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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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I do hope these upgrades are not 'instant', or at least not the effects of it.

Upgrading a town to a city should make it so that Burghers *START* to flow there slowly over the course of say 2-5 years. Your food production *STARTS* to slowly go down from that place as slowly people there are realizing that farming isn't as lucrative there. And that it can also be cancelled while in progress, making it slowly go towards it earlier equilibrium again.

That's one of the big 3 lessons from EU4 imo. While the decision you take to do something is instant, its effects aren't (hopefully).
I would like mechanics like this, but from a practical point of view this will make the game less accessible and harder for new players. It's hard to say if that would be worth it in this case.
 
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if I understand things correctly, the tool tip is a bit misleading

If an increase of control increase crown power, shouldn't it be displayed in green 56.15% crown power?

Why use red -43.85 for some values and green +56.15 for others, while it's mechanically the same?

It leads to believe that crown power is positively proportional to levy and negatively proportional to crown power
 
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if I understand things correctly, the tool tip is a bit misleading

If an increase of control increase crown power, shouldn't it be displayed in green 56.15% crown power?

Why use red -43.85 for some values and green +56.15 for others, while it's mechanically the same?

It leads to believe that crown power is positively proportional to levy and negatively proportional to crown power
I believe he said the numbers are not at all balanced yet.
 
In regards to Control being a pure positive- perhaps it's worth considering either Control itself, or mechanics that spread Control and similar things more effectively (e.g introducing major reforms to laws or estate privileges that increase Control), have a deleterious effect on unrest? Such as- say- if you try to introduce 'National Law' or 'National Taxation' as an alternative to 'Noble Law Enforcement' or 'Noble Taxation' to boost control in Noble-rich areas, then you might get a big increase in province unrest scaling to 'how much noble power' versus 'how much noble control'.

A big part of revolutionary politics and other internal strife in the time period was various groups feeling that their privileges were being encroached upon by State control- it's a big part of why many states became absolutist, so they could remove as many voices from government as possible to minimise the ability for people to deny their Control-boosting reforms. I could see absolutist low-estate-power countries being able to keep unrest at a simmer during heavy reforms unless something really goes wrong, while parliamentary states can only do small reforms at a time, but can recover from each one quickly.
 
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In regards to Control being a pure positive- perhaps it's worth considering either Control itself, or mechanics that spread Control and similar things more effectively (e.g introducing major reforms to laws or estate privileges that increase Control), have a deleterious effect on unrest? Such as- say- if you try to introduce 'National Law' or 'National Taxation' as an alternative to 'Noble Law Enforcement' or 'Noble Taxation' to boost control in Noble-rich areas, then you might get a big increase in province unrest scaling to 'how much noble power' versus 'how much noble control'.

A big part of revolutionary politics and other internal strife in the time period was various groups feeling that their privileges were being encroached upon by State control- it's a big part of why many states became absolutist, so they could remove as many voices from government as possible to minimise the ability for people to deny their Control-boosting reforms. I could see absolutist low-estate-power countries being able to keep unrest at a simmer during heavy reforms unless something really goes wrong, while parliamentary states can only do small reforms at a time, but can recover from each one quickly.
I think it should be the other way around, control should be at least partially limited by estate power (especially nobles) and so, in order to gain more control, you have to revoke privileges and make other actions that make them more likely to be unhappy and eventually revolt. This “power struggle” has more to do with estates (with control being a primary consequence to it) than directly with control
 
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1) What about hellenism? Will there a way for hellenic religion to come back to life?
The last reports of anyone in Greece following the Hellenic gods were rural shepherds in the 9th/10 centuries, while a Syrian Desert town followed their partly-Hellenised pantheon until the town itself was wrecked by raiders in the 12th century. Unlike rural Norse followers it appears Hellenism was functionally extinct by 1337, and the only version we'd see would be reconstructed versions like the form advocated by Philosopher Gemistos Plethon
 
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Especially in the early game where your proximity range is far smaller.
Will there be fairly strict limits on the number of vassals you can have Ala EU4 or Imperator, or will the game be more like CK3 in this regard where the player might have dozens of vassals administering your periphery?
High control is always good
shouldn’t it risk unrest? Historically both the process and products of increasing legibility, which I believe Control is at least partially representing, was extremely disruptive in this period and was a component of the French Revolution. Or is this represented by secondary mechanics like taxes increasing unrest, so control only has negative effects if your policies are harming this newly legible population?

Edit: looks like this was addressed elsewhere. Basically control gives you more tools to work with when it comes to both increasing and decreasing unrest. Hopefully this doesn’t quite cancel out if you need to surge your tax collection, since if it was that easy the French Revolution would’ve been a lot less dramatic. Speaking of, would 1776 be represented? Colonial vassals banding together to violently resist integration?
 
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I think it should be the other way around, control should be at least partially limited by estate power (especially nobles) and so, in order to gain more control, you have to revoke privileges and make other actions that make them more likely to be unhappy and eventually revolt. This “power struggle” has more to do with estates (with control being a primary consequence to it) than directly with control
On the one hand, I could see that. On the other hand, I think IRL 'Control' was often a bad thing for the people on the ground (not always- e.g French peasants praising the introduction of standardised weights and measures so the nobility couldn't play every trick in the book to squeeze more grain from their permitted volumes), such as making conscription easier and adding additional and often-punishing duties like 'make sure you can host our armies when they're in the area'. I think modelling it purely as Estate-related would miss out on that feel a little bit, although (as with the 'standardised weights' thing) there's definitely cases that sort of reforms would be explicitly Estate-related.
 
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Thats assuming too much. We thought they would get the manpower from pops in IR when they introduced levied and they didnt, and manpower remained completely removed from the population numbers and regenerating magically.
Imperator had pops, but not population. Project Caesar has both, just like Vic 2 where there is a link between available population and available soldiers. A dead soldier means a person in a pop dies.
 
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Imperator had pops, but not population. Project Caesar has both, just like Vic 2 where there is a link between available population and available soldiers. A dead soldier means a person in a pop dies.
The battle of Anzicourt if i remember well, wipedout a big part of French noble.
 
No they are not.

Its a bit hard to have a naval battle involving a few dozen ship of the lines on them.
What about cities along big rivers? Would they act somewhat like a coastal location and provide any maritime bonus like extra sailors or even allow for the construction of ships? Also, it'd be really cool if we could learn about the situation of the Caspian Sea and the Great Lakes early on in the development, would the locations adjacent to them gain any bonuses?
 
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Here you can see the control that Sweden currently has.

I'd put the Swedish border further east. Based on that screenshot, currently the in-game border is west of even the most conservative Swedish-Finnish interpretation of the "1323 border". Historically in the late 13th century both Sweden and Novgorod vied for dominance over Karelia, Savonia and Bothnia, with Sweden desiring the Neva as the border and Novgorod IIRC the Kymi. In 1307-08 the Karelians rebelled against Novgorod and requested help from Viborg*, which is apparently what led to Sweden acquiring the Karelian counties of Savonia, Jääski and Äyräpää, followed by a peace treaty establishing the border**, whose agreement is lost to time, later reaffirmed by the 1323 Treaty of Nöteborg (Mykle konungen Jurge med allom them aff Nogardhe gaff till winschap try giszla lagh Sauolax, Jæskis, Æg[r]epæ, Karelsk gitzla lagh).

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The second image's eastern dotted line largely coincides with a later Swedish forgery attempt (with the notable exception of the eastern Karjalankoski border point, which could potentially be genuine), which is largely the same border that was then later settled at in the Treaty of Teusina in 1595.

Additionally, the "1323 border" also ran from the Siestarjoki (Sestra) to Retusaari (Kotlin) Island, cutting the island in half, either since the early 14th century or definitively by the early 15th century, in about the following manner:

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Also, up until 1534 the castle province (slottslän) of Viborg did not pay taxes to Stockholm or Åbo. Instead its taxes were dedicated to the defence of the eastern part of the realm. Viborg was quite autonomous, at times even conducting its own foreign policy with regards to Novgorod and the German monastic orders in the Baltics. Until the 16th century the province also controlled Savonia, while Borgå Castle Province was subordinated to Viborg as a tax domain (meaning its taxes went to Viborg).

This is roughly the territory that was under Viborg's control or taxation (Borgå) until the 16th century:

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Viborg's autonomy during the Late Middle Ages should be represented in some way in-game.

Under Erik Axelsson Tott, who in addition to controlling Viborg Castle Province in 1467-1480, also controlled Åbo Castle Province in 1465-1470, Viborg became the third city in the Kingdom of Sweden to have walls surrounding it, which says something about its significance. The other two were Stockholm and Kalmar. Visby also had walls, but it was controlled by Denmark. Tott also began the construction of Nyslott Castle (later called Olofsborg Castle) in Savonia in 1475.

*At the time spelled Wiborg, Wiborgh, Wiburg, etc. but for simplicity and consistency with PDX's games I'm using the modern Swedish spelling here.

**There was another rebellion against Novgorod in 1314 where the local Karelians openly let Swedish-Finnish forces into the fortified city of Korela (Käkisalmi/Kexholm (Swedish spellings vary)). Russian sources mention Korela as the second-largest city in 15th century Novgorod and that's something I also want to bring attention to since it's been ignored in past Europa Universalis titles, but that's outside the scope of this post.
 
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Peasants! Peasants don't need money! I need money. Give it to me.
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