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Tinto Talks #58 - 9th of April 2025

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talk, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about our entirely super-top-secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today, I will be your host instead of Johan since we will be talking about the flavour mechanics. These will be basically IOs, Situations, and Religions, and we will be talking about a bunch of them for some weeks, although from time to time Johan will come back to present some other stuff. So, let’s start without further ado with the Holy Roman Empire, the most convoluted organization invented by mankind only Imperial polity that existed in Western Europe for most of the game period.

In 1337, it’s a very different beast compared to previous installments in other PDX GSGs. The Great Interregnum that started in 1254 after the deaths of Frederick II and Conrad IV of the House of Hohenstaufen, and the double election of two contenders (Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile) in 1257 led to a period of weak and diminishing Imperial Authority. In the coming decades, the Houses of Habsburg, Luxembourg, and Wittelsbach would fight for the Imperial election, making the Electorates increasingly more important.

HRE Map.jpg

A beautiful beast! The color code for every country:
  • Yellow: Emperor
  • Light Blue: Prince-Elector
  • Middle Blue: Archbishop-Elector
  • Dark Blue: Imperial Prelates
  • Light Green: Free Imperial Cities
  • Middle Green: Republics
  • Pink/Brownish: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Grey: Imperial Princes
  • Purple Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land

Here is an overview of the HRE IO panel and all the different member types that you can find by scrolling down on it:

HRE Panel1.png

Prince-Elector.jpg

Archbishop-Elector.jpg

Free Imperial City.png

Imperial Prelate.jpg

Imperial Peasant Republic.jpg

And here is the sub-panel that show all its members:

HRE Members.png

The HRE comes with a bunch of mechanics and features, which you can easily grasp in the IO’s tooltip:

HRE Tooltip.jpg

HRE Tooltip2.jpg

Let’s start with the most important base feature, the Imperial Authority, which is the currency used by the Holy Roman Emperor to enact Imperial Laws. There are a few sources to either add or subtract Imperial Authority:

Imperial Authority.jpg

Note: the missing +0.01 comes from value rounding which is not reflected in the tooltip.

Imperial Laws create different effects that impact the members of the HRE. At the start, there are only two available:

Imperial Laws.jpg

You may notice that there’s a category, ‘Fundamental Laws’, with only one policy possible, the ‘Golden Bull’. This was the single most important law approved in the HRE, becoming its base political constitution up until its dissolution after being enacted in 1356. In Project Caesar, the Emperor has a very high incentive to pass it as soon as possible, as it unlocks additional laws and actions:

Golden Bull.png

When you have 35 Imperial Authority, you can try to enact it, and a Vote in the Imperial Diet will happen:
Golden Bull vote.jpg

That works quite similarly to country parliaments, as you have to secure a positive vote of the different HRE members:

Golden Bull Diet.png

And this would be the situation after the law passes, with 8 new Imperial Laws available:

Imperial Laws2.jpg

Imperial Laws3.jpg

In general terms, most of the laws have 5 policies available, with the starting ones usually being in the middle positions of the 5. This is how it works (these are 'instructions' in the script):

#With the enactment of the Golden Bull, most HRE laws are set to the 3rd policy which has limited or no modifiers active at all
#The HRE Emperor can try to change the policy to the next adjacent one (so from 3rd tier to 4th or 2nd tier)
#The left tier is the 4th and 5th and is more in favor of benefitting the HRE as a whole
#The right tier is the 2nd and 1st and is more in favor of benefitting the HRE Emperor first and foremost

#Some laws have only 3 policies in which cases there are not pro-Emperor vs pro-Member positions

#The only law which does not follow the rule is the power_of_the_emperor_law which starts at improved_imperial_authority_policy (4) policy.
#The reason for this is to delay the unification of the HRE + there is not much design space for an even further decentralized HRE.
#As such, having 2 policies for the decentralized HRE are not really doable.

# LAW
# Pol 5 Pol 4 Pol 3 Pol 2 Pol 1
# |--------------|--------------|--------------|--------------|

Let’s take as example the Imperial Voting Law:

Electorship Law1.jpg

Electorship Law2.jpg

The Imperial Election is then a key feature, since it elects the Holy Roman Emperor, who then sets all the Imperial Laws, Diets, etc. Here you can see an example of how it works:
Imperial Election.jpg

The King of Bohemia got backed by most of the Electors, and thus, became the Holy Roman Emperor after the death of Ludwig IV of Upper Bavaria.

This event will trigger if a different country gets its ruler elected as Emperor, as in this example:

Imperial Coronation1.jpg

Imperial Coronation2.jpg

One of the factors behind the election is the Dynastic Power, a new value that is currently only used for the HRE mechanics (although it could potentially be used for other IOs, as it’s a scriptable/moddable feature), which impacts the likelihood of a certain country from a powerful dynasty to be elected or re-elected as Emperor:
Dynastic Power1.jpg

Dynastic Power2.jpg

Dynastic Power3.jpg

Last but not least is the Imperial Contribution. It is an amount of money and manpower that any member of the HRE may contribute to the Emperor, who can later spend it in Imperial Actions, and also defending the Empire (in theory…):
Imperial Payments1.jpg

Imperial Payments2.jpg

… And that’s all for today, since it’s already a very long TT! Next week, we will be taking a look at the Catholic Religion and the Catholic Church IO. Cheers!
 
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Yes, for both.
How easy is it to bring in new HRE members, or is it mostly a thing for players? For example I’d make a strong push to add the Teutonic Order to the empire as well as the French and Italian minors occupying imperial land. Obviously I’d need to fight France over their vassals, but for the other two is diplomacy alone viable to bring them on to the fold?
 
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I hope it will be doable to change the number of electores, like as long as eveyone is catholic and if the pope jions the empire, it should be easier to make him an additional electer (who would dare to say no to the pope).

And I hope there is the possibility to make the HRE more democratic with the time maybe that every (free,noble,thecratic,...) member can vote, after a bunch of reforms
(that would be really nice, since it encourages members to be smaller and have more votes, and maybe one day the empire can be 1000 city states under 1 emperor)
It is possible to change the number of electors, yes.
 
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Any chance of tweaking the Archbishop-Elector colouring? Doesn’t really stand out as well as the others, and will clash with the sea if there ends up being a coastal one.
 
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Right now, no, we abstract the Imperial Army by giving this manpower buff to the Emperor.
Is that not possible in the code or just a gameplay design, because there’s a IO I’m designing for a mod I’m planning and and imperial army would be nice
 
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What does Golden Bull impact exactly? I was expecting 7 elector status to be established with golden bull in the game not before, but this may be due to my lack of historical knowledge
There were already 7 more or less established electors (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Rhense), but the Golden Bull clearly established which ones were to be. In this game, it works similarly, and you can also change the Electorship laws after enacting it.
 
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Could we see what that looks like?

Also, does the united HRE tag have additional flavour?
We have to keep something for the players to discover after the game is released, right? ;)
 
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I'll be honest, I find the voting interface very unclear. Like take this:

If I am correct the main thing here is that you will be Emperor perpetually unless somehow forced to revoke the law? Just make a custom tooltip that says that instead of wasting 4 different lines on saying various voting laws are disabled. The 'when implemented' and 'when removed' parts being practically the same thing twice only serves to make it more unclear. And then at the end you have the self vote part and the undefined leader part. That's just confusing. Just make it say 'when removed re-enables voting' or something like that instead of the wall of text
 
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The HRE has how many republics and imperial princes? The dev diary shows the amount of prince-electors, archbishop-electors, imperial prelates, free imperial cities and imperial peasant republics, but not these two.
 
Is Dynastic Power calculated from and/or shared between all countries of the same dynasty? It seems like Habsburgs would be at a significant disadvantage given their domains being accurately represented as separate countries vice EU4's combined singular Austria representing all Habsburg possessions at game start.
 
Will the game push the Habsburgs to become Emperors more often than not or will most games have a random chance of anyone being Emperors?