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Tinto Talks #49 - 5th February 2025

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we discuss details from our secret upcoming top secret game with the codename of Project Caesar.

This week we will talk about our disease system.

outbreak.png

This is the tooltip of an outbreak together with the spread...

We have 2 types of diseases, environmental, which does not spread through movement of trade nor movement of people, and those that spread. A disease does not just infect the pops in a location, but can also infect armies.

Each disease has many different attributes, all of which can be complex calculations, and this is a very flexible system entirely modeled through script.

  • A chance for it to spawn each month.
  • How often the disease processes, i.e. how fast it ticks.
  • How quickly it spreads to other pops.
  • How it spreads between location and pops.
  • How quickly it stagnates in a location or unit.
  • How many pops and/or soldiers die or become resistant, each tick.
  • How many pops and/or soldiers die each tick (of the above).
  • The mortality for characters.
  • How quickly resistances decay.
  • How much presence is needed before it spreads to adjacent locations.
  • If you want specific pop types affected…
  • And more…

When diseases are present in a location, the resistance to it builds up, making further outbreaks less effective. Pops, locations and sub units can have resistances. So if pops move around they can bring diseases they have with them that they themselves are immune to. Likewise, a unit carrying disease may spread it to any locations it travels through.

disease_in_location.png

There is a big Smallpox outbreak here in Saint-Marcellin, but the resistance is already nice.


So let's take a detailed look at the different diseases we have.


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Bubonic Plague

With the default options, this will happen in 1346, start somewhere in Central Asia, and spread throughout the Old World.

It spreads relatively quickly and the mortality rate for pops is between 30% to 60%.

A great pestilence that sweeps through busy trade routes, sparing neither low nor high. Those infected suffer black swellings in the groin and armpits, terrible fever, and death. Some believe it is carried by the vermin that scurry in our streets and fields, spreading foul sickness from one poor soul to another.

great_pestilence.png
Great Pestilence


This will spawn in the New World whenever someone from the Old World colonizes a location, and spreads from there. It represents the collection of diseases that the European colonizers brought to the Americas. It can and will spawn at multiple places. It doesn’t impact pops from the Old World as they are immune to most of these.

This has a gigantic mortality effect, killing between 75% to 90% of all pops.

Terrible news reaches us from abroad. Misery and plague sweep the lands, and death runs with them, apparently brought by mysterious bearded foreigners. This plague is not something our elders have ever heard of, and no answers in our ancestors' memories could help us face the catastrophe if it reaches our settlements. Will our people perish, or will we somehow resist when this walking death reaches us?


malaria.png
Malaria


This is an environmental disease that is pretty much permanent in most Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the local people have limited resistance to it, but any colonizers from abroad will die.

There will be regular outbreaks that can kill 10% to 20% of the pops that do not have resistance in a location.


The ancient bane of humankind, Malaria, is an infectious disease transmitted from person to person by the bite of an infected mosquito. This illness produces chills, headaches, sweating, and a very intense fever that repeats every three to four days.

typhus.png
Typhus


Outbreaks will appear in the areas of the old world where one of the three types of Typhus are endemic. It will also spawn in forest, woods or jungle locations, spreading from there.

It spreads relatively slowly, but the mortality is between 4% to 40%.

This deathly sickness creates on those stricken by it a great deal of fever, a big red rash that might extend over the entire body, and a confusion of the mind that might get worse, to the point of full-on delirium. Those poor souls that reach that point would develop gangrenous lesions and invariably die

influenza.png
Influenza


This will spawn during winter and spread in a relatively short period of time. It will not appear in the Americas until the Great Pestilence has ravaged the continent fully.

This kills off on average about 1 in 1000 people, so it is not the most lethal of diseases.

Known by the common folk as the Flu, it is a widely spread sickness with usually mild symptoms like a runny nose or a fever in healthy individuals, but that might be extremely dangerous for those that are too young or too old or already weakened by injury or another malady.

measles.png
Measles

This will spawn in most locations around the world, and it's far more likely to spread in towns or cities.It will not appear in the Americas until the Great Pestilence has ravaged the continent fully.

It is a bit more deadly than Influenza, but about 2 in 1000 people will die from it.

Measles, also known as morbili, rubeola, and red measles, is a plague that spreads extremely fast from person to person, causing fever, coughs, sneezes, and a great flat rash that eventually covers the entire body. It preys most eagerly on children, who are at great risk of death if they fall on its claws.

smallpox.png
Smallpox


This keeps spawning in most locations around the world, but not in arid or arctic climates. It will spread in a small region and is highly contagious. It's far more likely to spread in locations with a lot of trade.It will not appear in the Americas until the Great Pestilence has ravaged the continent fully.


The mortality is between 5% and 30%, so an outbreak where there is low resistance can be deadly.

Smallpox is a terrible disease that produces on the sad victim fever, vomits, and finally an enormous amount of liquid-filled blisters that cover their entire body. The outbreaks of this plague are very deathly and those that survive are commonly left blind for life.




There are ways to reduce the impact of disease in your country. First of all there are medical advances in most ages, and there are also buildings you can build.


First there is the Hospital that you can build in any town or city with at least 20 development. This is available at the start of the game for more advanced countries.


hospital.png


Then after the Scientific Revolution you can research the advance for Medical Schools and build them in your town and cities.

medical_school.png


Next week we will talk about how forming new countries will work…
 
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It is called Beeswax, but represents all apiary goods including honey as it's also used to produce wine using a mead production method, and beer using a mjölska production method.
A note- given the Mayan's domesticated their own species of bee, there should be some parts of Mexico that produce beeswax if there aren't already.
 
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Actually, cholera has been a massive issue for a good chunk of human history as it's a disease that keeps popping up when sanitation and clean water sources break down. The 19th century just had the circumstances for that to happen a lot, as massive increases in population density and numbers put major strain on the water supply in many places.
One potential building could be a water system to reduce diseases like cholera. They would also need to be mechanically designed to need to be replaced every 30-40 years, otherwise they would be malfunctioning and could even become a source of disease.
 
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A couple other notes: I wonder if 'Dancing Plagues' could be represented in Medieval Europe. A still unexplained phenomena where people would start dancing for weeks on end, some even dancing to exhaustion, with this phenomena travelling like a disease outbreak. It probably wouldn't impact gameplay too much since death rates were still low, but it'd be a fun thing to include.

Some people have also brought up the idea of vaccination, with different cultures discovering it at different times. The discovery that Cowpox vaccinates Smallpox was a huge advancement in europe, but Islamic nations had long had a practice of inserting skin tissue from sick people into the arms of kids to protect them from disease, and this had a tangible benefit of helping the Ottoman Empire- routinely giant climactic battles would be fought with them and Europeans in which the Europeans thought they would be unable to recover, only to find within a few years their armies had completely refilled.

I definitely think some sort of vaccination 'institution' or something similar to it should be present that helps combat against disease outbreaks.
 
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Pretty sure 'plague resistance' refers to the generic mechanic of plagues, not specifically the bubonic plague.

As the tooltips list "Disease Outbreak" and "Disease" it is a perfectly valid concern and request. Maybe the mechanic started as plagues but it is being listed as diseases.
 
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Awesome DD, delivering it even better than expected.

The Med School building should have more than just local effects, tho.
Probably some kind of boost to local effectiveness (plague resistance), as per university-hospital synergy, but it should also have some kind of province/nation wide effect.

Also, as many others have pointed out, do not forget dysentery outbreaks (demographic pressure + poor sanitation).
 
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FORMING COUNTRIES TT!!!!!!
 
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Is it found everywhere or are there regions which don't have it or have very few locations? Like pre-columbian Americas of which their own native bees produce much less honey compared to Europran and African bees?
I only know that the honey of Maya's tailless bees is green (from a popular science book I read a long time ago)
China's honey production should be relatively low, because although China has independently domesticated bees for a long time, the performance of bees in China or the entire East Asia is somewhat strange. They have higher working hours and flight distances. But the total amount of honey produced is only about half of that of European bees.
 
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Incan Empire should still be quite doable.
Keep your borders far away from the Atlantic Ocean, but make sure to get infected from other natives as quickly as possible once Europeans arrive. Then rebuild as much as you can before Europeans actually make it to your borders.
ummm, But I will definitely play elsewhere. And after the Great Plague, my strength will be reduced to one in ten, how can I defeat the colonizers.
 
How feasible is it to prevent the spread of the Black Death? Does a country in a somewhat isolated geographic position like Norway or England stand a chance at this if they can wean themselves off foreign trade before it hits? Or would that just delay the inevitable?
 
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I agree, syphilis probably deserves to be represented, as syphilis epidemics were a big deal in Europe and led to the downfall of Europe's bathhouse culture, when bathing was blamed for causing epidemics. The disease was also possibly brought from the Americas to Europe.
The ancient medical history of Europe always gives me some small shocks.
 
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On the note of alt-history scenarios, might something unique occur if say China or Mali are the first to conquer the new world? I think keeping Europe's grimy mitts off the New World entirely would require a massive rejiggering, and probably be best suited to some mod scenario anyway, but I should think that initial contact coming from Africa, or Asia (or hell Australia) should at least in the short term bring some minor differences with them.
I don't think there will be much difference. The Chinese or Malians are not good people. They may not have official scale massacres and exterminations (refer to the Qing Dynasty's treatment of Taiwan's aborigines), but assimilation and private drive will inevitably exist (ploughing pavilion, driving Miao people to expand their industry, and changing soil to return to the stream)
 
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ummm, But I will definitely play elsewhere. And after the Great Plague, my strength will be reduced to one in ten, how can I defeat the colonizers.
I know, but before that you don't have any diseases. And colonization is expected to be much slower than in EUIV, giving you more time to recover. And you never have to fight against entire Spain, only as many soldiers as they actually bring to you.
I'm not saying it will be easy, I'm just saying it should still be doable. I certainly intend to try.

Aztecs and Mayans would be much more difficult, as most likely you will have to face plague and European soldiers at the same time.
 
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I know, but before that you don't have any diseases. And colonization is expected to be much slower than in EUIV, giving you more time to recover. And you never have to fight against entire Spain, only as many soldiers as they actually bring to you.
I'm not saying it will be easy, I'm just saying it should still be doable. I certainly intend to try.

Aztecs and Mayans would be much more difficult, as most likely you will have to face plague and European soldiers at the same time.
I think the hardest part should be playing SOP on the island of Cuba
 
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I wanna suggest adding the Great Pox (or Syphilis) as a disease. It originated in the new world and was introduced to Europe by the early colonizers.
 
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Those diseases are not really pandemic worthy.

Stds don’t kill that much

Leprosy is rare

And cholera doesn’t actually become an issue until thw 19th cen
I'm well aware that Cholera wasn't in Europe before the mid 19th century but it existed before.
Influenza kills 1 in 1000 in game that's not exactly more than Syphilis would.
Leprosy was NOT rare in europe from the 13th to 16th century. There where a lot of hospices/hospitals created specifically to care for people with leprosy.
 
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