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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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Would be cool if gold could have localised names in different parts of the world at least, it would give the -totally secret unannounced- game more character. It just being named "gold" instead of something like ducats kinda breaks immersion imo
 
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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.
I see some difference of opinion with other developers of Paradox...
 
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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.
As guesses are being taken for the part in brackets, here's mine. Soft power, cultural power, cultural influence, or something along those lines. Will impact willingness to immigrate, and the cost and time of cultural conversions. Distinct from prestige as prestige can also be gained by military might. Also perhaps distinct because it's not a value assigned to a single country, but to a culture, so when the culture is doing well all countries with that culture get the benefits.
 
if you have no money, you take loans, if you can't take loans, you go bankrupt.

How will this work?

One of the things I always disliked about EU4 is that all countries, from the Italian city-states who invented modern banking to literal stone age tribes without a currency system, have the ability to borrow money out of the aether. Since estates earning money and having their own budgets has already been confirmed, I would really appreciate it if taking loans depends on social progress (Banking as an institution, in EU4 terms) and the amount of wealth possessed by your estates.

In other words, loans should be taken from your estates and paid back to them, making a prosperous bourgeoisie that much more important!
 
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Would be cool if gold could have localised names in different parts of the world at least, it would give the -totally secret unannounced- game more character. It just being named "gold" instead of something like ducats kinda breaks immersion imo
He has already answered he said gold because that has always be how its called in game

That doesn't mean the currency will be localised as gold
 
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ther is 2 things that i would like to see in project ceaser:

1) when we colonize i want 1 we can choose if it is a commercial coloni( to produce/buy thing) or if it is to make settelment
2 we have to do somthing to make the people go there 3 that the native have a real role like if they want to trade whit us or they want us to leave 4 if we could create a flag for our it would be very cool

2) when there is a civil war we can chose or side for exemple the king died whitout a legitime heir so two big noble familly in the country want the tron then we have to chose wich family we would play(or you see that the rebel against your government have a reform that you want)

and that's all i wanted to say , have a great week:)
 
I know that placeholder UI is being used but I really hope the final UI will be better than the minimalist designs of CK3 and VIC3. Mobile game looking UI with no flair or characteristics of the era the game is taking place in will look boring.

UI looks bad, please dont do what you did in Victoria 3, rustic old looking UI will always beat this modern look. I dont want to feel like im playing a mobile game
I'm not a fan of what we have seen of the UI so far, nor do I like the Vic 3 UI, but I really struggle to so how any of them gives a feeling of a mobile game. I could just have played the wrong mobile games though.

Age mechanics suggest a much more hard coded game than the start date seems to suggest. Not necessarily a bad thing but does seem to go counter to some of the other game design decisions
Why? How would a 1337 start date suggest some things not being somewhat hardcoded? I would expect it to require more "hardcoding", or at the very least hardlocks of events such as the reformation, age of exploration etc. to prevent them from triggering too early or not at all.
 
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The most important issue: can you manage your army maintenance for separate armies separately?

In eu4 this idea was dropped entirely in my opinion quite unreasonably.

In peace time you don't need to pay your entire army if you want to use like 5% of it to fight some rebels. You don't need to pay your entire army to explore the new world with a few units. Etc. I don't know what exactly army usages will be in this game, but i guess it still will be useful.

Edit: i saw it was already answered for another comment that: no

@Johan Could you elaborate why it is not taken under consideraion?
 
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Some of the sliders have a slightly less blue section, prior to going to black. (Commoner and Burgher)

The bar for clergy is completely black and does not have the ability to be increased, judging by the + button being blacked out.

Is it correct to say that the solid blue is how much you are taxing, light blue is about available to tax, and black is amount you cannot tax?

What was the thought process behind showing what % of their wealth you can tax, vs keeping the slider on a range of 0-100% of what you can tax?
 
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speaking of buying eachothers populations/soldiers.. criminls? What about Potemkins cities and villages? Deciding that once a thief might not be doomed into being a forever thief, murderer and worse. Maybe even settling empty lands using other nations prisoners or other undesireables. Not unlike Spain gifting populations to the Berbery states.
Or even sending a 10k military force to the new world and then use those soldiers to settle the land.. taking local Pocahontases as wives. Locals might object to replacement colonisation so there will be fights.

But then thats a colonization diary.
 
Hi Johan,

Would we be able to set a tax rate per province? If so, would we be able to tax each estate differently in the province? It could work if there is a default rate, that the player can change if the province is unruly, or leave alone if the player doesn't want to deal with that level of granularity.

no
 
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So-- What happens when someone just refuses to surrender in Multiplayer and fights a death-war to the end, dragging their opponent down with them and allowing their enemy to inherit a burnt out country for their trouble as a sort of revenge? This is already an endemic problem in EU4, surely Caesar will have some kind of in-game fix to stop this behavior outside of us having to just not let players who play like that in

The Peace system has ways to attempt to stop that.
 
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Oh God, this is getting really awesome! I'm guessing the cabinet system is similar to offices in Imperator Rome or court in CK but I have no idea how it would work without characters. Also I love the idea of actually being patron of arts and not just giving burghers a privilige. This is really really good! Not to mention those super sexy sliders!

Edit: I deleted my stupid question that was answered in the post. I think I should sleep lol. Can't wait to learn the real mechanic behind the culture spending. Good night everyone!
 
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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,

lol, i meant selling food reduces the gold you get
 
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We are getting shown some Art here and there and I'm liking it, EU4 and sometimes even Imperator, lacked some graphics to immerse us more in the management and vibe of the game. Blank UI with just letters and numbers becomes a spreadsheet of work after some time, and the time period covered has such visual richness available to us, that Art is a must!

Pretty basic diary this one, I am sure Johan wished to tell us much more, but had to tell pretty given stuff, and refrain from some mentions. But certainly, Culture is an aspect I was sorely missing in EU4 and Imperator (well, Vic3 too) that CK3 managed to give a pretty interesting dynamic. And hell, with the "start of globalization" that the period entails, Culture contact and exchange is paramount and a rich bounty for interesting gameplay to be built upon.

How will we justify centralizing power upon our Monarch (or permanent republican diet) without apologetic material, propaganda and ideological control? (Well, of course, there is bureaucracy, monopoly of violence and class conscience) With lots of Culture!
Nations under a state become a Nation-State through strong cultural identity. So I'm very happy to see it be given a place under the sun!
 
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@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.

no