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Tinto Talks #47 - 22nd of January 2025

Hello Everyone and Welcome to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we give you some information about our entirely secret upcoming game with the codename of Project Caesar.

As mentioned in https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/psa-tinto-talks-topic-change-this-week.1726639/ we have a change of schedule for this week.

Today we’ll go through the market screen and show how it's used in the game. Here I will be playing as Sweden, and this is the 6th iteration of the UI we have done for the economy system as we kept iterating upon it to make it more player friendly. Our goal has been to give you important information at a glance and reduce the amount of clicks you need to do anything to a minimum.


market.png


At the top of the screen you can see the balance tab for all your fun sliders, and the trade tab where all your trades are shown.

First, let's explain all the keywords you see here.

Trade Efficiency
This modifies how much gold you get from trades, by directly impacting the price you sell goods in the target market. A negative will decrease the profit, and could even make a trade unprofitable if the margins are low enough.

Production Efficiency
This impacts the output of buildings. A positive Production Efficiency increases the profit, while a negative may make it not worth keeping open.

Trade Advantage
The Trade Advantage of countries in a market determines who will be able to get their exports fulfilled first. If there is a limited amount of supply of goods in a market they get distributed by the trade advantage that each country has in that market.

Market Attraction
This impacts how much pull a market_center has over a location to make it a part of its market. As we play Sweden here, and currently don’t have a market, it's not that important to us.

Trade Maintenance
Trading is not free, as the ships, wagons, and caravans need to be maintained, and the merchants themselves need to be paid.

Market Protection
Protectionism is a desire to keep trade within one's own Country. This is represented by one location_modifier and one country_modifier, which reduce locations' likelihood of belonging to foreign markets.

Trade Capacity
This is if we have any bonus to how much capacity each merchant has in all our markets. This represents how much a country can export and/or import from a market. Each trade created from this market uses merchant_capacity depending on the distance to the other market, and the volume of goods that trade is doing.

Trade Range
This is simply how far our merchants can reach, and determines how distant the markets we can trade with can be. This is calculated from any market we have merchants in.


Below we have the search bar and filter list. This is something we have in pretty much every screen with a list of objects in Project Caesar. The Search Bar allows you to just type what you look for, and it will check on names, or any other relevant information that is connected to the elements in the list. The filter allows you to toggle any data.

filters.png

These are the filters we have for the market list.


Let’s focus on the market entry of Riga then. This is a UI widget, which we refer to as the Market Card, that you will see in several screens, as it gives you information about the market, while allowing you to quickly do actions.

riga.png

The flag and name do not need to be explained

In the top right corner we have an automation button, which allows you to toggle trade automation for that market.

Below it you will see 5 blue buttons, all with important information.

The first shows the amount of trade capacity available and how much you have in that market. If you click on it, it would open the buildings overview tab, with this market filtered, and with all buildings you have and could build that could increase your trade capacity in that market.

The second shows our position in the market when it comes to trade advantage and clicking it will open up your trades with a filter for the market, so you can quickly change your trades.

The third button shows how many types of goods you have some sort of lack for when it comes to your constructions or the requirements of your buildings in this market. The banner is only shown if there are any goods lacking. Yellow if buildings are inefficient due to lacking of some of the goods and red if there is a blocker. If you click on it you get to the goods screen with the needs and the market filters selected.

The fourth button is similar to the third, but is about the needs of your pops in this market. The banner goes red if you have pops in the market that are actively part of a rebel faction. If you click on it you get to the goods screen with the needs and the market filters selected.

Below here is the tooltip for this button...
pop_needs.png

Yeah, I’d also be upset if I lacked wine…


The fifth button shows the current food balance in the market, and if you click it you go to the food screen, with any locations in the market you can get food from in the filter. If any province is starving or likely to starve in the next 6 months, you will see alerts there as well.


Lets end by taking a quick look at what the goods panel shows when we click the fourth button..

goods.png


Market widget is at the top, as mentioned above, where it acts as a filter for the information displayed below The buttons to the right allow you to quickly toggle to the next market we have presence in, or remove the market filter to see data for your whole country.

Normal search bar and lots of possible filters. The “Pop Needs” filter is present, so the list below only displays the goods that our Pops are currently demanding.

Let’s now explain this list, with 4 entries.

First is the icon of the goods, in a tiny little version, so it works fine with lots of goods at the same time.

Second is a small vertical progress bar, which shows how much goods are in the stockpiles in the filtered market. Obviously empty here.

Third is the monthly balance in the market, which is very red and negative, so we need to do something about it.

Fourth is the price in the market, with gold or silver icons indicating relative price, with Wine being more expensive than the default price, indicating that imports can be profitable here.

Then we have the two buttons for importing and exporting. The export button is greyed out, as there is no surplus. We have some capacity so we could attempt to import about 2 goods of one type.

After that is the Expand RGO button, Cloth can not be expanded as it's not a raw material, but the others are also greyed out, as there are no Wine production in Sweden, and no gold or silver mines. The Sala Silvermine was not present in 1337, but there is a nice DHE for it. If any of the RGOs were available, clicking on the button would open the Expand RGO screen with all locations you own with that raw material in the filter. The number on the button shows the profit of the most profitable RGO of that good you can expand in your territory.

The final button is the “build a building that produces the goods” button. If you click on it, it would open the buildings overview tab, with this market filtered, and with all buildings you have and could build that could produce that good in that market. Now the quick thinking of you will ask: “wine?” Yes, there is a production method for Breweries that can turn fruit into wine.



Cheers, next week we will back the regular scheduled programming.
 
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To me, the "Markets" screen layout implies that the items on the left and right are opposites (i.e "Trade Efficiency" vs "Production Efficiency"). Perhaps this could be mitigated by having them both left-aligned and having the same order of Icon | Name/Info.
 
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Thanks for a great TT! I really love the UI and the style more and more with each dev. diary :)

I do not know if it is too early to ask, bit I would like to mention a couple of things concerning UI, I will be grateful if you could comment on something now.

1. You once said that you like decimals (and here in the market screen they make perfect sense), but I think sometimes they are really excessive because UI is going to be overloaded with a lot of information (in a good way for a proper GSG).

For example, in the estates screenshot you use power % without decimals and it is beautiful and sufficient (left part), while satisfaction % indicators use insignificant decimals. I think it would be enough to round them to the lower value.

If you get rid of 50% of numbers in the right part of the window, it immediately becomes much more clear and user friendly:
french_estates.png
french_estates_good.png

2. Will there be an option to switch off permanent text underlining for the words that have a popup window? More detailed thread is here, but in general for me and a lot of people it would be enough to highlight them with a proper bold font + another colour (approved by a colour-blind person too).

There have been some screenshots with more than 50% of underlined text, that makes it very cluttered that would affect long gameplay:
Underline.png
UnderlineX.png

3. Will there be an option to change number format in the game?
There are different formats like 1,000.000 / 1 000.000 / 1.000,000 / 1 000,000 and everyone is used to a different format. So this option would be the best compromise.

I personally would prefer 1 000.000 over the current you have in UI, so I would love to have it this way:
Underlining.png
UnderliningX.png

I think all of these things would benefit greatly to the mentioned goal
to give you important information at a glance.

Thanks in advance and thanks for your work!
 
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Is trade advantage an absolute thing? ie. do countries get ranked by trade advantage, they then each get to fulfil their trades in order until nothing is left, or do countries get to fulfil the weighted proportion of their trades depending on their trade advantage?
 
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Is trade advantage an absolute thing? ie. do countries get ranked by trade advantage, they then each get to fulfil their trades in order until nothing is left, or do countries get to fulfil the weighted proportion of their trades depending on their trade advantage?

the first
 
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"Yes, there is a production method for Breweries that can turn fruit into wine." - will this button also show the technologies we need for a production building, if that building is blocked by some technology requirements?
 
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Interesting, so if I have TA of 10% and the next guy has TA of 10.1%, I might completely lose out? Seems like maybe some sort of weighted access might make sense. I say that as someone who can imagine how much work you all have been putting into balance and making these systems work, so take the feedback with the smallest grain of salt :)
 
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