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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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Do we really need a Sailors parameter? Can't we just it integrate it to Manpower? Or at least tie them together? (Es. 25% of manpower can crew ships)
 
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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).

No they are not.

Its a bit hard to have a naval battle involving a few dozen ship of the lines on them.
unlucky
4
 
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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

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.
Can you choose between devolving power to subordinates or have the king administer the land directly, which would have an impact on the modifiers you get from the land, for instance if you were a city state which expanded, or is that done/assumed automatically? I think it’d be cool to let the player decide when to reform their administration/organise administrative zones (or are provinces the administrative zones? I guess the bigger you get the more tiers of administration you’ll need) and could work the other way if you’re reduced to a rump state.

Also devolving power to overseas territories could impact proximity value (imagining control is a function of proximity)? (as I’m not sure how for instance Portugal conquering and holding Malacca would be feasible with proximity, although I guess irl that was done by a colonial nation)
 
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will the bailiff houses that increase control take a building slot?

(Will building slots make a comeback at all? I hope not.)

there are no building "slots"
 
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How are the nobles added? Player moves or promotes them manually, they are moved or promoted automatically, they appear from thin air?

promoted over time.
 
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Now I could be wrong but I believe the city of Riga itself was under condominium between the Archbishopric of Riga and the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. So perhaps the city itself is distinguished from the Archbishopric?

What happened in the early 13th century is not an indication of later condition. From the end of the 13th century, there were essentially three decades of political conflict between the city, the Teutonic Order, and the Archbishop over ultimate control. Representing Riga as an individual state is the best solution in this, as it can have diplomatic relations with both the Teutonic Order and the Archbishop which reflect the status it reached in the 1320's.
 
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Excited for the feature to found new towns and elevate them to cities.

There are many examples of towns and cities in Germany that were planned on a drawing table and did not grow over several hundred years prior. Freudenstadt or Karlsruhe or Potsdam are great examples. These towns, cities or Residenzstädte tend to be a product of monarchs increasing absolutist tendencies.
 
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So, if less control means more money for estates, more money for estates means more power for them, than it means that keeping vast empires become hard task and map will become more dynamic and internal affairs finally get some love?
 
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