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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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One question I have always had about trade capacity. Does it count for imports, exports or both? Say Im sweden and I have 2 trade capacity. Does that trade capacity count towards importing 2 cloths from England, or do I need to have trade capacity in the English market in order to import from it?

You can use your capacity in a market to export from it and/or import to it, splitting your capacity how you want.
 
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The fact that all trade icons have the differenting sub-icon in the bottom-right of the fish-to-apples general trade icon shown in front view in a flat plane with the sole exception of trade maintenance, where the cog sub-icon is drawn in 3D perspective at an angle bothers me more than it should.
 
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1737558561829.png


Love a lot of the stuff, but -
I feel like a lot of the text in the top of this image is difficult to read. The red percent values at the top of the image have too low contrast and I can barely make them out if I squint, and the light blue "Trade Advantage" "Market Attraction" etc text blends too much with the image.
 
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Wait, so your burghers trade capacity is the same as the countries? Like a duplication? So if your trade capacity is 2, the burghers is also 2? I think it would still be useful as we have seen that burgher trade capacity has modifers such as estae privileges so your trade capaicty and the burghers is going to differ, no?

no, its completely seperate
 
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Hi. Red numbers are difficult to read on top of the brown UI. Have a good day.
 
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Question:

I want to import a good from Market A to Market B. Do I use up capacity in Market A, Market B, both, or one of them depending on which market I click the export/import button on?
the one of the 2 of your choice (no idea if you can choose upon doing the trade, hopefully you can as it'd be annoying to have an action have a different effect depending of the path you took to do it)
 
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On the topic of UI, this game seems to go towards big menu with lots of different tabs. But maybe it is an idea to make it more Windowslike? In the sense that you can have open lots of tabs and shuffle them around the screen the way you like. That makes it a lot easier to compare numbers and the like. (Something I run into while playing Vic3 or eu4)

And maybe even resizing? (The bigger UImod in eu4 is the one mod I can't live without)
 
If my vassal(or the vassal of my vassal) has a market center can I "control" it in the same way I could if I directly owned it? I feel like it should be this way for most vassals beside rebellious ones and autonomous ones maybe
 
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I know it is an abstraction, and it was in EU4 already, but what does trade efficiency represent? Sure, you get more ducats for a trade, but no one in-game really does pay the higher price, right?
 
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So if I as a Poland (10% TA) share market with Teutonic order (10.1% TA) and this market lacks cloth -> I expand buildings that produce it and they sell that cloth to the Teutons first and not country they are in? I guess there will not be a situation where one country in a shared market takes 100% of the goods produced in it but it still doesn't feel right to me

No, the cloth goes split out on market access.

Trade Access is for who Exports it from the market to another market
 
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Thanks for the detailed explanation ! Just to confirm though, in game your friend will also be able to ship the coal from riga to London (paying then 10 euros, and with the trade efficiency allowing to reduce the price to only 7 euros, + 1.8 euros for a total of 8.8 euros ?) Say because he has an awful lots of factories in Great britain and want to ensure coal stays as low as possible there, and / or he plans on fighting sweden to conquer paradox HQ and wants to ensure they won't have the coal to move their ships to defend ?

You buy the coal in Riga for 60€and sell it for 50€ in London. (This is assuming there IS any surplus coal in riga to export)

Base Profit is -10€
Trade Efficiency adds 5% of 50€, ie 2.5€
And a cost of 1.8€.

So the first month you'd lose 9.3€, and it will get worse as prices drop in London and increase in Riga due to supply increasing in London and demand increasing in Riga.
 
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So if I don't have any trade advantage in the Lubeck market I can only export goods from other markets(in which I have TA) into it?

Yes. If you want to control the trade, you need to invest in some infrastructure for it :)
 
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The UI looks really good and functional. My only constructive piece of feedback is on this section:
market.png


  1. The Tab is called "Markets", but then it immediately gives me numbers that seem to be about a single market, such as Market Attraction...
    1. If "Market Attraction" is a metric of how Sweden is attractive to any market within its locations, then I would suggest (probably too late) for something like "Attractiveness to Markets"
    2. My main point is that, for a non EU4 player like myself, my first reaction to these numbers was that they were about a market and not about Sweden
  2. The layout here is rather baffling, with only 3/4s of the information framed by the image. At first it made me think that the top two, Trade Efficiency and Production Efficiency were the two most important numbers, with the rest being secondary. But it seems like they are all fairly equally important.
    1. I would prefer these 8 pieces of information were in a table, tbh. 8 Rows in a table with a transparent background on top of the image.
  3. The icons are way too similar. Creating Icon art is not easy, but when it starts being repetitive the icons start working against their very purpose.
    1. If the player will normally encounter a UI screen where the icons will be without text, then these icons will be inefficient in conveying their meaning at a glance
    2. If the player will never encounter, say Trade Efficiency icon without the words "Trade Efficiency", then the icon is rather superfluous and imo unnecessary. Not every concept needs an icon in my opinion.
 
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No, the cloth goes split out on market access.

Trade Access is for who Exports it from the market to another market


I see. So needs are taken care of first, while moving stuff comes after. So basically if there's 10 cloth in a market, and all the countries in that market need 8 cloth, the Trade Advantage only concerns itself with the cloth that is left over and seeing where it goes. The actual needs of the market are covered first. So that 2 cloth that is left over is what is covered by trade advantage, meaning if two countries want to export it and have 2 capacity for it, the one with the higher access will be able to take it all.
 
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