Tinto Talks #45 - 8th of January 2025

[Znikii]

and did not cause the massive population decline in Europe. (Even worse than a Yellow River flood)

are you serious?

 

[zeruosi]

are you serious?

Yes, the Black Death was only particularly severe in Europe, but there was nothing special about it in China. It did not cause China to lose one-third to two-thirds of its total population.

 

[Soselo]

Can climate change during game?

 

[effy]

Shouldnt woods and forests give some sort of boost to locations with the lumber resource? Or there should maybe be a building for creating lumber that can only be built in wood/forest locations

 

[Johan]

Tinto are spaniards, thats why

It depends on your view

Some of are immigrants. And some are very adamant they are Catalans

 

[Hippolyta1]

With how vegetation works, it would make much better sense to make the Mata Atlantica region in Southern Brazil a bunch of properly passable and colonizeable locations with the Jungle vegetation instead of a godforsaken wasteland.
The area was inhabited and densely settled in the colonial age, it's no freaking Mordor. Please, review it before releasing the game

 

[Johan]

With mountains blocking vision and being snow covered in winter, have the Alps just become hell on earth for an attacker?
Also, does the lack of vision now mean ambushes are a thing? Or is there some sort of recon/scout unit available

yes on ambushes and alps being "fun"

 

[FleetingRain]

Well, vegetation made most sense for us

Location size might be a better option when you consider small locations. Two 100px locations with 100k Pop Capacity each having 200k Pop Capacity together only makes sense if a single 200px location with the same parameters also has 200k Pop Capacity. You'd need to also rebalance some of those numbers, of course, or big desert locations would be the new Paris.

Currently in our engine that is painted into the graphics, so the visuals wouldn't change.

Any chance we get at least something like a "Deforested" modifer in locations? Doesn't need to actually change the graphics and such, but affect gameplay nonetheless.

 

[GeneralUrist]

Currently in our engine that is painted into the graphics, so the visuals wouldn't change.

Then let the visuals stay unchanged even with deforestation! Deforestation and marsh drainage was a major occurrence in this time period, and I am certain that deforestation not being indicated on the map graphics is a MUCH smaller loss than deforestation not being in-game in any form.

 

[Oglesby]

We share the opinion that it would be a perfect feature for Caesar, but if it was as simple as us agreeing then it would have fixed it 12 months ago. Unfortunately it's a bit deeper than that. With the unprecedented worldwide level of detail that Caesar has, it's a unique engineering challenge to make the required improvements to the graphical system as we really are on the cutting edge in several respects.

Any timeline on when we will be able to hear more on this "unprecedented worldwide level of detail" with respect to the graphical systems that are cutting edge? Or is this more of a 'you'll see it when you see it' situation?

I think that the ability to change vegetation (deforestation, creating farmland) is going to be an ongoing thorn until we learn more.

 

[Bisonmask]

If such winters are once in a century or little ice age related events then maybe they could be handled separately and thus the limit might not apply to them

They aren't either. The Continental parts of at least Russia and North America regularly (maybe once every five years, less now) get bitterly cold winters and these have sometimes coincided with historic events, notably invasions of Russia

 

[andseanfor]

Currently in our engine that is painted into the graphics, so the visuals wouldn't change.

So is the problem that the terrain isn't saved in the save file, the game just checks the terrain file in common or history or whatever whenever it loads? So if you modified the terrain file and launched the game from a save, would the game show your modifications? Or would that mean that the game would have to reload the shaders or something (idk anything about graphics)?

If terrain really can't be modified throughout the campaign could there be location modifiers that changed the effects of terrain and maybe changed the visuals, like mild/moderate/severe deforestation, or drained wetlands? Different game obviously but Vic 3 recently added "harvest conditions" that add a modifier to a state and add a visual effect like land drying up or iirc wildfires burning.

 

[PyRonin]

wow having locations with no visions from adjacent locations is gonna be pretty game-changing. I can foresee having to split off single cavalry regiments to "scout" adjacent mountain or forest locations before moving my main army into them and risk getting into an ambush.

I wonder tho, will the AI "know" where our troops are, or would hiding armies in difficult terrain be a practical strategy to defeat numerically superior ai enemies?

 

[Bisonmask]

I strongly disagree with making Mediterranean the ideal climate, subtropical should definitely be better than it.

You could even avoid making one strictly better by fx making subtropical harder to develop but more conducive to large populations

It just doesn't make sense for Mediterranean to be the high pop one when it's nowhere near that irl

 

[Moppy771]

I don't think climate itself should directly affect population size. Population is largely based on food production within a climate, not the climate itself. Some subtropical regions like in India are immensely populated while historically in the US the South was very underpopulated in comparison to the North, despite the current set-up essentially saying it should have been like x3 more attractive for settlers for its subtropical climate vs the continental north. All the normal issues one associates with tropical climate (deadly jungles!) is a vegetation issue, not a climate issue (see the immensely populated island of Java). Egypt is in an Arid region, but because of the vegetation and food production of the Nile river it's always had a big population capacity.


Climate is an important factor but instead each climate type should have a different modifier for different types of grown RGOs. This will be immensely important to simulate how for example the introduction of the more versatile potato allowed regions of Europe that previously had lower food production (and thus lower population) to experience massive growth, or perhaps, in the case of my previous example, subtropical and tropical climates are attractive for cash crops so some players opt to have RGOs for that instead of actual food RGOs. Every climate should have an effect on the production of different types of grown RGOs. If you insist on planting cotton instead of rice, then you'll make huge profits but have lower food production and thus population capacity. If you plant potatos in Ireland, you'll have a huge boost in population up until a blight may nuke it...


The base population cap of a location, IMHO, would ideally revolve around size-in-pixels of a location, and its vegetation. Secondary should obviously be the actual food production, which is affected by both climate, development and the amount of the population that is producing food.

 

[Bisonmask]

this data is good, obviously important to note the discrepancies between today and 1337 in terms of various continent's share of population(Europe for example has less than 1/3 the global share it does in PC in 1337)

That's partly because they've used extremely low-end population estimates for regions outside Europe

 

[SupBros]

We share the opinion that it would be a perfect feature for Caesar, but if it was as simple as us agreeing then it would have fixed it 12 months ago. Unfortunately it's a bit deeper than that. With the unprecedented worldwide level of detail that Caesar has, it's a unique engineering challenge to make the required improvements to the graphical system as we really are on the cutting edge in several respects.

Since changing graphics are gonna be an issue, at the very least the player should be able to do something (buildings maybe?) in-game in order to change vegetation modifiers into deforested and farmland. That way, performance would be fine as it is but also it'll allow the player to simulate those processes that happened during the game's timespan.

 

[Moppy771]

Since changing graphics are gonna be an issue, at the very least the player should be able to do something (buildings maybe?) in-game in order to change vegetation modifiers into deforested and farmland. That way, performance would be fine as it is but also it'll allow the player to simulate those processes that happened during the game's timespan.

Yeah I suggested something similar. This whole terrain-change issue could be solved with "buildings" that represent the terraforming.

 

[Thorum]

no.. vegetation sets the base capacity.

An example in Iceland showing some other things that impact population capacity.
View attachment 1241415

So, population capacity is independent of the size of the location? Isn't that an enormous debuff for areas with larger location sizes?

I've just exposed pixel count of each location as a location_size trigger so modders can do whatever they want with that information.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a "pop capacity per (kilo?)pixel" from vegetation, and everything gets multiplied by this value? Seems like that would solve that issue?

Or am I inventing a problem, with us missing something still?

 

[Oglesby]

wow having locations with no visions from adjacent locations is gonna be pretty game-changing. I can foresee having to split off single cavalry regiments to "scout" adjacent mountain or forest locations before moving my main army into them and risk getting into an ambush.

The other possibility if gaining control of the location indirectly. Take the province 'capital' and the rest with automatically shift. If the location shifts control you now have vision into it. Note this is blocked if it is part of the ZoC of a fort _or has an army present_ (ie. If it doesn't shift it when it should it has an army hidden in it).

"Project Caesar has two different ways to automatically gain control over several locations at once. First of all, if you take a fort, all locations in its zone of control will start changing control to you. This is also valid for forts owned by an enemy if we have taken it. Secondly, if you take the capital you will start getting control over all locations in that province. Of course, this is blocked by hostile armies and forts." - TT#23

I wonder tho, will the AI "know" where our troops are, or would hiding armies in difficult terrain be a practical strategy to defeat numerically superior ai enemies?

I would think that it occurs like it had in the past. AI knows of all armies it has visions of. When a unit leaves the AI's vision there is a chance that it 'forgets' about it, i.e every period there is a chance to forget about the unit and it retains 'vision' on it until that occurs.