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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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Wow, all this sounds really interesting and cool. I just want to draw attention to the Tinto team - not to overdo it. A large number of small elements to manage is a recipe for failure and material fatigue. I'm afraid that managing this - where the city should be, where the rural regions, where to build which buildings - all this will make us, instead of playing the map of politics, shaping the form of government of our country - we will be fiddling (managing) in each province. This will not end well. Please, think it over carefully so that it does not end up with players preparing entire maps and plans where to build which city to make it as optimal as possible. Development in EU IV was very satisfying because it was simple but gave some control. Control that did not require sitting and managing every element - it was a mechanic that was simple but allowed a lot for those who delved deep into the game mechanics. A very good balance. So although I really like the concept of dynamic cities - giving full control over this aspect to the player - I'm afraid it might be dangerous for the game.
 
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Navies helps with
a) making it tick up faster
b) make sure pirates are dealt with.
c) making sure you actually have a maritime presence during / after a war.
Are navies the only way to deal with pirates, as in just hunting them down? Or could we in theory pay them to leave our shipping alone, and possibly pay them a little more than that to focus a bit more on rivals?
 
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Very unhappy to see Dhimmi's added. Please just split the existing three estates into interest groups, as seen in VIC3, or by heretics, heathens and true faith, as seen in EU4.

Quote from the first dev diary:
"
Replayability

There should be many ways to play different starts and reasons to replay them. Different mechanics in different parts of the world create a unique experience depending on what you choose to play. With a deep and complex game, there should be so many choices and paths that the player should feel they can always come back to get a new story with the same start.
"

I think that the Dhimmi estate falls short of this criteria. Since Dhimmi's would be accessible to all/most of the Muslim countries, there would be no need to play all the Muslim countries. Another thing to consider is why didn't Aragon have this estate? Wouldn't it make sense, if Aragon conquered a large Muslim population, for them to also have the possibility of granting various rights to them? Therefore I would like to not see them in the game + it screams EU4. A crazy good, but kinda an expected thing to add would be modifiers for each religion and culture of how they interact with diverse populations. All in all, it would be a much better representation of religious protection and such things than a whole separate estate.

P.S. Very happy to see the historically accurate border gore in the Baltics.
I really don't understand that argument. A Dhimmi estate would make playing a muslim state different from a christian state. That gives more variety and replayability.
You can still dislike a Dhimmi estate - or other special estates like the Cossacks - for different reasons, but the replayability argument makes no sense.
 
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With maritime presence existing, can we expect some juicy piracy mechanics take place? or just something related to plundering trade and something like that?
 
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Wow, all this sounds really interesting and cool. I just want to draw attention to the Tinto team - not to overdo it. A large number of small elements to manage is a recipe for failure and material fatigue. I'm afraid that managing this - where the city should be, where the rural regions, where to build which buildings - all this will make us, instead of playing the map of politics, shaping the form of government of our country - we will be fiddling (managing) in each province. This will not end well. Please, think it over carefully so that it does not end up with players preparing entire maps and plans where to build which city to make it as optimal as possible. Development in EU IV was very satisfying because it was simple but gave some control. Control that did not require sitting and managing every element - it was a mechanic that was simple but allowed a lot for those who delved deep into the game mechanics. A very good balance. So although I really like the concept of dynamic cities - giving full control over this aspect to the player - I'm afraid it might be dangerous for the game.
If I have to imagine that instead of development, I have a mechanic to manage every single province and decide - where there should be a village, where a city, where an even bigger city - and all this additionally to be considered through the prism that it provides different buildings, I would derive much less pleasure from playing EU. I barely want to manage fortresses to be optimal, and this would be on a much larger scale.
 
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Could we hope for a Jews estate for European and some Muslim nations?
Also, I wish there was a vanilla way to bring back other Pagan religions back like Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, and Hellenic without having to mod the game.
 
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Another Tinto Talk, another series of reasons to be in love with Project Caesar !!!
 
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With statements both "exclaves have no proximity without special buildings" and "Voltaire's Nightmare is a good example to follow", those seem contradictory to me. Plenty of hre states had exclaves that did not have specific infrastructure to govern them.

Which of the two will give? Or is the hre somehow an exception to the exclave-proximity-rule?
 
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Hopefully, we can avoid the VIC3/CK3 UI and 3d Characters. Looking good mechanically. I really hope that having vassal states becomes something people actually wish to keep around rather than annexing them as soon as possible. Control may help with this.
 
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I hope the UI gets redesigned to be more like EU4. I really love skeumorphism and would like not-EU5 to continue that trend. Really loved the drapes that display the notifications and other little stuff like that
 
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How would large inland lakes, like the caspian sea or the great lakes work in-game?
Like, will they work like mini-oceans, with pirates and potentially naval combat, or will they only be used for commercial/proximity purposes?
 
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With statements both "exclaves have no proximity without special buildings" and "Voltaire's Nightmare is a good example to follow", those seem contradictory to me. Plenty of hre states had exclaves that did not have specific infrastructure to govern them.

Which of the two will give? Or is the hre somehow an exception to the exclave-proximity-rule?
I guess the Exclaves are screwed without special buildings?
 
I cant believe this game is still using such an arcaic and abstract concept such as manpower when you have a beautiful population system.

sigh...Please give it a thought...Manpower should be the population not some magical pool of men that always regenerates with no consequences for the local pops
Manpower is probably derived from the population, as in a "usable fraction" of the pops
 
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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.
How will different nations governmental structures play into this? For example, the Ottomans had a much more centralized authority on their provinces. Maybe you should add a "bureaucrat" class to the game, which would belong to the "crown" estate in the game. Some nations can have access to these pop types at the game start, for example in China or the Ottomans, and the rest of the world can access and expand bureaucracy later on in the game. Increasing the number of nobles shouldn't be the only option to found a "control hub".
Will control play a role in our subject relations? If so, will we be able to increase our control by constructing certain buildings in our subjects capital?
How will control/proximity play into trade? Will I get a modified version of "control" based on my proximity, relations and treaties with the traded country and other things, changing my "trading power" in that trade node or market?
How will control/proximity play a role in military side of things? Will my armies fight differently in locations with different proximaties? Will autonomous mission thay I give to my armies and navies get less effective the lesser my control in the assigned location? I assume control will have major effects on culture, religion and economy in our locations but army, and possible diplomats, explorers, colonies should be effected too.
Would I be able to assign dukes, counts, valis, satraps, governors, viceroys etc. to my furthermost provinces, turning them into AI controlled provinces while only receiving tribute and some levies? Can I form the United Kingdom without integrating Scotland, Wales and Ireland, leaving them as mentioned AI controlled provinces, and assigning my heir as the Prince of Wales to earn him more legitimacy and possibly make him a better heir (in eu4 terms, increase his monarch points)? If I somehow have immense control over my colonies in the new world, will be able to administer them myself and not create a colonial subject like in eu4? Lastly, would I be able to have a modified version of control in foreign countries, native tribes etc. resulting in them more easily accepting my overlordship and becoming a puppet or a protectorate?
Will certain pop groups like burghers try to migrate to location where I have higher control? If yes, will they try to do this regardless, or will it just happen in a location which experienced a recent control decrease?
 
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So if towns/cities are not meant to fulfill their own food needs how are things like the Free Cities of the HRE going to work? What about trade ports that you colonize or take and they're already towns or cities for example taking Hong Kong or Zanzibar? Is there going to be an state wide food or will it be nation wide? Or are we having some MEIOU level of trade where each location buys and sells goods/food?