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Tinto Talks #6 - April 3rd, 2024

Welcome to the sixth Tinto Talks, where we talk about the design and features of our not yet announced game, with the codename ‘Project Caesar’.

Hey, before jumping into todays topic, I would like to show something very fresh out of the oven, based on your feedback last week. This is why we are doing these Tinto Talks, to make Project Caesar your game as much as ours...

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Today we will delve into three concepts that are rather new to our games, but first, we’ll talk about locations a bit more.

Not every location on the map is the same, especially not in a game of such scope as Project Caesar. By default, every ownable land location is a rural settlement, but there are two “upgrades” to it that can be done. First, you can find a town in a location, which allows you to increase the population capacity of the location and allows for a completely different set of buildings than a rural settlement. Finally, you can grant city rights to a town, which allows for even further advantages. Now you may wonder, why don’t I make every location into cities? Besides the cost and the population requirement, there is also the drawback that each of them tend to reduce your food production, while also adding more nobles, clergy and lots of burghers to your country.

Stockholm, Dublin and Belgrade are examples of towns at the start of the game, while cities include places like Beijing, Alexandria and Paris.

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Here you can see the control that Sweden currently has.

Control
Every location that you own has a control value, which is primarily determined by the proximity it has to the capital, or another source of authority in your country. There are only a few things that can increase it above the proximity impact, but many things that can decrease it further.

This is probably the most important value you have, as it determines how much value you can get out of a location, as it directly impacts how much you can tax the population in that location, and the amount of levies they will contribute when called. A lack of control, reduces the crown power you gain from its population, while also reduces the potential manpower and sailors you can get, and weakens the market attraction of your own markets, making them likelier to belong to foreign markets if they have too low control.


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Proximity
So what is proximity? It is basically a distance to capital value, where traveling on the open sea is extremely costly. Proximity is costly over land, but along coastlines where you have a high maritime presence you can keep a high proximity much further. Tracing proximity along a major river reduces the proximity cost a fair bit, and if you build a road network that will further reduce the proximity costs.

There are buildings that you can build, like a Bailiff that will act as a smaller proximity source, but that has the slight drawback of adding more nobles to the location, and with a cost in food for them.

Maritime Presence
In every coastal location around your locations, or where you have special buildings, you have a maritime presence. This is slowly built up over time based on your ports and other buildings you have in adjacent locations. Placing a navy in the location helps improve it quicker, but blockades and pirates will decrease it quickly, making it absolutely vital to protect your coastlines in a war, or you’ll suffer the consequences for a long time.

As mentioned earlier, the maritime presence impacts the proximity calculations, but it also impacts the power of your merchants in the market the seazone is a part of.

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Stay tuned, next week we’ll be doing an overview of the economy system, which has quite a lot of new features, as well as features from older games.
 
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Will seasonal changes affect the control over a location. For example will it be possible to sail in the Bothnian Bay during winter due to ice and will this affect the control? Ice on parts of the seas would also be a nice part of a more dynamic war situation, for example crossing from Finland to Sweden over the ice.
 
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a few questions:

Will cities be able to “sprawl“ over multiple locations? If a city gets populous enough, could we see the locations surrounding it increase in population as well? I think it would look kinda weird if all the population ends up super concentrated.

And will towns/cities be able to arise autonomously? I feel that plenty of towns weren’t exactly planned. E.g. gold or some other mineral is found in an area and people flock to it for opportunity and a town forms around it. Or the growth of towns along trade lines. Etc

I know you mentioned that towns/cities can be depopulates in a previous reply, but can they be demoted in category? E.g. if a town was sacked by a nomadic horde could it return to being rural settlements or a city was devastated by plague and war could it become a town?

Agreed, metropoles should develop naturally, in conjunction with internal trade patterns etc.. Furthermore, player initiatives to form a urban areas should be more efficient when the landscape or economy suits it. A player can force cities to form unnatural cities for defence purposes etc., but cities should naturally develop where a there is pertinent geography or trade in the region. Also begs the question of how migration and colonisation will work.
 
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They may have used the Swedish and Polish province borders following the Livonian Order's dissolution to make a composite setup. The southern border of Danish Estonia indicates that Järvamaa is not used as a location, so the level of granularity may still be limited, although better than in EU4.

There's a detailed 1422 map that shows the divisions of the Teutonic Order together with Livonia in case you want more granularity.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TeutonicOrder1422.png

I would prefer that Sakala have its own province for Pärnu (Pernau) and Vijlandi (Fellin), but province setup is probably balanced by something like population, similar to how EU4 balanced its province setup using development.

If some more refinement can be done on the map that would be great. Maybe by the time of EU10 we will be able see people's houses :cool:

Overall Livonia has less blocky provinces than before (or they are hiding them), while the feeling of being a bit of a conservative setup is there.

View attachment 1111135

However, comparing the shown setup with EU4's, there is the shape of Estonia that still looks like a water nozzle pointed at the Baltic Sea :confused:

Highly unlikely that they used Polish and Swedish border for anything, because it also doesn't follow that border. Southern border of Danish Estonia is simply a random scribble. In current map randomly half of Järvamaa is part of Denmark and half isn't. Also when you look borders of Dorbat and Ösel-Wiek it is even more clear that Polish-Swedish border was not an ispiration, because then the border of Ösel-Wiek near Pernau would be more north.

Again, I don't expect them to have perfect representation of historic borders (e.g. not having all exclaves on the Isles of Estonia). I just expect roughly historically accurately shaped countries. Dorbat should be more boxy, but instead it is a strange triangle. Danish Estonia looked historically like W not not one big boxy province. Courland bishorpric was separated into several exclaves... etc.
 
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Highly unlikely that they used Polish and Swedish border for anything, because it also doesn't follow that border. Southern border of Danish Estonia is simply a random scribble. In current map randomly half of Järvamaa is part of Denmark and half isn't. Also when you look borders of Dorbat and Ösel-Wiek it is even more clear that Polish-Swedish border was not an ispiration, because then the border of Ösel-Wiek near Pernau would be more north.

Again, I don't expect them to have perfect representation of historic borders (e.g. not having all exclaves on the Isles of Estonia). I just expect roughly historically accurately shaped countries. Dorbat should be more boxy, but instead it is a strange triangle. Danish Estonia looked historically like W not not one big boxy province. Courland bishorpric was separated into several exclaves... etc.
well the real problem are can in the past the borders was often a mess XD
 
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a few questions:

Will cities be able to “sprawl“ over multiple locations? If a city gets populous enough, could we see the locations surrounding it increase in population as well? I think it would look kinda weird if all the population ends up super concentrated.
But were there any urban agglomerations in the eu4 period large enough to span multiple locations?
 
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But were there any urban agglomerations in the eu4 period large enough to span multiple locations?
towards the tail end of the time span yes
18th century European capitals began to grow massively
and Edo by 1700 already had a million people
I think metropoles should be included but be a difficult thing to achieve before the 18th century
 
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Highly unlikely that they used Polish and Swedish border for anything, because it also doesn't follow that border. Southern border of Danish Estonia is simply a random scribble. In current map randomly half of Järvamaa is part of Denmark and half isn't. Also when you look borders of Dorbat and Ösel-Wiek it is even more clear that Polish-Swedish border was not an ispiration, because then the border of Ösel-Wiek near Pernau would be more north.

Again, I don't expect them to have perfect representation of historic borders (e.g. not having all exclaves on the Isles of Estonia). I just expect roughly historically accurately shaped countries. Dorbat should be more boxy, but instead it is a strange triangle. Danish Estonia looked historically like W not not one big boxy province. Courland bishorpric was separated into several exclaves... etc.
I think that the mod Beyond typus did a very good redrawing of Baltic provinces in EU4, I think locations should be something like that when it comes to detail in EU5 but of course with respect for 1337 borders too
 
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>> "First, you can find a town in a location"
Just putting a note here that I believe the correct grammar for this would be to "found" a town or city, as cities and towns state when they were "founded" in the past. "Find" in this context would mean "discover," while "found" means "create," when it comes to regional political structures like towns, cities, or nations.
 
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Super excited by the mechanics in this dev diary and the estates!! They seem like they are going to work really well together and keep things interesting internally
:) Super impressed by these ideas!!

I also just want to say thanks for continuing to strive to make interesting strategy games in different historical periods. No one else comes close in my book.
 
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Thought that struck me while reading the latest Vicky 3 dev diary:

Will events/effects leading to lower control in a location/province/state that leads to control hitting 0 (or especially if going past 0 in the maths) mean that rebels have a higher spawn risk for a time, or maybe that the potential rebellion there grows stronger in size, or such?
 
In the diplomatic map from today's Tinto Maps, we can see both Lithuania and its vassal Smolensk have non-coastal exclaves. How does this work with proximity and control? Does it mean those exclaves have zero value?
 
I really like the sound of this A little afraid of this thing called food but otherwise sounds cool. I think in history you can see that the romans building roads or the British having to use gang presses in the colonies for manpower shows the to ends of this. Will there be a way to promise your outliers something to increase your control or manpower you get from them? I know you said bailiffs but what i mean is can i say hey well take less tax if you give us soldiers or will take more money if you want to give us less manpower kinda like the way the edicts work now.