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Tinto Talks #60 - 23rd of April 2025

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talks, the happy Sant Jordi San Jorge Saint George’s Day Castile and León Day Wednesday where we talk about our entirely super-top-secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

This week, we will be talking about a trending topic: What happens if two (or more) Popes are elected in a Papal Conclave? What makes a man go neutral join the Dark Side nail Ninety-five Theses against indulgences on a church in Wittenberg? How does a general council of the Catholic Church react to this?

Or, in other words, we will be talking today about three historical Situations present in our game: the Western Schism, the Reformation, and the Council of Trent.



The Western Schism

When a Pope dies, some processes need to be started, leaning towards the most important one, the Papal Conclave, which will determine the election of a new Pope:

Papal Death.jpg

Papal Conclave.png

The Pope has died! As shown last week, the special Papal Heir Selection determines that a regency will start, with a clergyman becoming the Head of the Papal Conclave.

If it’s the year 1360 or later, a Schism might strike the Catholic Church, making for a divided election:

Western Schism1.jpg

The Western Schism may be managed in this panel:

Western Schism3.jpg

Where you might see a few things:
  • The contenders - the Papal States (the Pope residing either in Avignon or in Rome) on one side, and the country backing the second Pope on the other.
  • The support gathered by each Pope (which will slowly tick up, until one of them reaches 100% support).
  • The Reform Desire (more on this later).
  • The Curial countries that support each candidate.
  • The available actions.

This is the starting point of the Vote Progress hoverable tooltip (in the panel above, you see the numbers after some months/years have passed):
Vote Progress.jpg

The ‘Unity of Faith’ action:
Unity of Faith.jpg

And this is what happens because of the Curia Actions of the Catholic Church IO being blocked:
Blocked Papal Bulls.jpg

Finally, this is the situation map mode, showing the countries supporting each side:

Papal Contenders.jpg

The French candidate has more support than the current candidate, while Castile is sitting on the fence of the split election.

There will be some possible actions to gather support for each candidate, and some events may trigger randomly during the situation. And after a while, one of the candidates will gather enough support to reunite the Catholic Church again:

Catholic Church United Again.jpg

However, there are more perils for the Catholic Church…



The Reformation

After the year 1510, a certain Augustinian monk will protest against the uses of the Church, starting the Reformation:

The Lutheran Reformation.jpg

Reformation.jpg

The birthplace of the Reformation will be semi-dynamic, there are some weights in place, so it will usually trigger in a different place of the Catholic Christendom. In this case, Martin Luther was serving his duty in Perugia, Italy.

Lutheranism.jpg

The doctrine that a proper Catholic should follow!

This is the starting panel of the situation:
Reformation Panel.jpg

The elements that you can see are:
  • The Lutheran and Catholic pops at each moment.
  • The main active reformers (since all of them are characters that may spawn by event).
  • The Lutheran Preachers, which is a building that may spawn and spread throughout Catholic countries:
Lutheran Preachers.jpg

This might be a situation a year or so after the Reformation starts:
Zwingli.jpg

Ignore the weird graphical bug that we just found while writing this TT, each character has its own different portrait.

Reformation map mode.jpg

A second reformer, Zwingli, appeared in Switzerland, making the Free City of Bern a Lutheran bastion, and also 7 Lutheran Preachers buildings appeared. In the map mode, you can see the countries already converted to Lutheranism, the locations that already have Lutheran pops, and also other Protestant confessions present, such as some Hussites in Bohemia. Ignore the red borders, BTW; some countries decided that the start of the Reformation was a good moment to declare war on me, the Papal States, while preparing the screenshots for this Tinto Talks (traitors and heretics, they are!).

The Reformation may last for a while, because these are its ending triggers:

End Requirements.jpg

Which leads us to the third and final Situation for today:



The Council of Trent

If the Reformation is still active, and the Reform Desire (the modifier I mentioned in the Western Schism situation) is over 50%, the Council of Trent will trigger:

Council of Trent1.jpg

Council of Trent2.jpg

Council of Trent3.jpg

The main point of the Council of Trent is to debate, and eventually approve, some new Laws for the Catholic Church IO; When those Laws are voted and passed, it will end the Council:

Council of Trent4.jpg

Council of Trent5.jpg

And these are some examples of the Laws that are available for voting, each one having different policies that can be set:
Indulgences.jpg

Papal Authority.jpg

Veneration of Saints.jpg

Except for the Papal Authority doctrine, all the policies have proper Latin names, as they should be!


And that’s all for today! We hope that you enjoyed it and that your favourite cardinal becomes Pope. Next week, we will be taking a look at the final part of the Western Christian religious puzzle: the mechanics for the different Protestant confessions, and another situation, the War of Religion. And don’t forget that this Friday we will post the Tinto Flavour with the content for the Military Orders of the Teutonic & Livonian Orders and the Knights Hospitallers. Cheers!
 
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If the French-supported sidewins the Western Schism, is it possible for the Papacy to fall fully under the King of France, with the Papal State become a French subject? It would be really strange to start the game during the Avignon papacy and not have any means for France to keep its control over the pope.
 
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Ignore the red borders, BTW; some countries decided that the start of the Reformation was a good moment to declare war on me, the Papal States, while preparing the screenshots for this Tinto Talks (traitors and heretics, they are!).
I wanted to compare this screenshot for any changes made after the map in the Germany feedback thread was posted, but it was taken after the AI did some conquering, right? Guelders, Münster and Brunswick expanded a lot, for example. A bunch of small one location tags gone...
 
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What is the point of the western schism? What happens if France wins? Or the pope wins? Is there any consequences outside of not being able to use the Curia?
 
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I have a feeling I'll learn more about history playing this game than 16 years of schooling.

Also, I really appreciate the approach the team is taking of trying to cover as much of the historical events and institutions as possible, even if somewhat of a superficial level (cardinals for example), for release.

1. This means that DLCs can be focused on deepening these base game mechanics rather than trying to shoehorn them in and causing a balance nightmare

2. Modders can add extra content into a framework designed by the Devs themselves, bridging the gap until a DLC officially covers that topic.

3. As a player, I can choose which DLCs I want based on what facets if the game I want the most depth in, while still having some content that covers the other parts of the game that I am OK being simple but that I would definitely miss if they were missing altogether.
 
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I mean more like a UI question. I'm sure we (the forumites who play too much) will memorize them after a few hundred hours, but these names aren't useful "at a glance" because I don't know Latin.
Just posted one example of a policy, when you hover it, there's a description of its actual effect. :)
 
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Also idea. Maybe rename the x preachers building to x centre of reformation. Makes more sense logically being a building however you want to even imagine a building called "centre of reformation".
 
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Dude, you would be surprised by how many assets from other PDX GSGs we've had in this game, until being replaced by new ones. I think that we even had Stellaris ones!
Glitherhoof pope confirmed.
Space lizard banking tag confired.
The mustache unification movemet in London. Berlin, Vienna and Moscow confirmed.
The sighting of the Comet cousing Hunting accident confirmed.

This will be best paradox game ever!
 
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Yeah, and it was very related to the Hundred Years' War, with each side's allies supporting a different candidate. We'd love to have that, but you know, better make it kind of simple and working, than overcomplicating it too much from the start.
Okay, I just went to the Wikipedia page for the schism, to the section on which states supported which pope. The majority of states involved in the conflict (I'm being charitable to the game, here) did not have a cardinal from their country at this time, and - in this game - would not care about the schism despite many historically going to war over the issue. I was going to highlight all the ones that would not care about the schism in the game to prove my point, but gave up when most of the list was highlighted.

(Edit: Never mind, I finished it)
(Edit #2: I made a few mistakes here, you can see a better image here, the point has not changed)
Western-Schism.png

Green: Would be involved in the schism. Either has a cardinal or is a vassal under a state which does
Yellow: Would be involved in the schism on the wrong side, due to an overlord being on another side.
Red: Would not be involved in the schism.


I might have made a few mistakes, I did it while working on other things, but I'd imagine there aren't enough to change the result majorly. You might add a handful who are allied to participants when conflict breaks out, but I don't imagine that would account for the majority of the red names.

By not 'overcomplicating it' you've made most of the weight of this moment in history impossible to reproduce in game, and made the Schism only affect the countries with cardinals, when it affected the entirety of Catholicism.
 
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Why does Ulrich seem to be Catholic? The others seem to be Lutheran sans Calvin, who obviously would be Calvinist, but Ulrich throws me off. There’s also the hat on the right instead of the man and woman.
It's a bug, just fixed it!
 
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Just posted one example of a policy, when you hover it, there's a description of its actual effect. :)
It is not a deal breaker for me, but I:R had this same issue for me, specially with all the government offices.

Their names were all flavourful but meaningless to me, and I had to constantly bring up the tooltip to read the description. Not because it was needed for gameplay, as offices in I:R are as content light as it gets, but because I was trying to stay immerse.

Had the office names displayed in English with a subscript with their contemporary name or in a tooltip, I would have had an easier time.

Again, not a deal-breaker by any stretch, but something to think about if you are trying to be friendly to us lesser history buffs.
 
I’m not sure if it’s good to call the building “Lutheran Preachers.” I think a better way to call the building would be “Lutheran Pulpits” because having missionaries be considered a building sounds weird just as it is with Bishops being buildings. It should be a building that houses the people/preachers not the people themselves. Or at the very least a Pulpit just sounds more in line with what you are going for.
Fully agreed, pulpit is a great word to represent preachers/preaching without referring to actual people which would be weird for a building.
 
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View attachment 1284725
What happened to the catholic population, it used to be more than 85M in the catholic dev diary, is it because of the bubonic plague or a display bug?
I've been speedrunning the save to prepare the screenshots, so the Black Death has happened to Europe, but it hasn't had 150 years to recover its population.

As a rule of thumb, every time you see something weird like this in a TT/TF, it's the PDX equivalent of "A wizard did it!" -> "A console command did it!".
 
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I wanted to compare this screenshot for any changes made after the map in the Germany feedback thread was posted, but it was taken after the AI did some conquering, right? Guelders, Münster and Brunswick expanded a lot, for example. A bunch of small one location tags gone...
Yup, a bunch of HRE tags have died in the meantime.
 
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I am from Trento and I would love to see the change the city had with the council reflected in the game.
Trento was practically just a village with a castle, but after the council it became the biggest city in the Trentino and Südtirol, and among the major cities in northen Italy, with palaces and frescos all over the city centre.
A development boost would be nice or a large church building rappresenting Santa Maria Maggiore (where the council was held).
 
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Yes! Happy Villalar on catalan lands to you as well @Pavía !
Let me send you an electro-jota your way, to make you feel closer to home :p.
Lovely, and Happy Day to you, as well! And let me send you the classical one, then:

 
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Lovely, and Happy Day to you, as well! And let me send you the classical one, then:

One of the musician groups I follow did a hymn for Easter, that was really nice to listen to and I am not christian.

 
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