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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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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?
Carving out exclaves that are inaccessible by the AI is pretty diabolical, and could easily be done with the mechanics as I envision them. But 1, this could help AI not create a spagettified mess of border gore, and 2, how will this work in HRE where territories are often discontinuous?
 
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Oh neat. Highlights for me include:
  1. I really appreciate you adding in more estates. They made the game fun, and Victoria 3's stubornness with only a limited number of interest groups really made its political system boring and unrealistic. I hope to see more unique estates this time around!
  2. I really, really love the whole infrastructure being important deal. Roads and infrastructure affecting centralization is definitely a big part of the early modern time period and will help represent states centralizing and becoming more effective.
  3. I also like the importance of naval supremacy. In EU4 I would declare a war without any ships and then I would just occupy my enemy and would not suffer at all. This is deeper and more realistic.
  4. River countries rejoice! This will make Egypt, Burma, Khmer/Lan Xang and China really more realistic and unique. I love this.
  5. I like the towns and cities deal even if it is far too Imperator-y. Hope the limitations feel natural!
  6. The economy seems to be really cool too. I like how nominal control doesn't seem to be enough for economic control. Our lands far away being able to slide into someone else's market limits expansion in a meaningful way and makes internal planning all the more important and fun.
  7. One thing I don't like and will keep saying every Tinto Talk is that I still kind of dislike the UI graphics and skins.
This is a nice one. Keep cooking!
Johan stated all UI apart from the artwork is likely to change
 
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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.
When the "Graf Zeppelin" blimp flew over Russia in the 1930s it discovered "new" uncharted mountain ranges. That's how significant the "control" of the russian goverment over it's empire was.
 
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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
alliances should be mostly defensive
Offensive only if you make promises to them, but you can also make promises to "neutral" states in return.
And promises should be defined at the start of the war and somewhat binding
 
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Hi, after you showed the political map, I think many people may have such a question - we see that in 1337 there are states that, obviously, due to history, did not reach the end date of the new game (whenever it was). So, first of all, will artificial intelligence be able to move forward in a more historical way, as, for example, in EU4. Or will it be something similar to Victoria 3?
 
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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.

First, incentivize them with decentralization policy to develop their region quickly on their own and boost their economic output without tax and administrative burden and afterwards tighten the control and reap the benefits later in the game?
 
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The Bailiffs acting as a smaller proximity source would boost proximity in that location, as well as nearby locations right? So one option would be to place them strategically, so that their proximity spread affects more locations. Do they stack with each other?
 
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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 way he phrased it, it seems like it’s not “distance to capital” but “distance to major city”. For example, Vladivostok would be able to up your control over Eastern Siberia as Russia.
 
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I love that you have taken some inspiration from the criminally overlooked Imperator 2.0, @Johan . :)

Like this:
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.
 
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alliances should be mostly defensive
Offensive only if you make promises to them, but you can also make promises to "neutral" states in return.
And promises should be defined at the start of the war and somewhat binding
Like when you are a minor country calling a big like france you should be getting more dependent to him which at the end could make you a vassal of this country or PU
 
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Considering 99% of Germany will be either city or town then how will they handle food? There has to be FOOD TRADE!
Germany is not 99% made up of towns and cities. I know that's an exaggeration, but a large proportion of German land is agricultural, as it was everywhere in those days. Even the free and imperial cities had some. In EU4, the map is shown like this way for practical reasons. Here, the game will have much more space with the locations and will be able to show the farmland around the cities (in addition to the city itself). However, this doesn't prevent the game from having a possible food trade.
 
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I'm really hoping this game manages to nail the simulation aspects and the baseline mechanics for economy and AI, if it does I can really see this being THE definitive map game for a long time to come as building off a robust system is always a lot easier, especially for both DLC and modding.

I also do really hope that the economy and nation building/infrastructure is a bit more interesting and active than in EU4, don't really ever want to be spamming out 50 churches because it's the only option early game or playing tall and just devving up.
 
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I can already see it. In eu4 there is a discussion what to state, half-state, TC. In Caesar there will be discussion what to promote to town and city, and i very there will be "all provinces to city" strat.

Anyway, is there "core provinces" mechanic? I guess the control is equivalent of autonomy. So will the different regions will naturally reproduce the state-territoty-colony dynamics?
 
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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.
Will controlling/utilising lakes also be a factor for proximity calculation? Historically, both Mälaren and Vättern were just as important "highways" for Svealand and Götaland respectively, as the river Seine and Thames were for England and France.
 
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