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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.


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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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looks like a great system are there any plans to add syphilis as a disease that can come from the Americas to Europe after first contact? I noticed that some diseases go from Europe to the Americas but none go the other way.
 
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Can diseases be modded to have more specific effects than just mortality?
EG, decreased goods production, or local power, or say, changing the local climate for whatever reason?
Is there a quick and dirty trigger for ‘(location) has X% of (disease)’?
 
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Will the "medicine" good be able to reduce the mortality of certain diseases? Cinchona bark was used to treat fevers and later malaria withing the later centuries of the game's timeframe. A specific advance in the age of absolutism for a state who has a presence in a market with an Amazonian medicine producing province perhaps.
 
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Will some religions have lower chance of disease spread? E.g. Muslims and Jews ritually washing their hands.
 
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No because a lack of adequate reporting does not equal a lack of death.

There are reasons to believe PL and neighbouring states were indeed less affected by the Black Death, at least its initial outbreak.

We validated our BDP approach by examining two well-studied, but contrasting, regional case studies of the Black Death’s mortality, in Sweden and Poland. An earlier multidisciplinary analysis discovered significant contraction in cereal cultivation, as well as a more general economic and demographic decline, in the uplands of southern Sweden following the Black Death. By contrast, historians have long demonstrated that central Europe, particularly Poland, experienced economic growth over the fourteenth century, related to the centralization of royal power following a period of partition, few wars in the central provinces of the country, large-scale colonization of uncultivated lands and the development of cities27. Our BDP approach independently corroborates these trajectories. We validate the ability of our pollen datasets to reflect the extent of the Black Death’s mortality by comparing them to historical data of national tax payments made to the pope (Peter’s pence)28,29,30 (Fig. 3). This validity test lends further support to our primary focus in this study on cereal cultivation, as argued in the Methods.

Opera Zrzut ekranu_2025-02-05_155535_www.nature.com.png


Figure 6 visualizes the spatial distribution of the four trajectories of post-Black Death landscape change from Fig. 4, demonstrating that the Black Death’s mortality varied significantly between European regions. The pandemic was immensely destructive in some areas, but in others it had a far lighter touch. Strikingly, BDP identifies a sharp agricultural decline in several regions of Europe, independently corroborating analyses of historical sources that suggest high mortality in regions of Scandinavia, France, western Germany, Greece and central Italy1, and lending further validation to our approach. At the same time, there is much evidence for continuity and uninterrupted agricultural growth in central and eastern Europe, and several regions of western Europe, particularly in Ireland and Iberia. In this way, BDP invalidates histories of the Black Death that assume Y. pestis was uniformly prevalent, or nearly so, across Europe and that the pandemic had a devastating demographic impact everywhere.

Opera Zrzut ekranu_2025-02-05_155604_www.nature.com.png


 
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Some low-effort spelling/grammatical suggestions for the flavor text of the first image:

Smallpox is a terrible disease that inflicts fever, vomiting and finally an enormous amount of liquid-filled blisters that cover the entire body of the unfortunate victim. The outbreaks of this plague are very deadly and those that survive are commonly blinded for life


outbreak.png
 
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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.

I would love for this to be something that scales instead, and can spread its effect.

For example, while it would've been rare for hospitals to have an effect beyond the town and its immediate environs, people might take a long trip to a well regarded hospital for treatment, and medical schools if they get big enough would have their graduates start settling across the country. And it would be a little odd for a small hospital in a town of a few thousand people to cost as much as a hospital operating in a city of half a million or more.

Do you have a map to show the provinces/locations that harbor endemic malaria? (Something like this?)

Malaria like diseases aren't unknown in Europe at the time either. The Netherlands, for example, had a swamp fever that largely occurred in its coastal swamps, had symptoms very much the same as malaria, would be treated the same and with the same medication IIRC,, and was only rendered extinct in the 1960s as a result of the Deltaworks gearing up and turning a fair few brackish water swamps into fresh water swamps, which the disease didn't survive.
 
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