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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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with no bailiff or similar, you won't have control.
I take that with 0% control, you'll reap basically no taxes/manpower/levy from the territory. Does this mean the territory is effectively nothing, or will this have local effects (local nobles being more powerful, emergence of banditry, development of local autonomy that could become de facto independence?)
 
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I have a few questions:
1. You mentioned that if control over location is less, the taxes from this location is lower as well. Does that mean pops will get more money into their pockets from that location?
2. If previous is true, is there any way for pops from badly controlled location to create their own armies or navies or even demand for independence or release them as subjects?
3. Will the location "upgrades" to towns and cities reduce the control over that location?
 
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Will the roadways improve troop movement speed and speed of trade goods going through any cities, towns and villages, and will they also have an effect if you were to say, scorch the earth for enemy troop movement?
 
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Yeah, they are something you actively want to set up, even if you are not forced to.
Will there be playable trade companies? One of the big things missing from Eu4 IMO. They had extensive autonomy in real history and their own armies and administrations.
 
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Good news for estates! For example, in societies with mixed religions like China or Japan having buddhist monasteries being a separate estate from the traditional religious establishments, or for example for Yuan perhaps differentiating between Mongol and Semu nobles and southern chinese literati(though I expect Literati might be represented as Clergy in EUV? So that might not be necessary.)

in theory we should add the eriksgata as a road :)
From what I can tell this sounds more like a tour than a road. Temporary actions that boost control and fade over time could be cool, like issuing an important edict or having a ruler do a tour(bit surprised CK3 didn't reference the Eriksgata more directly in its Tour DLC btw).
 
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Looking at the new map I'm wondering. How does the AI deal with sea zones? Aland and Gotland are completely isolated from the mainland with the current setup. Will anyone be able to claim these islands without bordering sea zones? Will the AI take these lands when conquering? I know that from playing the Voltaire's Nightmare mod for eu4 where they also had similar situations where the AI just flat-out ignored these places when conquering the surrounding areas. All because they technically didn't border them.
 
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I really love the UI element under then sea area/locations name. It looks very intricate and nice. Also, will sea nodes have localization based on maritime presence? Since it is named Gotlands Hav and not Gotland's Sea?
 
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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.

Implementing navigable rivers is a pet crusade of mine.

1) Do you take the navigability of rivers into consideration? The classic example is the Nile - fantastically navigable in Egypt, but the cataracts basically form the southern border of the country by virtue of being difficult to traverse, even though the river is still navigable between cataracts.

2) As a follow-up to that question, do you have the ability to canalize rivers, dredging out less navigable sections?

3) Can you build inland canals?

I would imagine the best way to represent this would be to have all rivers have a base navigability rating in each location (say, 1-5) and you can unlock the ability to improve the navigability throughout the game. Canals would be effectively level 5 from the moment they’re built, where they can be built. Then, add in permanent blocks where appropriate (you can’t really canalize around a major waterfall at this point in history).

Edit: I should have clarified that I mean navigable in the sense of “economically navigable for barge traffic.” Not in the sense of being able to send your navies up and down the rivers like in CK.
 
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Just a question that I had since last Tinto Talk. Will Middle Eastern tags, like TUrkey, Egypt, Arabia and etc. have dynamic names to them, like in Crusader Kings, that would basically pull the dynasty name of the ruler? One example i had in mind is if Ottoman line ends and the next ruler will be, let's say, from Mustafid dynasty (or other dynasty name in Turkish name pool), will the "Ottomans" tag change it's name to "Mustafids"?

Because in EU4 it was weird when there was no Ottoman ruler, yet the realm was still called Ottomans. And I hope similar system would be implemented for Japanese clans as well. And I know nothing on how Chinese and Korean names were named, so I doubt they work like Japanese clans or Middle Eastern dyansties.
The state was named for the dynasty in China, although the official dynastic name was different from the family name (Tang dynasty's actual surname was Li, Ming dynasty's was Zhu, but the country was always named for a specific dynasty). Korea also had the country name changed between dynasties. In the game's timeframe specifically it changed between Goryeo (under the House of Wang) and Joseon (under the House of Yi) at the end of the 14th century.
 
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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.


View attachment 1110187
It looks like this could simulate the Ming Empire leasing Macau to Portugal in the 16th century? Provinces still belong to themselves but in a market that belongs to someone else.
 
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Will you also talk about food next week? How it will work, and what aspects of the game will it influence?

You mentioned that when upgrading location "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"

If there will be not enough food produced in your country, will it be simply imported, costing more money? I think it wouldn't be a great idea if player would be punished for urbanising his country, also adding burghers to the country should be in fact beneficial, as in real life it meant that your country was simply developing, take Netherlands as an example
 
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