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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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Will the wealth of an estate affect the quality of it's levies? Like for example if the peasantry get wealthy enough they might afford to put on some decent equipment when called to war which might also make peasant rebelions more dangerous.
 
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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.

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.
I'm completely against this. Why use our imagination to imagine that this money sink is becuase we pay money (while in reality goes to the ether as stated by Johan) instead of actually reducing taxes to the states for example, which in practice means more money they can keep and be happier?

In IR you "sacrifice a pig", i.e. use political influence which is a hard "currency" to obtain.
 
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What really bugged me in eu4 is that mining gold caused inflation and not the spending of it. Because the amount of money in a system stays the same of you dont spend the mined gold. Also, will the game go deeper in terms of inflation compared to eu4? Like, will the inflation decrease when taxes increase? Will there be deflation?
 
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What really bugged me in eu4 is that mining gold caused inflation and not the spending of it. Because the amount of money in a system stays the same of you dont spend the mined gold. Also, will the game go deeper in terms of inflation compared to eu4? Like, will the inflation decrease when taxes increase? Will there be deflation?

Excess gold from the new world was a huge factor in bankrupting the Spanish Empire. Tons of gold makes gold less valuable. No real different from the Weimar Republic printing tons of marks in the post-WWI era where money became essentially worthless and people would burn it since it was cheaper than wood or coal.
 
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yes, and buying income is reduced by lack of control
BLINK!!! Eyebrow raised above top of head.

Goverment feeds the people? I would imagine they themselves can buy their own food and thus control shouldnt be an issue yet. Tax levels and roads/ports should tho matter as a multiplier for purchase over sales. That in turn would move the BASE TAX _BEFORE_ taxgain are modified by control.

So overall money loss/gain re food from the treasury point of view would be lower the lower the control,
 
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.

This feels like a barb against Vicky the Third...
 
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I wonder if there'll be ways to prioritise private development via low taxes or something like that. I also wonder if there'll be trade guilds in the Republics and cities that attempt to restrict private ownership among commoners, and thus trynig to prioritise private development could harm your relations (and thus economic output) from those guilds?
 
@Johan
Will there be a system where you can cut spending on only some troops that you have? For example, you have 100k troops but want to fully pay only 30k, if you get declared war by someone, you would have at least some troops to defend in the first months of war.
 
Very happy to see naval costs properly shown as being one of the largest state expenditures in pre-modern (and modern!) states, as they should be. Great work to Johan & the team.
 
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Once a nation embraces or develops a banking as a formalized institution, will there be bankers estate which grows more powerful when your nation falls deeply into debt?
 
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yes.

and the standing army is pitiful at the start for almost everyone.
So more in the direction of a royal (or whatever the title would otherwise be) guard as a small troop that is constantly available to the top dog?


But it's great that the army sizes now seem to be visibly more realistic.
 
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I wonder how these two will work. Will be be able to give out loans like in early version of Eu4? To my knowledge it was removed because AI didn't know how to handle it and it was pretty abusable.

In Eu4 taking loans are not directly tied to anyone in particular. Usually some local banks, rich people were giving it out loans and I wonder if that's something that will be more pronounced in EU4 2. Like the Estates giving out loans e.g.
 
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I'm definitely asking for too much, but I think it would be great to be able to spend different amount of money on different colonies. So, say, we could spend more money on the colonization of a more desired region, but also have a smaller cheaper colony in another less important region.
 
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In the general trend of project Ceacar with not having click button get rewards, will the moving of the various tax and maintanance sliders be laggy? As in when you move it from 0 to 100 will it take a few ticks to have effect? I think that'd discourage minmaxing that perfect spot a bit.
 
This feels like a barb against Vicky the Third...

From vicky 3 team :
* Discrete options are clearer than sliders in what exactly you get for selecting each level
* We don't want players to be babysitting and tweaking their sliders every single week to get the perfect level of taxation/spending because we don't think it's a good gameplay flow
* The idea that a government would be making weekly adjustments to the tax rate without incensing the population is extremely unrealistic and discrete levels allows us to make it so changing the tax level is something that you can't be doing all the time and that changes can have political consequences
 
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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.
If not monuments as you replied earlier, I can only think to works of art or invitations/pensions for scientist, artists or other prominent figures of the period. Pretty much as François 1er of France did when he invited Leonardo da Vinci in 1516 and paid him a yearly pension.
 
Wow! A simulation-based EU? Literally a dream come true.

This topic reminded me that there was a time (in Europe) where metal currency was not abundant and that affected the economy.

It encouraged paying rent "in-kind" rather than with metal currency. Peasants would pay a portion of their production to the landlord instead of metal currency. This created a problem for landlords in that they frequently had an overabundance of some types of food and shortages of others. Not sure how to represent that, but I thought I would mention it. In the short term, landlords preferred metal currency. However, "in-kind" rent actually insulated landlords from inflation in the long-run (over the generations). Landlords tended to stay wealthier and peasants poorer in places with "in-kind" rent. This wasn't just from a lack of metal currency, but also in places where sharecropping was more popular.

Maybe easier to simulate would be the effect it had on small-proprietor trade. If you worked a small farm, then it was difficult to take your surplus to the market and get value for it when there wasn't abundant metal currency. So, a lack of metal currency should encourage a more subsistence based economy where peasants were focused on just producing enough to feed their families. This not only could affect overall food production, but also investment level in the rural economy. There wasn't an incentive to increase food production if the extra was just going to go to the landlord or to waste.

Anyway, just a few ideas. These are the type of things that could separate more advanced economies from less advanced. Or maybe be an effect of bringing gold back from the New World, although that was a case of too much of a good thing in that it eventually led to inflation. But a short term effect could be to reduce subsistence based factors in the economy.
 
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if you have no money, you take loans, if you can't take loans, you go bankrupt.
Out of curiosity, from who are we taking loans ? (besides countries/players loaning to us as thats not a reliable thing)

I am not expecting an in depth economic system for loans with all of its intricacies but it would be interesting if you could loan money from the estates. (although repaying the loan and then basically taxing it might introduce some weird things)
If it's just poofed into existence I hope there are things affected by such actions.

Bankruptcy building as a strategy is not something I wish to see in this super duper secret game.
 
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