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Tinto Talks #5 - March 27th, 2024

Welcome to the fifth Tinto Talks, where we talk about the design for our upcoming top secret game with the codename ‘Project Caesar.’


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The state is me! Oh, you meant E-state, sorry.. not me ..

Today we will go into detail about one of the core systems in the game, and talk about how estates work.

First of all, there are four estates in Project Caesar, which mostly map 1 to 1 with a social class: Nobility, Clergy, Burghers and the Commoners. There is also the Crown, which represents the state itself.

Each estate gains power based on the amount of population belonging to the estate, which is also modifiable by local attributes of where the population is, where some nobles may have very high power in a certain area, or whether a specific city has entrenched burgher rights there.

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This is the estates part of the government view, where you can see their power, current satisfaction, the equilibrium its trending toward, and what privileges it currently has.

Every 1,000 nobles gives +50 estate power to their estate, while 1,000 peasants merely give +0.05 estate power as default. Then these are modified locally in every location, as mentioned above, and then in the entire country by laws, reforms and most notably the privileges that you have given the estates.

The total power of all the 4 estates and the crown then together all add up to 100%, which is the effective power they have.

Depending on your crown power, you either get a scaling penalty or scaling bonus, on aspects like the cost of revoking estate privileges, the cost of changing policies in laws, the efficiency of the cabinet, the expected costs of the court, and other things. If your crown power is weak, you need to have the estates really satisfied, or you will not get much out of any parliament you try to call.

Each of the four estates has a current satisfaction and an equilibrium it will move towards. Some estates, and some countries, will have the estate satisfaction moving quicker to the equilibrium than others. Each estate has 2 factors per type of estate in which their satisfaction impacts the entire country, where satisfaction above 50% gives a scaling bonus, and below, a scaling penalty.

If the satisfaction is below 25%, this estate will not provide any levies. Most importantly, the estate satisfaction also impacts the satisfaction of the pops that belong to that estate, possibly creating rebel factions or even civil wars.
  • Nobility impacts your prestige gain and your counterespionage.
  • Clergy impacts your research speed and your diplomatic reputation.
  • Burghers impact your merchant power and the production efficiency.
  • Commoner impacts your food production and your stability costs.

So what impacts the satisfaction equilibrium of an estate? The privileges they get, the current stability, some reforms may impact them, some laws may, how you tax them, and much more. Some examples include clergy being happier with higher religious unity or burghers liking having more market centers in your country.

# estate privileges
Estate Privileges then? You may feel forced to grant privileges to estates to be able to tax them more, and you may be forced to grant privileges to get their support in parliament. All privileges impact the power of their estate, and many also increase their satisfaction equilibrium. They all have some impact on gameplay fitting the privilege, and often they also impact a societal value of their country.

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WiP ui, temporary graphics and no icons etc.

There are many different privileges, and many unique ones depending on where and what type of country you play.

We mentioned taxes before, and while this is not the development diary where we go into details about the economic system, it is important to mention that the estates of a country have wealth that is increased by the amount of money that you have not taken from them in taxes. Rich estates will use their wealth on many things, primarily to invest into things that benefit them, but will often also build things that also benefit the country.

Next week we will talk about a few new concepts that are rather new to this game that have not been present in previous games, as we will talk about proximity, control and maritime presence, all concepts that need to be talked about in detail, before we go into the economy system.
 
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The veracity of achievements through ironman is next to zero. It's easy to hack the game through cheat engine, and there's even a simple program to enable the console in ironman that anyone can come across by googling "EU4 console patcher". The community of challenge runners basically requires an entire campaign to be streamed for anyone to take a run seriously because of this, and at least one content creator that I know of has gotten ensnared in a controversy when they had the ironman icon but were using console. There's also the Steam achievement unlocker and probably a bunch of other ways to get around it.
Then try to fix that instead of saying "f*ck it, let's make achievements totally irrelevant then"?
 
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colonists should colonize on a state basis
you mean on a province level rather than location level? I wholeheartedly disagree. Portugal's colonization strategy was setting up outposts around Africa, which would be ingame locations and not provinces
 
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How will the new pop and estate system model the Reformation? Will there be separate denominations? If so, might we see proto-Protestants, e.g. Waldensians and the Lollards represented among populations in the 1337 start date? To add to this question, would it be possible for a scenario in which the Lollards or the Waldensians come to prominence during the Reformation, instead of being subsumed into later movements?

Reformation is a longer process and involved many more options along the centuries from Lollards and Hussites to Lutherans and Calvinists.
 
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On the main topic of the dev diary, two things concern me:
  • First, this estates system seems like a mashup of EU4's estates 1.0, and the reworked estates 2.0. Basically everyone agrees that the rework is much, much better, so I don't understand why we're going backwards.
  • Second, the fact that this is the fifth dev diary indicates that this is probably a pretty foundational system to the game, as compared to EU4 where estates are pretty vestigial. This sounds like the game will have more of an emphasis on "internal politics" which I've never been opposed to in principle, but in practice every implementation has failed. There's not a single 4X or GSG anyone can point to that does it well. At best you can get a system like Crusader Kings that can be fun for newer players, but anyone with any experience will know there's always 1 or 2 correct answers for every decision that functionally trivializes everything. Strategy games tend to fail when they go beyond (1) conquest and (2) centrally-planned economic development.
 
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In the post you mentioned taxes quite a bit, is the player going to be able to set different tax rates for the different estates? If so, is this done on the location/ province, area level?

As an aside, the map looks great; however, there seems to be a split among players on the newer zoom to see terrain map mode being the default political map mode. I personally, and many others, like this map mode. To keep everyone happy, is it possible to add a setting to enable/ disable this feature, or a setting to adjust the color saturation when zooming in? I like this newer map mode as it helps see the terrain of the land, in current EU4 you can't tell if you are walking into a forest, farmland, swamp, hills, etc unless you pause game clicking province to see land type or switch the map mode.
 
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Will clergy pops stil lgive power to your clergy estate even if the ybelong to a different religion? Like will the Ottoman clergy estate gain power from Christian clergy pops?
 
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What good are those mountain-related wastelands if you can't *feel* them? Same is true for the other map modes that were shown so far.

We are only showing the flatmap for now.
 
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Does it really make sense to have estate power based on population? A province having five noble families instead of one noble family doesn't make the nobility in that province fiv times more powerful. In fact, the nobility would probably be weaker if it's split among multiple smaller houses instead of a single noble house controlling all the land. Nor does a noble family becomes twice as powerful if they have 10 family members instead of 5.
My knee jerk response was to think it was a bit weird. But on more consideration, I think the high mortality among French nobles in the HYW was a big part of the reason for the state to be able to concentrate power afterwards relative to the nobility. Meanwhile in England the military losses were less commonly from the nobility, and the king made concessions to the nobles for taxation, so the crown became relatively weaker.

Considering that population will be a factor, but not the only factor for estate significance (love that they have their own wealth!), I think considering population makes a lot of sense.
 
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Also is the influence/population of a estate in a location influenced by what's in them?

Many factors you will learn about during the next few months
 
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Where is Johan? Is he safe? Is he alright?

I'm on holiday this week, so was out shopping with the family after lunch, and got home around 16.
 
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Will I be able to crush the peasantry with an iron fist? All these options like "free mobility for peasants" are worrying me I might actually have to give them rights like not starving to death.
 
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Then try to fix that instead of saying "f*ck it, let's achievements totally irrelevant then"?
Not going to happen. The resources required to make ironman have any teeth are completely disproportionate to the returns. If games like Call of Duty can't reliably squelch cheating despite having a much larger budget and cheaters actively ruining the game for other customers, there's basically zero hope for EU4.
 
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Love the map, interesting its called Byzantine Empire not Byzantium, I hope naming will remain more consistent like it was on EU4.

And a lot more dynasty names for Muslim nations instead of region names, Hisn Kayfa is now Ayyubids. I wonder if Mamluks will use Bahri dynasty, and if there is a dynasty mechanic for some Muslim and Asian nations like in CK3.
They said in the previous DD that naming will be dynamic based on a combination culture / tag and rank.
Ie Byzantine empire will not be alone, there should be kingdom of France, Kingdom of England, Republic of Venice…