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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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@Johan Will tech spread be more historical? At least be an option to turn on or off would be great. In EU4 it broke my immersion that the entire world had the same tech level as me by the 17 century playing as Spain. It would be great to consider it as an option for those who want to play a more believable campaign.
 
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Uh . . . Why is the map so dark? My screen doesn't have 5000 nits of brightness.
Might it be some kind of "fog of war"? Cause Achaia is somehow highlighted.

EDIT: Johan said, in one of his replies (pp.12-14, as far as I remember), that he was playing as Aragon and it really was fog of war.
 
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In my opinion, the major issue with the post-HOI4 paradox games is UI. It lacks atmosphere, a feeling that you are in exactly that period, and a certain warmth or cold of steel if we speaking of HOI. Instead, we get a generic, soulless UI like any other strategy and unfortunately, these screenshots give the same disappointing vibe. Hope I'm wrong and it's a work in progress
 
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@Johan I undestand that there will be no *unique* estates and that is honestly fine, however, is it possible to change the names of the estates to fit the region we are playing in? Same goes for the parliament, which essentially replaces the Diet from Eu4. I somehow feel that playing a monarchy and calling a parliament seems weird. Again, this would only change the name not any of the functionality/systems.

Reason being: immersion.
 
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I can't express how much I really like that the next EU is shaping like a MEIOU and Taxes: The game. I've spent well over 2000 hours on that mod alone and find it vastly superior to the base game, despite performance issues.

My only (minor) gripe, as frequent Byz player, is that I'd prefer Byzantium to be called Roman empire or Easter Roman empire. But that can be easily changed by a mod, I suppose.
 
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@Johan Will there be a change in the troop types? For example, ranged and melee infantry, ranged and melee calvary, siege artillery and artillery used to inflict damage to troops. This is so we can truly feel the transition from medieval style armies of armored calvary, footman and bowmen/crossbow men to pike and shot type of armies. Eventually leading to fully gunpowder armies.
 
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Did you guys hire M&T devs? I am so glad their ideas are very influential here!
 
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Will tech spread be more historical? At least be an option to turn on or off would be great. In EU4 it broke my immersion that the entire world had the same tech level as me by the 17 century playing as Spain. It would be great to consider it as an option for those who want to play a more believable campaign.
europeans didn't really have a massive technological advantage over other parts of the world until about the 18th century honestly
everyone essentially had the same guns lol
moreso it was the sheer number of firearms they could produce for increasingly organized armies that gave them to advantage when colonizing not the tech itself
 
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@Johan I undestand that there will be no *unique* estates and that is honestly fine, however, is it possible to change the names of the estates to fit the region we are playing in? Same goes for the parliament, which essentially replaces the Diet from Eu4. I somehow feel that playing a monarchy and calling a parliament seems weird. Again, this would only change the name not any of the functionality/systems.

Reason being: immersion.

yes. all of that can and will in many places have localised names.

For me personally though, a parliament is what a monarchy has..
 
yes. all of that can and will in many places have localised names.

For me personally though, a parliament is what a monarchy has..

Interesting. What about republics then?
 
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I don't want to be too pushy when it comes to unique estates before learning everything about new estates but it was a fun mechanic that made nations play in a unique way. Sometimes depended on region/culture/tag etc. Having them around again would not be bad unless they(dhimmi, jannisaries, rajput etc.) get represented another way
 
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Every country has an elite class. Even a communist state has it. The name will just be different.
Even if we accept this to be true (which, to be clear, I do not). Surely the ruling classes of a liberal democracy, feudal monarchy, and communist state, should have different priorities and provide different effects and bonuses, and not all play exactly the same. All arguments about history and ideology asside, that would just make for boring and samey gameplay, and make it feel like any dramatic changes you make to your government don't actually matter.
 
I really hope colonisation is improved, as it is a right mess in EU4. It would be nice if you play to the end that there are still many areas of the world, such as Africa, that are sparsely colonised like at the beginning of Victoria. Is annoying when world has been settled once you have played a couple of hundred years.
 
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Parliaments basically means place to parley, to talk, so it's a pretty good name for any regular political meeting. Although of course each nation had it's own name.

And while I thought the static and arthritic way Estates and your own realm reacted and acted in EU4, the Parliament objectives where cool, much more interesting to go after than Mission Trees in my experience.
 
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How easy will it be to culturally or religiously convert your nation/court? One of the parts of previous CK and EU games that I quite enjoy is the ability to change the primary culture and religion of the country I'm playing (eg. swapping to Zoroastrian as Gujarat, or swapping to Islam as Yuan, or swapping to Orthodox as Poland), but I feel like the population system will make that much more difficult to achieve, particularly with minority religions. Will there be a system for promoting minority religions/cultures among your population?
 
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I have to say I am really pleased with all I read so far from these dev diaries. As someone who started paradox games with EU2, CK1 and Vic1, I liked those games and their immediate successors (with all their jank and lower budgets) more than the most recent installments. A lot of the recent ones have great maps, great ux and many nice features, but they always feel a bit too min-maxy and less like "realistic simulations".

So far everything shown here pleases me. I love the direction of having trade-offs between short and long term and slow changes for some impactful things (the "societal values" mentioned).

I love that pops are introduced and that they are core to estates. I hated estates in EU4 when they were introduced, I even stopped playing for years as they felt gamey and abstract and just a "pick your buff" option.

Now what is presented is great so far. I love that the more pops you have the harder it will be to keep them in check and centralize power, it makes a lot of sense both logically as the bigger the country the harder to centralize, but also historically as countries such as Portugal, Prussia and Netherlands could punch waaay above their weight and this system seems great to emulate it.

The fact estates have their own wealth that taxes take from is amazing and so many trade-offs of public taxation "crowding out" private spending as economics puts it is possible, from the most obvious you tax burghers too much they will have less cash to lend you and to invest in trade or production to taxing peasants making them have less money for food and thus emigrate more or starve and have lower population growth.

We had so little so far but it has been enough to put my hype in the atmosphere already. I can't wait to play it.

I really hope the economic, trade and "development" \ building system is deep enough so that you can play tall and have fun playthrough with minimum expansion / war. The Johan comment about the cost of war in population growth makes me hopeful for that. Also very much curious to see how manpower ties to population, I hope a devastating war with huge losses will be painful to deal with economically and militarely and maybe cause the need to use mercenaries and take loans just to keep afloat.

Also I really hope we use the robust new terrain \ climate location system to simulate the habitability and economic viability of certain terrains and allow the player / tags / estates the costly effort to expand civilization by clearing jungles / woods and marshes for instance, or even adding bridges for passage though rivers or valleys that would impact trade, production efficiency and movement. Having it super expensive but easier with better tech so that you could shift a bad terrain type into a better one or add infrastructure. Some regions like the new world would benefit a lot from such system and it would simulate well why it was "undeveloped" when Europeans arrived, as the natives had less time working the land and less tech for that such as lacking the wheel and domestic animals. It could even tie in with colonization, such as that you must first "accommodate" the land before you can settle with multiple levels of it to do that, not just binary, so we can see the land improve further over the centuries.
 
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Since @Johan was playing Aragón, I was wondering how situations such as Sardinia (a papal fief given to the king of Aragón, but still controled by Pisa and Genoa and which Aragón would have to conquest, and it took a century) will be represented in the game.
In 1337, Aragon had already driven Pisa off the island and owned the southern and eastern portions of the island. Genoa, via the Doria family, still controlled the northwest, while the native Sardinian state of Arborea controlled the west-central portion of the island.
 
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According to the map and assuming there's one start date and the map is the start date, the game starts in or after 1337. Ottomans clearly have Nicomedia (modern İzmit) which was taken in 1337. And it clearly starts before 1341. Ayyubids ceased to exist in 1341 I see them in the map.

Beyond other posters telling you that we know the start date is 1337, the Ayyubids actually continued to rule the town of Hisn Kayfa until 1525, and are playable as such in EU4.
 
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