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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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Did it? My understanding was the last Hellenic holdouts were rural shepherds in the 9th/10th century, with a Syrian desert town keeping their Hellenised pantheon until the 12th century when the town was razed. I'm not aware of any other holdouts by 1337.
That said i guess someone can do a "Akbar".
Wipe out all rebels, seizing lands and ttles and everything from those defeated with maximum bloodbaths until no one dares rebel again as a youth. Then later as the wise old ruler who never faced any rebellions in his later years creates a wholly new religion and everyone just smiles and a few join.
 
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Abstract expense named stability, probably exists for gameplay reasons.

And, no, reducing taxes and "invest" in an estate it's not the same, especially if you have 0 tax policy for certain estate, as shown in the pictures above. If the estate is still dissatisfied, the way to change it, could be through stability expenses, helping them in some way. In the example from the yesterdays DD, that could mean giving them money to build a cathedral, or monastery etc.

Then make that an estate interaction. 'Stability' is entirely abstract.

People keep coming up with what-if scenarios and hand-wavey explanations for what stability really is but none seem to agree and nobody can say exactly what it is. That means it's abstract.
 
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Then make that an estate interaction. 'Stability' is entirely abstract.

People keep coming up with what-if scenarios and hand-wavey explanations for what stability really is but none seem to agree and nobody can say exactly what it is. That means it's abstract.
Of course it's abstract, I just gave my opinion why they did it like that
 
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Of course it's abstract, I just gave my opinion why they did it like that
Yet in contrast to all other sliders, which can somewhat be linked to specific personnel + equipment and its costs (court, army, navy, arts, colonies), Stability is too abstract to represent anything along those lines. Rather, Stability is a meta concept which relates to the state of your realm. And I don't think that low Stability should be represented as a problem you can just throw money at to solve it.
 
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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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those are the automation buttons

If I spend my ducats on culture, does that mean I'm giving some money to my burghers? Will they get better off or more powerful because I'm commisioning art?
both?

If you increase burger tax too much, might some pops change profession and become commoners?
no but they might lose some weight
 
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I probably should’ve asked this when the TT actually had to do with country names but will there be dynamic flags for tags or will tags always have the same flag no matter the government type?
 
I probably should’ve asked this when the TT actually had to do with country names but will there be dynamic flags for tags or will tags always have the same flag no matter the government type?
Speaking of names, I'd be interested if the games kerning for names can be more dynamic? Paradox always has a tendency for squished smaller names on very large countries with close together letters.

Just look at Russia on most world maps.its R U S S I A. I think it'd be interesting if the spacing would adjust to more appropriately fill the political area. Just a pet peave of mine.
 
I'm curious about the culture slider.
 
I have a question, will cultures, religions and estates' percentages be shared equally to one another? For example, if out of 100 people I have 50 muslims and 50 christians AND 50 greek and 50 turkish (for example), will I necessarily have 25 greek muslim, 25 greek christians, 25 turks muslim and 25 turks christian? If not, how will this affect the game? If yes, does it mean that culture and religion in a way don't interact with each other?

Finally, is it possible to have an unbalanced presence of cultures and religions across estates? The question regarding muslim ulemas seems to suggest that.
 
Then make that an estate interaction. 'Stability' is entirely abstract.

People keep coming up with what-if scenarios and hand-wavey explanations for what stability really is but none seem to agree and nobody can say exactly what it is. That means it's abstract.
I think that the values of satisfaction and taxes relate to the relationship between the estate and the state, while stability accounts for all the other interactions between estates, plus infights WITHIN each estate. In an ideal game where you can play EVERY estate or faction in EVERY place, probably stability is not necessary. But you know, you might as well go in Sudan and try to become a new war chief at that point.
 
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