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Tinto Talks # 7 -10th of April

Welcome to the seventh edition of Tinto Talks, where we talk about really super secret stuff, that is hidden behind the code name of ‘Project Caesar’.

Today we’ll look into what makes up the economy in Project Caesar. Obviously, we’ll go into much more detail on some of these aspects in later Tinto Talks. Right now though, we’ll go through the incomes and expenses of a country in the game.

Every month you have running incomes and expenses that need to be balanced, and if your balance is positive, your gold is increased and you can use that gold to invest in other things.

And with balancing incomes and expenses, of course there are sliders. Having some buttons for just a few possible options for taxes or expenses, like in Imperator, is not really fitting for a GSG with deep economical gameplay.

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Incomes

If we start with income, you have trade-related incomes, which is a system we will delve deep into in early May, as well as diplomatically related income. You also gain gold from provinces (not locations) that sell surplus food they can not store in their local market. Neither of these you directly control with any slider though.

The bulk of most countries' income will come from taxes though, and taxes in Project Caesar are really different than before. First of all, every estate has a possible tax base, a concept we will delve into much more detail next week. This you can attempt tax from them, but every estate has a maximum tax you can take from them, which depends on your laws and their privileges, and how much power they have in your country. The higher the tax you take from them, the lower their satisfaction equilibrium becomes. Some examples of tax affecting things include the Catholic religion which limits the taxes on Clergy, and also the ‘Auxilium et Consilium’ estate privilege for the nobles, which reduces the tax they pay.

Finally, for something that has existed in some older of our games, we have minting. Now what is that you may ask? Minting is the possibility to get more money by printing more coins. It just has the slight drawback of increasing your inflation the more you do it.

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Here we have the possibility to tax the commoners a fair bit more…


Expenses
We all do love gaining gold, but sadly we also have to spend it, and while we can reduce some of the spending, we can not completely avoid all of it.

First of all, we have the Cost of the Court. This is something that is directly correlated to the economic base of your country, and if you spend less gold than expected, your legitimacy, or equivalent applicable government power, will decrease over time, and the more you spend, the more legitimacy can increase. There are advances, laws, and other things that impact how much you need to spend here.

Then we have the cost for your standing army and navy, where spending less reduces their fighting capability. This is nothing new to our GSG games, so I am not sure why I need to mention this here.

Fort Maintenance is another common economic expense from our games, which is here as well. If you don’t pay, garrisons don’t tend to stick around.

Culture, this is an entirely new concept, which will become available in the Age of Renaissance, where you can invest money to get [TO BE TALKED ABOUT LATER], while also impacting your prestige.

You can also decide how much you wish to spend on your colonial charters, which is a new system we will talk about later this year.

Finally, the last thing you can impact with a slider is your investment in stability. The cost for how much your investments are needed depends on the size of your country, with different laws and societal values impacting it as well. Stability in itself ranges from +100 to -100, and will decay towards 0 on its own. There are two other ways to impact your stability gain, besides investing gold as mentioned here. One of them relates to the cabinet system, but another is a more long-term impact from how your country is built up, as it is based upon how many clergy pops you have of your state religion compared to the total population.

There are other expenses as you can see below, but one important thing to mention is that provinces that lack food will try to buy it from the local market.
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Maybe maybe we should cut down on our fleet, and maybe we don’t need ALL those forts. Our standing army of 200 brave footmen is enough!

Next week we’ll talk more in depth about how the tax base functions, how the food system works, and some other related issues.
 
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Some chance for guns, cannons and horses to be represented as tradable goods like food?
All these goods were strategical and extremely relevant to certains regions without local production in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
 
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I would love a DLC where I can easily change the geography. Adding for example a few extra islands in the Atlantic or connecting the black and caspian seas. I just want my imagination to run wild. The mods and tutorials for doing this with eu4 have always been a bit scary, and I’m willing to pay to make this big scary thing go away
Welcome to the Paradox Forums, paradoxwhydoyouneedaname!

I understand why you'd like to see this, but IMHO it's extremely unlikely to happen. Apart from EU4's Random New World feature, all Paradox historical games work with essentially fixed maps, because the geography of the Earth is largely fixed. You can see the bitmaps that are used in your steamapps/common/Europa Universalis IV/map directory; they look like this:
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The game 'layers' together various such pictures for the height, terrain, provinces, etc. to create the map we see in the game. It would definitely be possible to make these editable in-game (HoI4 in particular has various tools to help modders do similar things), but it would be a big effort for something that I doubt many players would use.

And even the Random New World feature doesn't really generate new maps (in the way that Civilization or Millennia or Simutrans do). It just stitches together pre-prepared tiles (I think it effectively layers the tiles on top of the real-world map, though it's hard to be sure without seeing the code).
 
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Yeah, its such an important change.
Most of the new systems seem great (i.e. having estates built into the core mechanics), but I hope you all can go one step further and figure out a way to make the stability expense less abstract- what does that even represent? Being able to pay gold to directly increase stability is too on-the-nose and feels out of sync with the design principles from the first Tinto Talks. At least there can be a better name for it (administrative costs?), if it's not broken up into multiple factors.
 
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So the Age of Renaissance. I know this is actually an economically themed dev diary, so I can ask again later. But I am very curious about Tinto's theory of history for project Caesar. Since, the Renaissance was a big deal in Europe, but not outside of it. In a different Paradox game, EU4, all states are expected to develop the Renaissance. Which is just kinda silly. Since, say the Islamic world didn't loose these texts, they preserved them. And many others like the Chinese and Indians had their own traditions and ancient texts.

What is the plan for Project Caesar? Since it is set in the early modern era. Will all states go through the Age of Renaissance? Previously you have shown maps including India and China. They places have nothing to do with the Renaissance in Europe. Will they have their own Ages?
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the Ages coming back. They were one of the most board-gamey things added to EU4, so if EU5 is including them when its direction is supposed to not be board-gamey then...well...that's a miss in terms of design. It always felt weird that I'd need to complete specific objectives that were totally arbitrary for the age (stuff like have 3 personal unions...wut...) just to get bonuses and then suddenly BOOM we're in a different age and the bonuses disappear and now I need to unify my culture and become Protestant. For EU4's gameyness and the nature (however flawed) of the gameplay revolving around endless bonus stacking it makes sense even if the system had its warts, but in EU5 the concept of the world just suddenly entering a new age I think will feel extremely out of place and fundamentally against the design of the game.
 
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Honestly I feel like you could replace the tax sliders with 5 buttons.
No tax
25% loyalty equilibrium
50% loyalty equilibrium
75% loyalty equilibrium
Max tax
 
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Regarding paying more directly for Stability: what does this represent? This seems like an abstraction at odds with the stated design goals from TT#1.
To me, it represents paying people money in order to improve their disposition towards you. It can be seen either as bribes or throwing parties. Having that money go back in the economy would be better, with the simulating goal of the game, though.

Maybe, then it could be tied to an hypothetic corruption mechanic, or the estates influence could be increased y using that slider. I think @mcmanusaur has a point that the mechanic is a bit too imprecise in what it does, but I'm not against its very existence.

If we draw a comparison with Imperator, in that game, you sacrifice a pig when you want to increase stability over time. I think spending money continuously in the goal of improving your country stability works better.
 
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Hopefully the "200 footmen" means that army will be more accurate like having 78 guns instead of 40.000 Cannonstack or even having different types of units as for example some nations had different cannons with stuff like mortars, siege cannons, ... as well as different cavalry like the winged hussars being a heavy cavalry force in a time where most nations had light cavalry.
Would be really nice to have more than the EU4 unit types that just change some pips.
 
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Is Economic and Trade Warfare a possibility? Maybe by blockading the trade routes of a Food dependent nation or banning exports from your own market to cause a famine? Or flood the markets with lots of goods to crash prices for trade dependent nations.
 
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¡Hello Johan! Will inflation affect, in addition to the cost of our investments (as in EU4), the happiness or acceptance of the classes? And if the answer is yes, it would have different impacts depending on which one? For example, it is logical to think that a noble or burgher has an easier time escaping inflation than a commoner. This question was asked by an argentinian so I can consider myself an expert in this subject.
 
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To me, it represents paying people money in order to improve their disposition towards you. It can be seen either as bribes or throwing parties. Having that money go back in the economy would be better, with the simulating goal of the game, though.
Isn't this the same as not taxing estates as much so that they're happier? I don't get what abstract stability represents within a kingdom when the other actors (estates, population, etc.) are already modelled.
 
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By the way, are those buttons in which you can go further and set some settings? Like "forts mothballed at peace"? If so, we don't seem to see those in the income category.
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