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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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You hinted in your comments that it will be advisable early game to use subjects for distant holdings as they'll have higher control. In EU4 there were quite arbitrary limits on the number of subjects you could keep (and a bunch of convoluted ways to get around that limit). Will this be the same in Project Caesar? What will prevent a player from having a vassal swarm?
 
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How will terra incognita work? Can you lose sight and fade back to terra incognita? I'm thinking for someone like the Greenland colonies.

Also a cool idea I had was what if you could see names of places you think exist in terra incognita. For example most of Europe knew Yuan existed but they don't have diplomatic oversight over them. Maybe they could see the yuan name in the terra incognita and it wouldn't disappear until the news of the fall of Yuan reached their court, maybe like 3-5 years after it actually fell. Same could happen for the fall of Constantinople. Or the existence of El Dorado.
Would be really cool, but I imagine we're talking DLCs and not base game here.
 
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Is there a downside to “griefing” a country into oblivion via depopulation?
if there is it should be something akin to a drop in defensiveness and supply
for example, Canada's population borders the USA to make a land invasion more difficult and hopefully buy enough time for the rest of the British empire to mobilize.
 
The AI has zero cost to micro. This is supposed to be fun, not a job. They have multiple "not as bad" alternatives to simulate the troubles of growing an empire. Increase road building duration based on proximity, increase cost, increase unrest, lower owning estate happiness, etc. Having to manually build roads in the whole of the Mamluks is something that's tedious for the point of being tedious.
AI is not clever as player, so even if doesnt have to micro he will be uneffective at building stuff. Actually if player dont micro too that is where unbalance begins
 
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.
I appreciate the concern about distance penalties but if I'm reading the diaries and Johan's responses correctly it looks like the resources you don't get aren't just jettisoned into the void, they go to estates instead, so the resources not in your pocket still impact the country. Now it may depend on what estates can do with those resources, but it sounds more interesting than in the games you highlight. Also it will probably depend on how effective the pro-centralisation tools are and how quickly or slowly you're dripfed improvements with technology.
 
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With town and cities being a thing, it got me thinking, they must have a connection to forts, no ? Maybe forts cost mapower too.

Assuming forts will work like in eu4, what if a fort could be build anywere, as much in a city as in the middle of nowhere (ex: barely inhabited mountain), but it will cost a lot in maintenance for the latter and be extremely cheap for the former ?

The ressources being next-door should make them cheaper since there would be basically no transportation involved. Meanwhile a fort in a barren location is much more expensive, so the state (player) will build one only if the strategic benefits outweigh the costs. That way, most cities will be fortified like in real life, even though they may not be a crucial strategic point. Maybe the cost will vary depending on the distance from a town/city, be linked to control or we may even have nobles build some in their estates like they did in real life.

Could be neat to increase realism, if it isn't already a feature.
 
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Really love the concept so far. Not sure you can answer my question or not but I’ll ask anyway.

1. How control or proximity affects army e.g. supply/attrition, movement speed, etc?
2. Can I turn every single location into town and rely only on trade for food? Maybe those minor city state in the HRE already facing this situation.
3. How horde or Yuan is going to handle the control in their vast empire? For Yuan I understand they have big cities everywhere but horde, I don’t think they even bother to build roads.
 
Will the AI consider the potential control of a province before declaring war? More specifically, will the AI not declare a war if the conquered locations will have too low control?
 
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With dhimmi added, will you make more estates? Also would those estates be able to bring added through decisions etc.

Because it would be great if I could destroy my noble influence by replacing them with burocrats I have personally elevated and given many noble privileges, leading to me getting a very loyal noble replacement whole the disgruntled nobles may die out or get replaced by this loyal group, but the loyalty modifier gets finished over time as this new noble class entrenches itself into my power structure starting to cause similar problems (I don't mean establishing a new pop type only that some nobles get more power or that I transfer power to the burghers that belong to this new estate).


It would also make the transition from peasants to workers more interesting by establishing a new estate which presents and burghers can join the more you industrialize in the end game, maybe leading to new problems and benefits like calls for democracy.

Aka making estates a bit like IG's from Victoria 3 just with more impact from the player in their establishemnt/disulision.
 
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Is there a downside to “griefing” a country into oblivion via depopulation?
My guess is that you won't be able to repeatedly negatively affect the same location. There will be time gating that prevents pops from dying due to warfare, so you can cause death in a province at best a couple of times during war (and it would require losing the province again in the first place), plus trying to starve the provinces to death can only be achieved via starving your own army at the same time if it works like I:R.
 
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Will there only be cities and town or also an even larger metroplopolian location? It was one of my favorite things in imperator Rome to try and build the biggest metropol I could possibly build and I imagine that one metropol should already be hard enough to achieve in not eu5
 
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I dont, we wanted a better EU4, not Victoria 3 but 14th century
I'm good with anything that slows down colonization to the historical speed, doesn't make Africa fully or almost fully colonized in the game timeframe, that doesn't make small states going always away in some decades and makes armies and navies operating taking account of logistics and distance from their own country.
The approach that must be absolutely avoided in my opinion is the complete lack of a mechanic linked to managing a big empire, that makes a player "winning" automatically just by reaching a certain critical mass.
 
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Hey Johan, great stuff! A friend and I were wondering when religion will be covered. I know you briefly showed the different sects of Christianity (Bogomilism, Lollardy, Hussites, etc. ), but I was curious how they will be significantly differentiated with seemingly more religions/religious options.
 
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yes, there will be some tiny remnants left..
I wonder what our options for interacting with minority religions (Norse remnants in Scandinavia, Zoroastrians in Persia etc.) are. Can we somehow promote their growth and eventually switch to a different religion this way (similar in effect, but not in mechanic to the EU4 "provoke zealot rebels -> let them run around your country converting provinces -> accept demands")? Or does the more grounded design of Project Ceasar mean that the only options are to oppress them or let them be?
 
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