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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.

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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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Cholera is less of a sickness with a resistance, and more of a permanent penalty to population growth depending on level of urbanization. Modern waste management is centuries away, and the first instance of a city having natural population growth (instead of just consuming life, and relying on immigrants from the countryside) isn't until... 1914.
I think it should be an endemic disease; if measles and influenza are then should should cholera. It still spread like any other pathogen during this era as wasn't entirely concentrated. Especially in more conurbated locations there should be outbreaks — waste management was poor in most places to begin with.
 
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First of all, I’d like to say that the disease system is really solid and seems pretty fun. That said, I feel like the "Great Pestilence" disease is being used as the explanation for the demographic collapse of native peoples after European contact. This just brings back old arguments that have been challenged many times—and, in my opinion, rightly so.

A lot of scholars have pointed out that the real deciding factor in the collapse wasn’t war or disease but the sheer exploitation of Indigenous peoples, which completely wrecked their social structures and production methods. In other words, it led to the breakdown of their entire system of social reproduction, making recovery nearly impossible.

I will leave here some academic sources that have explored this issue:

Some sources:

-Reséndez, A. (2016). The other slavery: The uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
-Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. University of California Press.
-Cook, S. F., & Borah, W. (1979). Essays in population history: Mexico and the Caribbean (Vol. 1). University of California Press.
-Mann, C. (2005). 1491: New revelations of the
Americas before Columbus. Vintage Books.
-Newson, L. A. (1985). Indian survival in colonial Nicaragua. University of Oklahoma Press.
 
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So Hospital only gives plague resistance? No resistance for measles, smallpox and others?

its all the same. should probably rename it to disease_resistance
 
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Great Pestilence

This will spawn in the New World whenever someone from the Old World colonizes a location, and spreads from there.

This has a gigantic mortality effect, killing between 75% to 90% of all pops.
Well, the number of natives in the American continent is already the lowest estimate, with this i wonder if there will be any natives left for the colonizers to fight, exploit or assimilate.

Diseases did kill the most at first, but violence also killed a good part since the discovery, and then there is those that for centuries either died while being exploited or were assimilated into non native cultures.
Finally there is the natives that survived until the 19th century, and then mostly died as well but thats outside the game timespan, but at least there were still natives while this Pestilence may reduce the already low estimated number into far too little pops.
 
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I feel like Rice wine should be liquor if anything, not wine.
No, most of China's liquor/Baijiu(白酒) is made from sorghum. The wine brewed from rice wine is called Huangjiu(黄酒), which is a low alcohol fermented wine. There are also lower alcohol sweet rice wines that undergo simple fermentation, known as fermented rice wine(醪糟).
 
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Do you still get food from the rice you use in wine-making?
At least in reality, the brewed rice can still be consumed (provided that the brewing time is not particularly long)
 
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Should rice wine be split from grape-based wine for Asian countries? Not sure if wine demands in the west would see eastern rice wine, especially in the game timeframe as the perfect substitute and vice versa, especially in places like France, Italy, China, and Japan.
In my opinion, wine should be renamed as fermented to include the vast majority of alcoholic beverages in the world.
 
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However, if you tie the ressistance to diseases to culture, I don't understand the need for the "Great Pestilence", since the diseases that ravaged the New World the most were in fact Smallpox, Measles, Influenza, Typhus and Malaria (along with Cocoliztli). And since they were several diferent diseases, it was all the more damaging, since whenever a society started to recover from the first, the second would take its place, and so on. The New World Epidemics were not a single event that took place in the 1500s throughout the entire continent, but rather waves of different pathogens that kept coming back every few years, extending well into the late 19th century in certain regions such as the American Great Plains and the Amazon.
It is true that there is no need for the existence of some kind of major epidemic, just spreading the diseases of the Old World and causing the highest mortality rate can significantly reduce the population.
 
its all the same. should probably rename it to disease_resistance
Since Hospitals and medical schools treat known diseases would it make more sense for them to increase the rate of disease_resistance build-up rather the actual resistance? and or reduce disease mortality chance...
 
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Could we get a game rule to disable the Great Pestilence like the one that you guys made for the Black Death? In case maybe someone wants to play in the Americas but doesn't want to deal with 90% of their population dying.
 
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yes and yes.

the drawback is that your soldiders will die.
Countries with access to slave soldiers can make biological warfare WHILE thinning out the minority population? It would seem that you could make a very unethical Ottomans or Mamluks campaign.
 
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First of all, I’d like to say that the disease system is really solid and seems pretty fun. That said, I feel like the "Great Pestilence" disease is being used as the explanation for the demographic collapse of native peoples after European contact. This just brings back old arguments that have been challenged many times—and, in my opinion, rightly so.

A lot of scholars have pointed out that the real deciding factor in the collapse wasn’t war or disease but the sheer exploitation of Indigenous peoples, which completely wrecked their social structures and production methods. In other words, it led to the breakdown of their entire system of social reproduction, making recovery nearly impossible.

I will leave here some academic sources that have explored this issue:

Some sources:

-Reséndez, A. (2016). The other slavery: The uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
-Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. University of California Press.
-Cook, S. F., & Borah, W. (1979). Essays in population history: Mexico and the Caribbean (Vol. 1). University of California Press.
-Mann, C. (2005). 1491: New revelations of the
Americas before Columbus. Vintage Books.
-Newson, L. A. (1985). Indian survival in colonial Nicaragua. University of Oklahoma Press.
Agreed, they should really reconsider the whole 'great pestilence' thing. The natives lacking any resistance to any of the old world diseases is enough to kill off at least half of the population provided enough pass through's of disease. Further, the encomienda system and slave mines in the Andes and Mexica region killed off a huge portion as well. There's no need to artificially introduce a 'great pestilence' for any of this.

On another note, Malaria wasn't introduced to the Americas until the colonization of Brazil, so that's another disease that shouldn't become possible there until then. There's plenty of new evidence suggesting that there were whole civilizations of Amazonians that ended up disappearing likely as a consequence of the introduction of Malaria.
 
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What about the revenge of the New World - Syphilis?
It appeared in Europe after 1492 so it's thought to be arrived from the New World.

Although it is basically a sexually transmitted and "slow" disease, in the decades following its appearance, a much more intense form of it devastated the Old World. Once it appeared somewhere, it remained there permanently, only to be reduced by the growth of Resistance, the development of medicine and, well... improved sexual morality.
As someone playing through the excellent KCD2 right now, I'll never forgive Syphillis! The decline of buxom bathmaids in the early modern period is just depressing.



No, most of China's liquor/Baijiu(白酒) is made from sorghum. The wine brewed from rice wine is called Huangjiu(黄酒), which is a low alcohol fermented wine. There are also lower alcohol sweet rice wines that undergo simple fermentation, known as fermented rice wine(醪糟).
Fair enough. I've only ever had Sake I think, though I think I also had a korean equivalent at one point. IIRC Sake is sometimes referred to as a type of beer even and I definitely would not describe it as such(either wine or a sort of liquor would seem more applicable, though I actually enjoyed it fully so yeah I guess wine would probably be the best description). I'd love to try a chinese version sometime though.
 
Are hospitals really the most reasonable representation of disease prevention for this era? It would seems like cultural mores and common practices would matter a lot more. Which to me would seem more like policies, estate privileges and technologies.
 
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