on quality is focused on making each soldier perform better, while an army focused on quantity tries to get more people to fight in the battles.

A country that leans towards quality will have morale recover faster, gain a bonus to military tactics, and have far higher initiative, but the maintenance costs will be higher.

A country which favors quantity will have a higher possible frontage, cheaper armies, less food consumed by armies, but the initiative will be far worse in battle.

Offensive vs Defensive
A country that is focused on offensive prefers the attack, and using their armies and navies in enemy locations, while a defensive country relies more on their forts to defeat the enemy.

off_v_def.png

Do you want to attack or defend? Easy choice or ?

Land vs Naval
A country focused on land is usually a country without much of a coastline, while a naval-focused one may be those that values its coastline more than others.

Here we have actively wanted to avoid military-only attributes, as otherwise 99% would always go land.

A land country will trace proximity quicker over land, trade over land, have larger RGOs, but trade over sea is more expensive.

A naval country will trace proximity quicker over water, trade over water, maritime presence is faster, but trade over land is more expensive.

Capital Economy vs Traditional Economy
A country with a capital economy is more focused on earning money, particularly from trade and towns and cities, while one with a traditional economy is more oriented about living off what the land provides.

A capital economy country will have cheaper buildings, lower bank interest rates and higher production efficiency while food production is reduced.

A traditional country will produce more raw materials, produce more food, and have a higher population capacity, but buildings will be more expensive.

Individualism vs Communalism
A country based on individualism may get more exceptional characters, while one focused on communalism is all about the greater good of society.

An individualistic country will have higher morale in its armies and navies and a far faster migration speed for its pops, but a slightly lower estate satisfaction.

A communalist country will have a lower satisfaction threshold for pops to join rebels, far cheaper to revoke privileges from the estates, a slightly higher estate satisfaction, but pops will migrate far slower.


Mercantilism vs Free Trade
A mercantilist country aims to protect the market price of the produced goods in their country, while a country focused on free trade wants to benefit more from trades around the world.

merc_vs_free.png

This determines how you handle trade in your country..

Outward vs Inward
An outward country focuses more on interacting with other countries, while an inward country looks inside its borders.

An outward country will have a higher power projection, higher diplomatic capacity and faster migration to colonies but a lower cultural tradition growth,

An inward country will have a higher crown power, higher control, faster cultural tradition growth, but the colonial migration will be very slow.


Liberalism vs Absolutism
A Liberal country will emphasize the importance of civic liberties and legislative governing bodies, while an Absolutist country will focus more on the centralized authority of its ruler while reining in the power of the different estates.

A liberal country will get a higher cultural capacity, easier to get through requests in parliament, its pops are less likely to support rebels, but the impact of estate power from cabinet positions is higher.

An absolutist country will have a higher crown power, cheaper-to-revoke estate privileges, quicker integration, but the expected cost of the court is higher.

As mentioned earlier, this societal value appears from the Age of Absolutism, and shapes the last two ages dramatically.



Stay tuned, as next week we revisit a topic as it has been revised…
 
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I'm glad that there are negatives to each side. I hate mechanics where you just have to commit hard to one side to get the max bonuses, and I find things where balance is more important to be a better mechanic. Do you find when testing that players usually try to get to either -100 or +100 to get max bonuses, or do you at least sometimes see players preferring to stay near 0? Because I think the mechanic is badly implemented if people always want to go extreme in one way or another.
 
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Honestly, I disagree with a lot of people in the thread, I think gameplay will be better with mostly bonuses and minor negatives on each value, so your goal is maxing one out.
There’s already thirteen decisions here (“which of these should I go towards?”), making them into gradients drastically increases complexity (“where exactly do I want to be on this?”)

Plus, these values don’t appear to be able to be changed on a dime. If the penalties match the bonuses in scale, you’re spending a significant amount of time on something that is effectively net neutral, which isn’t as fun as building up bonuses for minor tradeoffs.
 
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Honestly, I disagree with a lot of people in the thread, I think gameplay will be better with mostly bonuses and minor negatives on each value, so your goal is maxing one out.
There’s already thirteen decisions here (“which of these should I go towards?”), making them into gradients drastically increases complexity (“where exactly do I want to be on this?”)

Plus, these values don’t appear to be able to be changed on a dime. If the penalties match the bonuses in scale, you’re spending a significant amount of time on something that is effectively net neutral, which isn’t as fun as building up bonuses for minor tradeoffs.
The problem with that is exactly that the goal would be to always go to the extreme. There would be no reason to make it -100 to 100 in the first place then.
 
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Is there a Benefit to keeping it in middle? Would it be possible to add Intervals to the Societal Value Sliders?

For example from 0 to +/-33 giving minimal buffs of both sides, from 33-66 giving more modifiers but also adding the malus’ then from 66 to 100 on each end giving the full benefits and malus.

This way players could choose to keep it at a certain point if they don’t want the max amount if malus but just enough benefits etc
 
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no, but could perhaps be done
That would be awesome if we could influence our subjects societal Values because Historically that is what happened. Many Colonial overlords were using Capital Economy while pushing their colonial subjects towards traditional economies to make them profitable
 
Its not easy to get to extremes though.

Isn't it? With 0.10 progress from just one law which pushes society value to a direction completely passively, it takes just 1/6 of the game's timeframe for all the societal values to become extremes from 0. Obviously most values won't start at 0, but it looks to me that all starting countries will have their society completely formed by 1450.
EDIT: Just saw the reply saying there would be equilibriums. Nevermind then.
 
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Naval and Land:
It might be useful to specify an equilibrium point towards toward which this value naturally drifts. Here I mean something like the ratio of the population of landlocked locations to the population of locations with non-frozen coastlines or something like that.
 
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The problem with that is exactly that the goal would be to always go to the extreme. There would be no reason to make it -100 to 100 in the first place then.
Yeah,might as well make it a button that gives full bonuses after 40 years.The point of sliders is to have the option to play mixed.
 
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It's not uncommon for parts of a game to be fully worked out in detail, just to be changed completely again during beta.

Or many many other times during development. The key thing is to get all core functionality into the game ASAP, and then keep iterating and/or fleshing them out over development.
 
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How things are constructed in EU4, you can pick Offensive, Deffensive, Quality, Quantity, Mercenary, Maritime, Naval, and Aristocratic/Plutocratic in one game. Now, you have to choose your path, and, with increased bonuses for "less popular ideas" in EU4, sometimes offensive or land, won't be better in each playthrough.

You are correct, and it will make countries far more different.
 
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eddin2 said:
How things are constructed in EU4, you can pick Offensive, Deffensive, Quality, Quantity, Mercenary, Maritime, Naval, and Aristocratic/Plutocratic in one game. Now, you have to choose your path, and, with increased bonuses for "less popular ideas" in EU4, sometimes offensive or land, won't be better in each playthrough.
You are correct, and it will make countries far more different.

I think it's important to keep in mind that it's going to be a lot harder to balance this system than the previous one, since they're two mutually exclusive options. If there's even 1 strong modifier on one side, people will always pick that side. In the previous one, all ideas had to compete against each other at the same time.

I'm not saying it's a worse system than the previous one, it's just different. I mention this because I think it's something important to keep in mind when balancing values and modifiers.
 
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I feel like the current system makes it so switching between societal values would never feel worth it. Anything but the extremes won't offer full bonuses and the debuffs aren't enough to offset that; couple that with the fact it takes forever to change societal values and I don't see a reason to be anything then 100 or -100 the entire game. Bonuses for being between the 2 extremes would help alleviate this as it will make switching between values less painful and it would give you an actual reason to be in-between the extremes.
 
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Slaves and Serfs:
Is there a relationship between a country's slavery laws and serfdom/free subject values?
Is it technically possible that free peasantry and slaves exist at the same time in the same state (as it was the case in several European colonies)?
 
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Under serfdom it shows Court Language causing a -0.1; is this a feature of a specific Court Language, or would any Court Langauge with sufficient prestige cause this?
I guess it is the fact that the court language of England (French) is not the common language and so most peasants don't speak it and have harder time defending their rights against the nobility
 
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Fort defense -50% for offensive? Offense is usually my mindset, but that seems steep for 10% siege ability.

For those that follow paradox religiously, how many of these talks before the game is usually announced, and how long after announcement until release? Are we looking at less than a year for this, or a year/years?
I am not sure, but from my memories, this never happened before. I think it's about 6 months to launch since it's announced but we've never had "talks" before a game being officially announced.
 
Do the Societal Values increase/decrease slowly up to +100/-100, or are there Equilibrium Values to which they tend for, like Stability in Imperator: Rome.

I hope it is the second option.
yes, there are Equilibrium points, it will be harder and harder to reach an extreme. Yeah, I find it cool too.

I hope the boni and mali will be powerful enough, so that the difference between countries will be more remarkable.
 
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