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Tinto Talks #9 - 24th of April 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, this is the 9th of its kind, where we talk about our very secret game using the codename Project Caesar. And today we continue with the 3rd of the 4 talks we have now about the economy systems of the game. So lets start..

Constructions
In the previous development diary, we mentioned constructions and how you needed lumber for expanding the mines. In this game, almost all constructions require different materials to progress, and if that material is not available in the local market, then that construction is stalled until the material is available. This includes things like road building, shipbuilding, recruiting regiments, building buildings, or expanding R.G.O’s.

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Not sure why you want another monastery?

For example, building a light ship in the Age of Renaissance requires Naval Supplies, Lumber, Weaponry, Copper, Tin, and Metalworks, while moving your capital requires Paper, Books, Stone, Lumber, Marble, and gold.


Buildings
Buildings are rather important in Project Caesar. There are hundreds of different types of buildings, some can only be built in rural locations, and some require a town or city. Some can only be built in ports, and some can only be built in other countries. Some you can only build when there is no owner of a location. Lots of buildings are unique to cultures, regions, religions, or even to specific tags.

Some buildings can only have 1 level, some have a fixed cap, and some have a cap that scales with the population or development, and so on.

Buildings can also be categorized into three different categories: buildings that can produce goods, buildings that only give effects, and buildings that can only be built by the estates. Those pure estates usually have a drawback to them as well, and it's not easy to remove them

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Definitely not something we are all that keen on having in here.. it does increase demands for some goods though..

So what about producing buildings then? This is where the truly fun parts of the economy start. Project Caesar has a large amount of different goods. We currently have about 70 different ones that have different needs, some are needed for the military, some are needed solely by pops, some are needed for buildings, and so on.

Producing Buildings in towns and cities go from guilds and workshops to manufactories and mills at the of the game. These include everything from Paper Makers Guilds to Foundries. A producing building outputs one or more types of goods.

Finally, we have buildings that are purely giving an effect. These include Granaries that increase how much food you can store, libraries that increase literacy, different types of forts, buildings that train manpower, port buildings to help with shipbuilding, and much more.

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Some claim you can build Stockades of wood, but we trust only stone!

Almost all buildings though, have a production method, which impacts how they work.

Production methods
All buildings have at least one production method slot with one production method, but many have different methods in each slot, and there are plenty of buildings with multiple production method slots.

What is a production method then?
A production method is a list of goods that are required for a building to function. There are two categories of production methods, those that produce something and those that do not.
As an example, a Castle does not produce any goods, but it still requires Stone, Metalworks, Weaponry, and Tar to function, and if it does not get those goods, then the Castle will not function properly. The effectiveness of a building is based on the lowest available percentage of goods present, and it will only purchase and use required materials in that percentage required. If the market cannot supply enough resources, then it will not work.

The output of the producing building is also scaled by the percentage mentioned above.

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There are a few options here, but only wood pulp would be profitable here, probably because of the great supply of lumber in this market..

And of course, you can automate the production method selection, which will adapt it on a monthly basis based on what resources are available and what would be profitable. The UI also allows for macro decisions regarding production methods

Other important aspects
Every building requires employed pops to function as well, and those that require “upper class” pops like burghers, clergy, and nobles, also increase the potential for them in the location, making pops slowly promoted. This can be slightly awkward as powerful nobles or clergy construct more buildings that make them more numerous and powerful.


Producing buildings that are not profitable will be closed, and pops will work in other buildings, however, you can always subsidize a building if you require the goods or other benefits it gives.

Speaking of profit. The profit of a building is added to the Tax Base of a location, split among the power of the population in the location.

You can always close and open a building, if you want to manipulate prices, or if you want your pops to work with other things, and you don’t want to destroy a building permanently.



We mentioned last week about different ways to get raw materials, and one way to get it, besides trade, is through a set of rural buildings. These include Lumber Mills that you can build in any wood or forest location to produce lumber, sheep farms, stone quarries, and many more.

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Yeah, this requires some input.. Might be worth it..


There are stockpiles of goods, but those are in the market. There are buildings you can build that increase the amount they can store, as if you do not have the goods required for a building, unit, or construction, those will not function.

Speaking of markets, that is something we will talk about more next week when we delve deep into the trade system.
 
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So if you need weaponry to recruit regiments, does that mean you will need horses to recruit cavalry?

I am very excited to see how the New World plays, especially in the Andes. Particularly for the economics... I love that region a ton.
 
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I don't think local prices will be in the game, but I presume the price of goods in a market will be influenced by the availability and demand of said good in the market, and a location's need satisfaction is in part reliant on how much access it has to the market its location belongs to.
That is fine, I just dreaded having to manage local prices on a map with way more locations/provinces than Victoria 3.
 
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'd not go with less than 32gb for anything these days anyway.
Hot snot the ram inflation has been harsh lately. But seriously, I hope Paradox is aware that today 32+ gigabytes RAM in a desktop/laptop is largely reserved for the serious enthusiast community, and casual computer users will be ram-limited out of buying. This will make Project Caesar dependent on the hardcore gamer market for success. I hope it works out for you.
 
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Too many mechanics from other games of yours packed into EU. If it really is the successor to EU4, I'll be out by now at the latest. Too bad
and so what ? the old games are 10 years old should we really just keep playing the same thing over and over ? isnt it wise to add to the game the best mechanics ? isnt this system good for globalisation and trade with cultures to make it feel authentic to history ? didnt the arabs go all the way to china and indonesia just to bring what they want since the 700s ?
you sound like the EU2 players when EU4 was announced
 
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Are you saying that as a dev or as a player? I min-maxed my build for PDX GSGs, but so far with 16GB of RAM the worst bottleneck I've had was with the graphics card, or lack thereof. Upgrading to a GTX 960 (this was in 2021 for reference) fixed that though.

Eitherway, what I'm asking is, all else equal, could I expect significant performance improvements from doubling my RAM at this point? Or is that for running Excel spreadsheets and two dozen browser tabs on another screen? I don't need a concrete answer for this game, but for the rest of your catalogue I'm genuinely curious.

(this is me as a player of games)

I upgraded from 8 to 32gb a year ago.. my "older" gaming pc (autumn 2020, about 1K€) at home is a AMD Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core Processor, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, that now has 32GB ram. So kind of similar I guess.

Just checked Media Markt, and discovered you get much better pc's for below 1K these days.

Now, I can't comment on the requirements we will have when the game is released.. but I have always had my principle of never spending over 1,000€ on a gaming pc, and I want them to last 4-5 years.
 
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Hot snot the ram inflation has been harsh lately. But seriously, I hope Paradox is aware that today 32+ gigabytes RAM in a desktop/laptop is largely reserved for the serious enthusiast community, and casual computer users will be ram-limited out of buying. This will make Project Caesar dependent on the hardcore gamer market for success. I hope it works out for you.
RAM is the cheapest upgrade you can make compared CPU/GPU. It's definitely not only for the "enthusiast". RAM is pretty much never the bottle neck, CPU/GPU will be the bottleneck, I think Johan was just shooting from the hip with his remark regarding his own standards.
 
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Will we still have % based sieges in eu5 or static like ck3? Static is often dull, but % if often frustrating.

Also, I believe you said the ledger will be more limited than in eu4 in a previous TT. Is this an oppurtunity to link access to ledger info with your spy network?
 
'd not go with less than 32gb for anything these days anyway.

Go all the way for 64GB. RAM is not that expensive and it is the easiest way to future proof. Sadly my laptop is a bit old by now, and although powerful enough to run most games comfortably (including Vicky 3) the limitations of 8GB RAM are starting to show. I should be replacing it soon. 7 years of mileage was good enough I suppose :)
 
Does the UI allow operating on many building for such purposes? For example, can you change all Paper producing buildings to start using some PM or does it have to be done one by one? Or can you change the PM of all buildings for some specific goal, i.e. to maximise the price of X good in Y market etc.?

Yes, you can operate on X amount of buildings at the same time. I showed PART of the filters the buildings UI has earlier. can show it here again.

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I haven't played imperator so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but will we be able to build multiple castles in a province, in different locations? And if so how would that affect the occupation of provinces with multiple castles and the buildings in the province?

need all castles then
 
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This excesive focus on economy is not a good sign.
that era was all about trade . the discoveries made was to seek trading opportunities . venise , the arabs , ottomans , all was about trade . it was rarely about pure conquest.
all wars were driven in a way by desire to have trade outposts and control over ressources. territorial wars had a lesser impact than lets say an ottoman Portuguese war over an outpost in india .
 
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Now, I can't comment on the requirements we will have when the game is released.. but I have always had my principle of never spending over 1,000€ on a gaming pc, and I want them to last 4-5 years.
Cities Skylines 2 doesn't approve it :D

That is it needs computer parts required in last couple years.
Vicky 3 also has steep requirements too.
 
How are you handling different architectural styles using different materials?
A lot of architectural differences stem from material and technological limitations that I assume will be somewhat present in the game as well. Let us take the Monastery you showed us as an example. An Incan or Meso-american Monastery would not use glass, since they didn't have the know-how to produce significant quantities of that material. instead they relied more on masonry and pottery for their buildings. Contrast that with a comparable buddist Monastry in China or Japan. They too would not use glass windows, but not because they didn't know how to produce it. Rather, it was due to other Materials being favoured for glass' various applications, leading to the stunting of the industry and further glassware development.
The way I see it, you could either ignore the differences, make seperate buildings for different regions, or make different production methodes.
 
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Is there any restriction on changing PMs, or can you slide from one to the other with no friction? That was something that always bugged me about vicky 3 compared to hoi4, that there was no scale up from one to the other