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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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Gross. Distance from capital penalties were never very fun in strategy games. They used to be pretty common, but were gradually phased out to be temporary or minor, which is a good thing since I can't think of a single game where they made the experience more fun. I remember far-flung cities in Civ3 being worthless, permanently stuck at the minimum of 1 commerce and 1 production. Everybody hated it.

The EU series in particular is quite poorly suited for them given the time period. Russia expanding halfway across the globe in a contiguous land empire, or England or the Netherlands ignoring the continent and pushing into India or Indonesia instead. The diary mentioned control would travel along water more freely, but it'd need to give almost 0 decay if historical conquests are to make any sense. Hopefully the solution isn't to make colonial-nation style subjects either, as I really don't want to be forced to give up control of huge swathes of territory to dumb AI subjects. Such subjects seemed like they were permanently competing in the "bankruptcy speedrun any%" category in EU4.

Naval control being more important is intriguing and could be good, assuming we get some HoI4-style automation for it. Naval control is nice to have in EU4, but part of the reason most players don't really bother is the cognitive load of trying to maintain a full blockade on an enemy is quite high. It was always too easy for the AI to jump out of the shadows and destroy your blockading light ships if you weren't paying attention, so most top players didn't even bother, and just had a few doomstacks of heavies to help siege individual coastal forts.

The game starts in 1337 and there is a reason Russia did not expand halfway across the globe until much later. The distance penalties will decrease over time when infrastructure and new tech get developed. I think this is realistic and can be fun if implemented properly. Especially the infrastructure development and road-building, which sounds interesting.
 
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I love the incentive to building infrastructure, but I think the amount of control one has over a province should mostly be determined by institutional progress and administrative expansion. But perhaps that is governed by another mechanic? I.e. control being a measure of 'spatial control' and there being another mechanic to govern 'administrative control'?
 
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I am getting really interested in this game so far.

What prevents the player from spamming towns and cities only near the capital where control is Higher? Food Will be only by province?
 
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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.

Yes/no/maybe

Are you cooking something different for China/Yuan? Beijing is quite far from, for example, Kunming or Guangzhou.
 
No they are not.

Its a bit hard to have a naval battle involving a few dozen ship of the lines on them.
Are rivers movement blocking for armies? Or just a penalty if you engage in combat over them?
 
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Will the proximity affect separatists ? Or are there other mechanics to simulate unruliness of the peripheries (zaporozia in commmonwelath, catalonia in spain, etc.)
Will mountains/impassible terrain/climate affect the proximity as well ? Trudging through a tundra or a jungle shouldn't be on the same level as German forests. Historically jungles pretty much restricted colonisation to the coastline & rivers only (as it was historically (maybe buffs to natives, or debuffs for exotic diseases (since you already added bubonic plague something similar like smallpox for N. Americans would be thematic)) .
 
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Will nomadic countries have their own estates like burghers, ulema, amirs, tribes(possibly) etc. like other countries or will they only have tribes as in EU4?
 
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If a piece of my land sits at 0% control for too long it will only really be de jure and not de facto part of my realm, would it be possible that a new state might rise up without a war, as de jure control might just gradually transition from me to another country?
 
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It's a very early stage, but in case it might help I leave some more Stellaris II map feedback here: Invert the colors of the water ---> shallow/lighter at the coast, and darker at the deeps, basins, etc. and IMO the seawater becomes intuitive and improves visibility of the map a lot in coast and specially of (small) islands. Furthermore, I believe it looks more attractive in general as a map. Not less important, make sea shapes all straight, not curved ones at the coastal ones, as seen in other previous maps.

I leave a sketch down here and the original to compare.

In the other hand, land is perfect for me and love the granularity as in other TT maps.

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For the features, I just love them all! They're looking very good. I love control/proximity, maritime influence, roads, city rights, Hanseatic League (countries that don't own land) and all the stuff so far.
 
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What happens if I isolate an AI's capital location in a peace deal? Will they move their capital or will overall control plummet and potentially stun them to death?
Will there be dynamic releasable vassal tags to release low-control vassals if I happen to come into possession of cut off territory?
 
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Can you share with us how you will represent the mess that is Denmark in 1337? On the map it looks like there is a Denmark tag, but in Halland there is a tag starting with an S.

And will forming the Kalmar union be possible?
 
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I unfortunately see a fair number of inaccuracies in the map of Livonia. I've done a bit of work on this, and am happy to share my result for 1340. I would claim that north of Daugava, I'm probably better than 5km accuracy (in some cases down to 1km), but of course it's tough to say with historical boundaries (which may not have been defined by treaties or actual population usage in this period).

The WeTransfer link to my SHPs is here. It's valid until April 10th.

In this, the attribute "LAND" means who controlled it. There are a lot of sub-parcels, mostly because I designed it to include any boundaries which changed in the Medieval period and to take into account diocese borders.

The translation of the data is as follows (vs what I see on the map):

"Kuramaa" => "Courland"
City of "Riga" => "Riia"
Archbishop of "Riga" => "Peapiiskop"
"Tartu" => "Dorpat"
"Ösel" => "Saare"
"Livonian Order" => "Ordu"

Please keep in mind that the "Livonian Order" was the Teutonic Order in Livonia whose Land Master (Landmeister) had to be confirmed in this period by the Grand Master in Prussia.

I prepared (and used) these in this publication (which is unfortunately only available in Estonian thus far) concerning "Ösel" or "Saare-Lääne" in the Medieval period.

My quick thoughts on the map:

1. Danish Estonia should be split into two (Harrien and Wierland), and its boundary shifted in the south to match the Teutonic Order's lands in Järvamaa (Gerwien).
2. Link Hiiumaa with the advocacy of Pöide but split it such that the bishop also has a half (linked to western Saaremaa). But it was very lowly populated in this time though and if it needs to be a separate province, it should belong to the Order (as it does). In reality, it was split by treaty in 1254 and although we only evidence fortifications there in the 16th century, it's likely these are much older.
3. Dorpat was the most powerful entity after the Teutonic Order and the Archbishop. I would separate it into three provinces, one north of Emajõgi (and include Võrtsjärv on the map), and two south, the eastern of which would be very lowly populated at this time. This is somewhat supported by the fact that the most southerly point on Võrtsjärv was an important crossing into the bishop's lands (Pikasilla or Lange Brücke) which was the only similar locality in these lands until the mid-16th century (even in 1558, the Land Master of the Teutonic Order lamented he could not cross with his armies at Pikasilla and had to go around).
4. Daugava does not seem to exist, but the city of Riga never had a lot of lands on the northern bank of Daugava (right bank). These extend too far.
5. The archbishop's lands are too limited in the east where they owned huge territories which were rather lowly populated.
6. I would rather include all of the Teutonic Order's lands north of Viljandi (Fellin) in one province rather than have the lump just to the north of Dorpat. This seems to represent either Põltsamaa (Oberpahlen) or Laiuse (Lais), but there were more important sites elsewhere in Livonia at this time.
7. The Livonian Order's territories should split Courland, not vice versa. Courland was incorporated into the Teutonic Order and should start in some sort of a diplomatic relationship to them, so this should not be a major issue for movement of troops.
8. I would estimate that right now there are (in the visible image) 3 provinces for Ösel in Livonia, 1 for Denmark, 1 for Dorpat, 1 for the city of Riga, 3 (4?) for the archbishop, 1 for Courland, and 8 for the Livonian Order. Keeping Ösel's 3, the other should be balanced as follows: 2 for Denmark, 3 for Dorpat, 1 for the city of Riga, 2 for Courland (to represent it having two separate parcels), and 4–5 for the archbishop. Some of the castles to the east were not founded by this time, but it would be good to represent the territory. It's tempting to look at the annuities the bishops had to pay to get into office (in which Ösel surpasses all the others easily), but I think this is misleading to their population and number of men-at-arms; the diplomatic negotiations of the 15th century support that Ösel was less important than Dorpat.
 
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What happens if I isolate an AI's capital location in a peace deal? Will they move their capital or will overall control plummet and potentially stun them to death?
Will there be dynamic releasable vassal tags to release low-control vassals if I happen to come into possession of cut off territory?
Good point.
It would need something to prevent you from border-goring (now a verb) your neighbors

Or will control pass through forgeign lands, too? Maybe simply at an reduced rate?
Would make splintered countries in the HRE more viable.
 
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I figured I wanna just quickly pop in for an unrelated thing: the UI. What is it with Paradox games this "generation" (CK3, Vic3, now this) looking so...mobile? I dunno how to describe the feel. It's really silly probably, but the fonts and the curves and the colors, it's really off-putting for me for some reason. I know it's not final for Eur...this Project Caesar and it's a long way from release, but still.

Very interesting work otherwise, and I'm excited for more, as is surely the rest of the playerbase!
 
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Off topic but i want to ask about alliances in this game. i dont really like how it works in eu4 when all you need to do to gain an ally in war is to curry favors up to 10 and be sure that buddy is not in big debt. i would want to see something more expanded making alliances harder to get
 
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A bit sad about that. I like the MEIOU system where the flipside of having low control was that your estates were wealthier and they would build more and give you more armies. Will this be the same in EU5? Ideally as a player in a game you want to have control, but having low control should benefit the estates which should benefit the player when they build things for you
If you have zero control and the local burghers end up rahter wealthy, id imagine they would invest in their local areas, however you wont be able to do anything with these investments as you have zero control in those local areas.
 
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Proximity is the perfect solution for blobbing and snakes, this game is going steady to became all our dream eu game :D
 
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