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Tinto Talks #8 - 17th of April 2024

Hello, and welcome to the eighth iteration of Tinto Talks where we talk about what we are doing in our very secret future game, with the code name Project Caesar.

Btw, on a completely unrelated note, Paradox Tinto has just announced our new expansion ‘Winds of Change’ for EU4. Go check out its cool contents and trailer!




This week we’ll continue talking about the economical part of the game. Last week we talked about the different items in the monthly budget, and now we’ll continue with explaining some of the core concepts of the economy. Please be aware that all images here are tooltips or parts of tooltips, and some are very much Work in Progress!


Loans and Bankruptcy
Let's start with Loans, which will work a fair bit differently than any other previous Paradox GSG. At first glance, it is kind of similar to previous games, where you can take a loan, you get money, and you pay interest on it for a set period of time. However, in Project Caesar, there are some new changes. Take a look at this WiP tooltip for taking a loan:

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Yeah, 10% interest is perfectly fair…

In this game, you are not borrowing money from an abstract national bank, but instead, your internal loans are taken from what the estates have made available. The estates invest money they have, not only in immediate gains for their own power, or other ways that benefit the country, or other [REDACTED], but they also invest in having money available for the country, where they will benefit from the interests.

If there is no money to borrow from the estates available and you have no ducats left, you will go bankrupt, which is a little bit more severe than in, let's say EU4...

There is also another way to get gold, you can send a diplomat to one of the banking countries, like Peruzzi and Bardi, if there is one that you know of within diplomatic range, to request a loan. Make sure you don’t forget to pay them on time, or default on the loans, or you may never be able to loan from them again.


Core Concepts
So let’s continue, by taking a look at the tooltip for a location, so we can quickly have a reference to some important aspects in the rest of this development diary.

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Enjoy the nice placeholder icons, sadly the forum does not allow for nested tooltips, like the game does…


Food
If you notice the line of food above, you see that Kalmar is not self-sufficient in food, and needs to rely on the rest of Östra Småland for food, unless they buy it from the local market.
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Even the small town of Kalmar needs food from nearby locations…

Primarily, there are a lot of burghers here that consume a lot of food. There are also a lot of modifiers that impact how much food the location produces as well.

If the granaries in Östra Småland are close to full, we would sell their surplus to the local market in Riga, but only get about 56% of the profit, as we only have 56% control in Kalmar. If the entire province lacks food, we would have to buy food at 100% of the current price in that market. The price for food is different in each market, and depends entirely on how much food is sold to that market.





Taxes
We mentioned taxes in last week's Tinto Talk, and specifically mentioned Tax Base there. The tax base of an estate is based on the total of all their Tax Base in all the locations they are present in.


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Quickly find the error in the text in this tooltip!

We are slowly increasing our control over Kalmar up to 58.2%, so the tax base will be slowly increasing, and if we would get it to the 100 maximum, it would be even bigger.

As you can see here, the nobility and the burghers have a fair bit of power here, and the peasants have basically none. Currently, we are able to tax more from the burghers each month, and could probably go above the 25% tax rate we have currently set on their estate.

To clarify, only the money that is in the “potential” row exists, and anything you don’t tax on that goes to the estates. So you get 0.05 ducats there (perhaps more, but Paradox rounding), and the remaining 0.37 goes to the estates.



Raw Materials
As you noticed in the tooltips above, we talk about Raw Materials and Resource Gathering Operations. Every location has one raw material possible that can be extracted, this includes things like lumber, stone, grain, amber, or copper. Of course, there are other ways to get access to the raw materials than merely owning and controlling a location.

Only peasants and slaves will work on gathering raw materials, and how many will work with it depends on how big of an infrastructure you have built up for that. Pops that are working with this will not be producing food, unless the goods are food related.

The maximum size of an infrastructure that can be built up depends on population, development, technologies, and societal values.


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We mentioned buildings in one tooltip earlier, and next week we will talk about how they work in Project Caesar.
 
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We had money not disapearing, and it didnt work.. it made it far better to just conquer stuff and not build up infrastructure.
I think there's an assumption here the taxes always come in the form of gold from the estates' pockets. Peasants often paid in the form of crops. This could be simulated by having the surplus divided between the estates. The monarch could redistribute them or sell them on the market, and the peasantry and nobility could store it (if there is such a mechanic) or sell it as well.

If the markets are designed well, this would mean most distant provinces would not be able to make any meaningful profits, yet high value trading locations such as Riga would thrive. Additionally, instead of pretending nobility in remote areas are not actually real members of the nobility, you could find a way to simulate the fact that there were far less nobility in rural areas on the fringes of the country. This could also work to force monarchical development there, as nobles generally don't invest where they don't have much of a stake.
 
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Buying food is basically limited to the provinces own market? So how are you going to model Dutch grain trade in Baltics?

I don't think i t is. I asked a bit further up if there is a way for bringing goods like timber from other markets to your own market in case your own market does not have any and he did not say "no", he said "stay tune to the next two weeks", so presumably there is some sort of trade route system to move goods between markets.
 
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Do docked ships give control? In European controlled Asian outposts or even in the West African ones, there were surely more sailors stopping by and a local administrator rather than an army stationed there. Unless stationing 100 well equipped guards is good enough.

Allowing religious freedom should help stop control reduction as well right? It was understood by the East India Company that Hindus and Muslims in India should not be proselytized as it could result in their expulsion from trading with the people living in the Indian subcontinent. This was at a time when religious tensions were high in England. Will that sort of duality be present in game?

The English 1698 charter explicitly allowed proselytization in India.
 
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:+: Spark’s Note 5: Noblesse Oblige :+:

Having peeked up the frock of the clergy estate last week and discovered tithing does not, in fact, help god with his cable bill, we can all agree with Erasmus that the senate proceeded the church by hundreds of years, and we can all agree with the church that Erasmus was a heretic. Moving on.

Taxing nobles & elites was less of an arm wrestling contest in a washing machine and more directly indicative of the progress towards nation building. Notably, this was not a strictly internal process as the diplomatic impact of establishing institutions and titles to lord over nobles led to interesting wars. And we like those.

The Burgundian dreamer Charles the Bold held his confederation together with a States General, a toothless legislative body tolerated by covetous French kings. However, Charles also founded his own Parliament copy-pasted from the court in Paris. This was intolerable to France as it would enable Charles to rule through royal edict (the horror!) interpreted & codified by a central governing body. The first concession forced on Charles’ successor Mary was its abolishment.

The expansion of the claims system in eu4 opened up the interesting option of revoking claims as concessions. Per the above example, EU5 could expand on this so some rival claims affect a monarch’s capacity to centralize, with the maintenance or revocation of those claims adding additional tension via war-by-another-means. The very act of upgrading one’s institutions and advancing nationhood could trigger a rival like France with a policy of ‘patiently waiting for you to die’ (-200 opinion) to froth at the mouth (-200 opinion with a timed cb).

Notably, an analogue for this exists in the 20th century as both governments in Taiwan and Beijing claimed legitimacy over historical China, a claim the ruling party of Taiwan could not drop as it would be an ipso facto declaration of independence and force a response by the mainland government. A tricky situation.. but CK4 should not extend that far.
 
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I have a few questions regarding the resources in locations. Will resources in various locations be static? For example, will the Swedish location used in this Tinto Talk always have stone at the start of the game? Is it possible that some locations may change resources due to events or other ingame factors? And is this true for uncolonized locations as well? Or will they be randomized upon colonizing them like how it worked in eu4?
 
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With the pop system of Project Caesar is it possible that as you get towards the rise of nationalism you would be able to unify culture groups under one nationalist culture(Chinese, German, etc). I think I would prefer this over the system of something like EU4 where if i want to unify a culture I have to convert the the entirety of a culture group to one sub-sect of the group like Jianghuai or Cantonese instead of Chinese.
 
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There is always a chance.
Fingers crossed! I'd love to see this later in the game's development. I often play different bookmarks in EU4 because I find the history immersive, even though many EU4 systems (innovativeness or estate privileges for example) go from "zero" even if I start in 1700. And if you play from 1444, you can be so powerful by the late game that events such as industrialisation feel trivial compared to the economic might you've amassed over previous centuries.

Given that there's a greater focus on the transition from feudal to centralised states in "Project Caesar", it might be appealing for players to pick a benchmark where they can start playing as an early modern state and experience the "feel" of playing a more centralised government, with a standing army and any historical flavour you may add for 1500s, 1600s and 1700s - especially given that they'd have to play from an earlier start date to reach these things.

Plus as a sucker for historical maps, the appeal of playing in very different time periods is super appealing. So if I wanted to play a Mughal campaign as a gunpowder empire while facing off the threat of European navies, or fight a Great Northern War as Sweden against much larger powers, I wouldn't have jump through a lot of roleplaying hoops in the previous centuries to have those experiences.
 
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I have question's about the "weather" while modifiers for that exists in paradox games, they never really reflect reality well, especially in EU4.

War's in winter, late medieval era should be super-costly or with huge attrition/both, also attrition being "capped" in EU4 was something i really didn't like, if you have a stack of 50k soldier's and send them to siege Moscow in winter, attrition should be much higher than 3/4%.

There should also be system that calculate amount of food harvested depending on Summer/Winter situation in certain year.
For example many historian's suggest Little Ice Age of XVI/XVII century to be one of the major reason's for mass rebellions, wars across Europe in those centuries.
I'm not sure if that was really super costly. For example exactly in that period of time, Teutonic Knights and Lithuania were doing military campaigns against each other mostly in winter, because they could not easily cross river Neman. And they were waiting for winter, so they can cross while it's frozen. People were used for cold more than you think. Of course, conquerors from south would not be prepared for winter, if they would come. So that depends who's fighting, I suppose.
 
I'm interested to see how the Estates will interact between themselves.
Like, will the Clergy and Nobles ally themselves and bicker?
Will both exploit the Peasants?
Will 'international' Estates interact?
 
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yes, you need them, else it will stall.

purchase priority is based on market access of the location of the construction.
If the good isn't present. Can you buy it from somewhere/someone? If I have 1000 gold and no stone and a church requires 100 gold and 100 stone. Could I build the church at a cost of (100 gold) + 100 * (market price of stone)? If you can import materials, is that a viable way to build things or is the cost so high that you almost always want a domestic source.
 
I mean... control look like "institutional organization, penetration and recognition". Basically is about receiving money from people that recognize the sovereignity of the state and that the state can reach with its material and immaterial infrastructure. What is out if "control" is probably the local non monetary economy of the less integrated countryside, and the lands full of foreign pops (not accepted culture/religion) that don't recognize the state and basically just live there. What I'm curious about is if there are option to force those pops to pay (probablyforcing integration at cost of unrest is one way, but some kind of tyranny or tax against the not recognized locals could be interesting) or to accept them giving some recognition/privilegia (generating an estate or integrating them in an existing one, maybe with disaffection from the old guard)
 
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If the good isn't present. Can you buy it from somewhere/someone? If I have 1000 gold and no stone and a church requires 100 gold and 100 stone. Could I build the church at a cost of (100 gold) + 100 * (market price of stone)? If you can import materials, is that a viable way to build things or is the cost so high that you almost always want a domestic source.

we will talk about trade in 2 weeks time
 
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Yes.

the cost for taking something in peace scales with their control
Does control deteriorate fast enough for warscore costs to change during a war? As in, suppose you want to conquer some coastal locations. Their current owner has a distant capital and are only maintaining decent control with a strong naval presence. Suppose you utterly rout that navy and that owner had no other means to exert control. Can you then wait to get a big discount on the warscore cost to take those lands in the same war?
 
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Peasants do not invest in a new plow centrally.. thats not simulated.

The Peasant Estate could fund the construction of a new market village.... Thats the level we talk about here.
Couldn't then the peasants in a low control area also decide to build a new market village? Financed from what is currently the rebellion pool?
I mean if they are unhappy they will raise an army, sure. But if they are perfectly content with the far away King or hopelessly outmatched why wouldn't they use the money to make something nice for themselves.
This should then be balanced by further reducing control, after all, what have the Romans ever done for us? So instead of revolting they invest to make more money and share less with the crown, meaning even more money for the "rebellion pool" meaning more incentive to keep them happy in the future.
 
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Is there any particular reasons why you choose the scale of the units for food or materials that you did? Is it really better to deal with decimals rather than showing them as a whole number? E.g. producing 788 food instead of 7.88.
 
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I foresee Norway's role as premier deliverer of timber due to our woods being so easily connected to the world through fjords and rivers, something that gave Norway a lot of wealth during this time, will be well modelled.
 
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