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Tinto Talks #4 - March 20th, 2024

Welcome to the fourth iteration of Tinto Talks!

Today we’ll give you an overview of the different mechanics of the Government part of the game. There will be development diaries going into much more detail for these later on.

First of all, we have 5 different government types in the game, which determines a fair bit of what type of mechanics you get access to. As an example, a Republic does not have access to royal marriages, and a Steppe Horde has a different view on how war, peace and conquest works compared to other types of countries.

  • Monarchy, which uses Legitimacy
  • Republic, which uses Republican Tradition
  • Theocracy, which uses Devotion
  • Steppe Horde, which Horde Unity
  • Tribe, which uses Tribal Cohesion

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An illustration from our game..

These, together with country rank, government reform, and local flavor gives countries names like “Crown of Aragon,” “Kingdom of Sweden,” “Principality of Wales.” Not all countries are countries that are based on owning locations on a map though; more on that in later development diaries.

Each country also has a ruler, or they may be in a regency, if there are no possible adult heirs.

One of the most defining parts of the government of a country in Project Caesar is the Estates mechanic. This has been one of the core parts of the game, with a full connection between the population and the estates. Keeping the estates satisfied while keeping their powers low is an important part of the gameplay loop. In this game, the Estates are also active entities and will do things on their own if they get enough power.

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Two government reforms, one culture specific and one government specific.

As time passes, different government reforms and reform-slots will be available. They can also be based on tag, culture or religion.

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These are the two available possibilities in the Law 'Language of Pleading' for the country I tested.

Something that is different from a reform is what we call a Law. A Law can have several different policies you can pick from, and several laws have unique policies only available to certain tags, religions, cultures, government types or other factors.

There are some drawbacks to adding new reforms or policies though, as it takes a few years for it to have full effect, depending on your country's administrative efficiency. (Yes, it's a name for something else in another game, but it fits here.)

Regularly, if your government allows it, you can call in a Parliament. If you don’t do it often enough the estates will start to get irritated, but each parliament has issues that need to be resolved, and the estates will have agendas they want done for their support. Of course, you also have options to push through what you want from a parliament, if you are willing to accept the demands of the estate, like changing a particular law.

Another part of the government is the cabinet, which also grows in size as you become more advanced, allowing you to do more things. This is something that can be viewed as a hybrid between EU4 Advisors and the CK2 council actions.

Some of you may remember the domestic policies from EU2 and EU3. In Project Caesar we are bringing the idea back in the form of Societal Values. There are seven that we took from these games, one that was split in two, and we added four new ones, bringing the total to 13 different Societal Values. Societal Values are primarily affected by what other actions you do, like what policies you pick in a law, or what reforms you pick. As with so many other things in our game, this is not an instant action, but a gradual change over time.

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oh look, its eu3!

Next week, we will go into much more detail about estates and how they work.
 
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Currently its a 2 year cooldown, and the estates does not care if its been less than 5 years, and every month after that they get more and more anxious.

so no, its not a major "click at time x"
After thinking about this for a bit, and conditional on parliaments being what I believe they will be, 2 - 5 year cooldown is too strict.

After some research and going through comments to figure out what these equivalents could be (Ständeversammlungen in the german principalities, the Reichstag on the level of the Empire itself, the Estates General in France, the Riksdag in Sweden, the Cortes in Portugal @Deutscher Kaiser) - It seems that some monarchs would convey them rather often, while others sometimes did not bother with them at all.

Perhaps a system where the less often they are conveyed, the more important the options become, or similar dynamic system, would be better. Overall, I feel like having to press a button once every 2-5 years (could even be every 2 years if it is a beneficial button to press) isn't a fun gameplay loop and very tiresome.
 
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Then again, majority of those things were not in the launch version of EU4 (yeah, I've been playing the game for a looooong time). Sure, different religions existed on paper, but they played pretty much identically until more and more specific features to each were added to differentiate the experiences. Same with the different regions of the world, the only practical difference were the difference tech groups. The only real differences between nations were the starting positions and the occasional flavor events some countries had. My overall concern is perhaps less with Mission Trees specifically, and more with the very sandbox-y experience some here seems to be wanting - I've already tried that with 2013 version of EU4 and although it was fun for a short while, it got stale quickly.
The thing is, the supporters of your position (and opponents of mine) like to say "ah, but you want no flavor". And that's a gross misrepresentation, because I want flavor, but flavor that has to do with what I did with my nation and nothing else. If I form Prussia, but I'm a prosperous and mostly peaceful nation living off trade in the Baltic, then I want to see zero things - events, missions, ideas, nothing - about goosestepping Prussian soldiers. That's not the nation I'm playing. That's a Brandenburg-Prussia that got torn to shreds during the 30YW and decided it would make sure it didn't happen anymore.

If I am at the head of Austria, a warring nation that has come to odds with most of its neighbors, de-facto left the HRE, and is in general a total bother to anyone around them, I don't want to smell even a wiff of "Felix Austria", or HRE bonuses, or K.u.K., or whatever.

If my England is a continental power due to holding onto extensive French holdings, something that distracted it enough that Scotland and the Irish princedoms are still around or at least not directly controlled, there should be no single mention of walls of wood, because I need very real walls of stone and blades instead, and ain't got no money to throw on that when I have potential enemies still on my island anyway.

And so on, and so forth. I don't want to be told "no, you are playing wrong, you see, you must do this instead". Yes, there should be some historical inertia, it goes without saying - France isn't going to turn on a dime and rule the waves - but that should be uniquely about how the situation was as of (we can assume, by now) 1337. I want nothing that didn't happen for like 300 years to influence my game. And when I get to that actual date, I want nothing that tells me "I know you played like this, but it's wrong, see, it's actually like that".

In fact, I will state it out outright: there's more history in my approach than there is in "I know Northern Europe has been developing in an utterly different direction for the last four centuries, but those Prussian soldiers surely look mighty".
 
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Seems to me these guys who want no mission trees basically just want Sid Meier's Civilization gameplay, Paradox style.
Gosh, I hate how ahistorical Civilization is. Civilization seems to have inspired those horrid monuments the content designers think are so cool. I do NOT want EU to look like Civilization, not at all!
In fact, I will state it out outright: there's more history in my approach than there is in "I know Northern Europe has been developing in an utterly different direction for the last four centuries, but those Prussian soldiers surely look mighty".
Well said. History is about processes far more than dates and individual countries histories. It is certainly not mechanically pushing forwards over and over the same narrative.

By making "historical games" with memes as history, Paradox is doing a disservice to real history, as people come to regard the history of their countries (or their favorite countries, or, indeed, the world) through the distorted lense of essentialization. Prussia can only be a military behemot, no question asked on how it happened. GB must be a naval power, and so on and so forth.
 
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Gosh, I hate how ahistorical Civilization is. Civilization seems to have inspired those horrid monuments the content designers think are so cool. I do NOT want EU to look like Civilization, not at all!
As a matter of fact, "you get fixed bonuses based on who you started with and having nothing to do with what you did with your faction" smells a lot more like Civilization than having stuff actually emerging from how you play, where, and against who, does.
 
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Please don't. Wars with claims like in ck3 would be awful and not fitting for the period.
If you reread what I said, I said that if you occupy a territory that you haven't claimed, you can annex it at the end of the war. I hope your lack of understanding is not due to the poor quality of the translator I'm using. :)
 
My overall concern is perhaps less with Mission Trees specifically, and more with the very sandbox-y experience some here seems to be wanting - I've already tried that with 2013 version of EU4 and although it was fun for a short while, it got stale quickly.
You're right. Much more fun and sure to have vastly more longevity if the game is designed for us to go through a pre-scripted storyline one single time per country and never play that country again. How could that possibly get stale?
 
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Allow me to give some minor feedback on the names of some Romanian settlements that can be seen on the map in the header.
  • Lichirești should be spelled with ș, not s (as should all settlements that have the -ești suffix);
  • tangentially related to the above, the correct letter to use is ș (s-comma), not ş (s-cedilla, which is used in the Turkish alphabet); if the letter isn't featured in the font used then s-cedilla is an acceptable replacement however;
  • î should be replaced with â in all instances where it is not the first or final letter of the word (Hârșova instead of Hîrșova, Târgoviște instead of Tîrgoviște, Râmnicu Vâlcea instead of Râmnicu Vîlcea and so on); the "î inside the word" spelling is a peculiarity introduced during the communist regime; (side note - î can be correctly used inside a word only if the letter is preceded by a prefix or as part of a compound word, but none of the names on the map will be meeting such requirements)
  • Ploiești should probably be spelled Ploești; Ploiești is the post-WW2 spelling of the city name; I'm not sure what the stance of the devs with regards to various spellings of the same name is, but the use of, for example, Pangalia instead of Mangalia suggests a preference for the historical version
I know I'm nitpicking here, but minor issue means minor fix that should take only a couple of minutes at worst to implement, so I hope a dev will take note of this and forward it to the people in charge of text strings.
 
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@Johan

Can you confirm if the 5 speed system will be retained or if there will be more speeds (6-7). Also, on average, how many minutes/hours would 100 years take on speed 5? The final question is if the game will run faster/ be heavier than Victoria 3 or CK3?
 
Then you haven't understood what they're saying at all.
Love the disagree.

> Person makes statement fundamentally incompatible with what the other side is saying.
> I point out they clearly don't understand what the other side is saying.
> DISAGREE. "I definitely understand what they're saying! *stamps foot*"

But you manifestly don't o_O
 
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Gosh, I hate how ahistorical Civilization is. Civilization seems to have inspired those horrid monuments the content designers think are so cool. I do NOT want EU to look like Civilization, not at all!

Well said. History is about processes far more than dates and individual countries histories. It is certainly not mechanically pushing forwards over and over the same narrative.

By making "historical games" with memes as history, Paradox is doing a disservice to real history, as people come to regard the history of their countries (or their favorite countries, or, indeed, the world) through the distorted lense of essentialization. Prussia can only be a military behemot, no question asked on how it happened. GB must be a naval power, and so on and so forth.
And to be honest, civilisation still has flavour in that a certain civ has core characteristics about them.

Some people have been advocating for getting rid of national ideas too (maybe to be replaced by something else, in which case: okay valid). But if every nation would play the same and have nothing defining about them, than what are we playing?

In that case, not even civ but probably territorial.io is the game you should play
 
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UI has changed any times in the last 4 years and will change more before release. The current one has basically no artwork yet. (Except the images you see)
I really hope the final UI is stylized to fit the theme of the era and not look to modern, also different UI art designs depending on government/culture like in CK2 would be realy cool
 
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The thing is, the supporters of your position (and opponents of mine) like to say "ah, but you want no flavor". And that's a gross misrepresentation, because I want flavor, but flavor that has to do with what I did with my nation and nothing else. If I form Prussia, but I'm a prosperous and mostly peaceful nation living off trade in the Baltic, then I want to see zero things - events, missions, ideas, nothing - about goosestepping Prussian soldiers. That's not the nation I'm playing. That's a Brandenburg-Prussia that got torn to shreds during the 30YW and decided it would make sure it didn't happen anymore.
OK, and how does this Prussia's flavor differ from any other nation when you play it as a peaceful trader in this case? I mean, I'm not even against your general point and I agree with your historicity aspect and how it should be limited to the state of things prior to the starting date (which is why I've argued in other threads for stuff like limiting the national ideas system to the national traditions that you get from the get go, while making the ideas per se more flexible), but when it comes to this specific topic I'm not really sure how flavor is an argument against more rail-roady things like missions unless you define flavor so widely that it loses all meaning.


You're right. Much more fun and sure to have vastly more longevity if the game is designed for us to go through a pre-scripted storyline one single time per country and never play that country again. How could that possibly get stale?
As opposed to having all countries play generally the same and then running out of possible different ways to play because development capability to deliver on alternate playstyles will run out years before you'd run out of tags in EU4? Yeah, longevity ain't the argument here either. And that's even before we get into how many mission trees, especially among the recent ones, have different paths to take.
 
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Some people have been advocating for getting rid of national ideas too (maybe to be replaced by something else, in which case: okay valid). But if every nation would play the same and have nothing defining about them, than what are we playing?
And I'm one of them. Couldn't societal values, as laid out in this TT, replace national ideas?
 
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And I'm one of them. Couldn't societal values, as laid out in this TT, replace national ideas?

Well a rework or revamp makes sense, and if you advocate that and advocating replacing it with something else, than it makes sense. The national ideas system definitely is not perfect. But where i would take issue with is if one advocates getting rid of that too and not wanting it to be replaced. I would compare it to CK3 where you play a character instead of a nation and a character also has traits and personalities. And i think it's generally more fun and rewarding if the nation you play has some kind of personality or vibe to it that makes it (sort of) unique.

I don't think societal values alone can represent it, because that seems to be more of a laws thing and less a personality-character driven thing, and i'm afraid of it not being unique or expansive enough, and such a system also risks having a meta gameplay (in that you play a certain tag and always choose the same societal values because it's the best way to play the game, similarly to ideas in EU4 where nobody would like really pick certain idea groups because they're too niche or not as strong as the ones you have to pick).
 
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Well a rework or revamp makes sense, and if you advocate that and advocating replacing it with something else, than it makes sense. The national ideas system definitely is not perfect. But where i would take issue with is if one advocates getting rid of that too and not wanting it to be replaced. I would compare it to CK3 where you play a character instead of a nation and a character also has traits and personalities. And i think it's generally more fun and rewarding if the nation you play has some kind of personality or vibe to it that makes it (sort of) unique.

I don't think societal values alone can represent it, because that seems to be more of a laws thing and less a personality-character driven thing, and i'm afraid of it not being unique or expansive enough, and such a system also risks having a meta gameplay (in that you play a certain tag and always choose the same societal values because it's the best way to play the game, similarly to ideas in EU4 where nobody would like really pick certain idea groups because they're too niche or not as strong as the ones you have to pick).
One concept for national ideas that I've been thinking about was tying it to cultures rather than specific tags. Where the cultures would get a revamp along the lines of CK3, where they have various traits of their own (and then various factors during the game could give them new ones or replace existing ones). And then whenever you'd get a new national idea unlock you'd get a selection to choose from, based on your culture's traits.

And there are two main factors to consider here. Firstly, different cultures could still share some of their traits. For example different cultures in separate mountainous regions could have one of their cultural traits relate to the mountains in some way. Then when it comes to national ideas you'd get to pick from a defensive idea about mountain forts and whatnot and another more focused on mining. That would represent parallel societal evolution where different societies could have traits in common because of a similar environment in some regard.

Secondly, you wouldn't be limited just to your primary culture in regards to which cultures provide you with national ideas picks, but all accepted cultures, showcasing that they are integrated to the point they help influence the national spirit as a whole. Which would both organically stem from the circumstances of the game even if they weren't pre-planned (like you got access to different cultures because of a lucky personal union or just expanded in a specific direction because the enemies were easy picking), as well as let you guide your decision-making on where to expand under the premise of "these cultures have the traits that would give me ideas I see fitting for my current playthrough" (if you get to influence the development of your cultures in some way - though it shouldn't be as direct as it's in CK3 in my opinion - that could be another avenue of letting you decide long-term on what to pursue).
 
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One concept for national ideas that I've been thinking about was tying it to cultures rather than specific tags. Where the cultures would get a revamp along the lines of CK3, where they have various traits of their own (and then various factors during the game could give them new ones or replace existing ones). And then whenever you'd get a new national idea unlock you'd get a selection to choose from, based on your culture's traits.

And there are two main factors to consider here. Firstly, different cultures could still share some of their traits. For example different cultures in separate mountainous regions could have one of their cultural traits relate to the mountains in some way. Then when it comes to national ideas you'd get to pick from a defensive idea about mountain forts and whatnot and another more focused on mining. That would represent parallel societal evolution where different societies could have traits in common because of a similar environment in some regard.

Secondly, you wouldn't be limited just to your primary culture in regards to which cultures provide you with national ideas picks, but all accepted cultures, showcasing that they are integrated to the point they help influence the national spirit as a whole. Which would both organically stem from the circumstances of the game even if they weren't pre-planned (like you got access to different cultures because of a lucky personal union), as well as let you guide your decision-making on where to expand under the premise of "these cultures have the traits that would give me ideas I see fitting for my current playthrough" (if you get to influence the development of your cultures in some way, that would also play a role here).
Cultural traits is definitely a good idea and something I definitely would like (culture also need a rework compared to EU4). But it's worth to note even if nations share a similar culture, some would still be different - depending on for instance government form, religion, maybe dynasty, etc. Like Venice, Papal States & Florence are all Italian but all would have different priorities. Or Flanders and Netherlands have a similar culture but the different religion makes the two uniquely different. (tho not at the start date yet). And in EU4 both flemish & dutch are classified as Germanic (which would be the same as Austrian), so it really would already have to be a trait at the lowest cultural level/distinction.

One caveat though is that this also opens up the possibility of meta cultures to accept because for optimal gameplay they might be better than others. Mughals in EU4 already sort of do that.
 
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Well a rework or revamp makes sense, and if you advocate that and advocating replacing it with something else, than it makes sense. The national ideas system definitely is not perfect. But where i would take issue with is if one advocates getting rid of that too and not wanting it to be replaced. I would compare it to CK3 where you play a character instead of a nation and a character also has traits and personalities. And i think it's generally more fun and rewarding if the nation you play has some kind of personality or vibe to it that makes it (sort of) unique.

I don't think societal values alone can represent it, because that seems to be more of a laws thing and less a personality-character driven thing, and i'm afraid of it not being unique or expansive enough, and such a system also risks having a meta gameplay (in that you play a certain tag and always choose the same societal values because it's the best way to play the game, similarly to ideas in EU4 where nobody would like really pick certain idea groups because they're too niche or not as strong as the ones you have to pick).
I don't think many people who want to scrap national ideas want them replaced by nothing at all. I don't want to play a game in which every country is the same, I just don't want a game where the qualities of countries are laid in front of me like they are inevitable. Furthermore, I don't want a game in which those qualities are inamovible whatever I do.

What I like with the potential of societal values is that it could be a system that allows for other mechanics to be unlocked at certain treshold. You want militarism? Then you can unlock it if you go all the way (or a certain way) over the "offensive/defensive" scale. Want to have the wooden wall doctrine? Go towards naval on the land/naval scale.

Countries could start in a certain way, and combinations of societal values could be necessary to get some mechanics. Effectively, if those countries were to follow their historical paths, they would have an easier time getting those mechanics, but others wouldn't be gated out of them. It would simply be more difficult for them to reach them.

I don't know if it will work like that, but I like this idea. Of course, a basic understanding of societal values is compatible with what I'm thinking about. Go towards offensive could increase discipline, for example.
 
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