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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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Talking about RGO. Will grain producing provinces have years when they overproduce and other years where there are failed harvests? As sudden food shortages was the primary factor that lead to the french revolution.
 
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I think that what is "implied" by "Building exclusive to a certain nation" we are surely talking about Mosques for Islam or Churches for the Chatolics, but I wanted to know:

1 - "will there be monuments / large projects like in EU4? and if this is the case, I imagine that the maintenance of this and the consumption of goods for this will be enormous and also therefore not simply 3 or 4 goods consumed as seen above but maybe 6/7/8 ?"

2- "Will there be a system of "population consumption" like in Victoria 3? for example the port needs sailors to function properly, and if there are not enough sailors the port does not function well or not optimally ?"

Love to the Team, from France <3
 
i like the fact that govt, mil, colonial, etc buildings require inputs and generate outputs. i'm also down for a more industrialized economy as well and can see how it will make "playing tall" more engaging. but will the new economic model be able to represent the cottage industry that prevailed throughout the world for much of this time period? is that a goal of the nation, to move away from a decentralized cottage industry into a more centralized industrial economy?

I think cottage industry is too small to be represented. I think the game represents the elements of the cottage industry that most stand out. In a province with cottage industry if the main good is wool then that will be the RGO for the location. The fact that it requires inputs doesnt mean its industrial. Same with towns and their workshops, its still within that cottage industry, not really industrial. But represented by X good
 
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Hi Johan. Last question I promise. Does this mean that we can manufacture as many goods as we want in one province? For instance in Paris at game start, if it has enough pops, can i centralise there all production of things like weapons, glass, beer, clothed etc? Or is there a limit per location of how many trade goods you can manufacture?
 
Are the population numbers intended to be realistic? Of course, 14th century censuses are probably somewhat unreliable, so the starting numbers are abit of guesswork, but I hope that the intention is not several milion people living in london when coal is discovered.
 
Shouldnt it be geographical? If the Netherlands conquer Portugal, surely they shouldnt be able to build those buildings there right?
More like a check on being hemmed in by big empires that prevent expansion over land while having a land shortage. Germany does not seem to have been very interested in reclaiming the westcoast of holstein yet. And yet the ability cannot be in doubt. Spain having any plans on the atlantic sandbank outside gibraltar to make new land? nah there is enough impoverished low on irrigration inland already.
 
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Just curious if there will be embassy or that sort of a diplomatic building
My money is in trade posts that allows you to trade resource in areas with no owned locations. It can also extend to supply stations to extend your navy reach for things like colonization (or just to allow ship repairs if you have long routes). You may not need to conquer province if you can get a diplomatic agreement to let you build a specific item in a port location that gives you that effect.

Another idea (unlikely in the development but I'd do if I were Johan) I also would add military options in vassal / allied countries. Like having a fort/garrison in an allied country facing a foreign threat (like the Barrier Treaty put Dutch soldiers in the Habsburg Netherlands against the french). So if I'm England and have a certain high diplo opinion from Portugal I could build and man a Torres Vedras fort system to support them against common enemies.
 
Are buildings as flexible in their effects as in Vic3? For example is it still possible to e.g mod in a Creepy Fishing Village building that takes naval supplies as input and as output causes the global Cthulhu_Rising timer to tick up?
 
All the talk about estate buildings has me a little worried. If estates can build buildings that increase their power/influence (and money), are there balances in place to prevent a powerful enough estate from sparking a positive feedback loop where their influence snowballs out of control as they build more buildings and get more money to build more buildings?

Also the more I read these forum posts the more I feel like we'll be playing the role of the monarch, almost against or parallel to the estates, rather than the country as an entity. I don't necessarily dislike this, but does crown vs estate control directly correlate with our ability to influence the game as a player, i.e. does high estate power take more decisions out of the hands of the player when it comes to buildings, economy etc.? If so how does this work if parliament becomes the highest authority in the country such as England after the civil war? Would we just sit back and let the AI estates run our country for us? Are there even mechanics like that for powerful factions to seize control of the country, and in that case would it almost be like we were playing as them after that?

Essentially as an example, can I become a peasants republic or similar by deliberately letting the peasants get too powerful? And if that's the case it would feel weird for me to still have to wrestle with the commoners estate when it came to economic control and buildings etc.
 
But albondigas instead in tomato and black pepper sauce! Adding some 12 month old goat 3 or 4 star cheese and potatoes as 3 tapas.. and yogurt dips.
Maybe with a chilean caraff wine.. or even sangria at a tenth of systembolaget prices.

no me gusta albondigas.
 
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Have you tried running a big empire? Like Ottomans and Russia where you will need to automate all of your PMs. Some people are worried that PDX automation is always bad and will screw your economy. Can you give us some light based on your experience since we cant see the game play yet?

Ottomans are not a big empire at the start.

and to be entirely honest, I get about 3-4hours of playtime each week, so I've not even got a country big enough to care, since i coded the feature a few weeks ago.
 
Unrelated question about economics, is there gonna be something like westernization which existed in early versions of EU4?
Also, about unit upgrading, how will weaponry consumption work? Like random man with stick consumes 0.02 but musketman consumes 0.1 or is there gonna be different goods for them?
 
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NED doesn't exist at the start... its a culture check
But why does someone need to be Dutch to make polders?

Historically China already had them at the same time or before the Dutch anyway.

But aside from that, shouldn't it be based on geography and technology? I really don't see how being Dutch (or Chinese) grants an inherent ability to make floodplains. This is IMO precisely why tag magic and stuff should be avoided.
 
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