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Tinto Talks #6 - April 3rd, 2024

Welcome to the sixth Tinto Talks, where we talk about the design and features of our not yet announced game, with the codename ‘Project Caesar’.

Hey, before jumping into todays topic, I would like to show something very fresh out of the oven, based on your feedback last week. This is why we are doing these Tinto Talks, to make Project Caesar your game as much as ours...

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Today we will delve into three concepts that are rather new to our games, but first, we’ll talk about locations a bit more.

Not every location on the map is the same, especially not in a game of such scope as Project Caesar. By default, every ownable land location is a rural settlement, but there are two “upgrades” to it that can be done. First, you can find a town in a location, which allows you to increase the population capacity of the location and allows for a completely different set of buildings than a rural settlement. Finally, you can grant city rights to a town, which allows for even further advantages. Now you may wonder, why don’t I make every location into cities? Besides the cost and the population requirement, there is also the drawback that each of them tend to reduce your food production, while also adding more nobles, clergy and lots of burghers to your country.

Stockholm, Dublin and Belgrade are examples of towns at the start of the game, while cities include places like Beijing, Alexandria and Paris.

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Here you can see the control that Sweden currently has.

Control
Every location that you own has a control value, which is primarily determined by the proximity it has to the capital, or another source of authority in your country. There are only a few things that can increase it above the proximity impact, but many things that can decrease it further.

This is probably the most important value you have, as it determines how much value you can get out of a location, as it directly impacts how much you can tax the population in that location, and the amount of levies they will contribute when called. A lack of control, reduces the crown power you gain from its population, while also reduces the potential manpower and sailors you can get, and weakens the market attraction of your own markets, making them likelier to belong to foreign markets if they have too low control.


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Proximity
So what is proximity? It is basically a distance to capital value, where traveling on the open sea is extremely costly. Proximity is costly over land, but along coastlines where you have a high maritime presence you can keep a high proximity much further. Tracing proximity along a major river reduces the proximity cost a fair bit, and if you build a road network that will further reduce the proximity costs.

There are buildings that you can build, like a Bailiff that will act as a smaller proximity source, but that has the slight drawback of adding more nobles to the location, and with a cost in food for them.

Maritime Presence
In every coastal location around your locations, or where you have special buildings, you have a maritime presence. This is slowly built up over time based on your ports and other buildings you have in adjacent locations. Placing a navy in the location helps improve it quicker, but blockades and pirates will decrease it quickly, making it absolutely vital to protect your coastlines in a war, or you’ll suffer the consequences for a long time.

As mentioned earlier, the maritime presence impacts the proximity calculations, but it also impacts the power of your merchants in the market the seazone is a part of.

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Stay tuned, next week we’ll be doing an overview of the economy system, which has quite a lot of new features, as well as features from older games.
 
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What about mission trees? Are we gonna get a lot at the start, or will they be very bare - bones, that is mostly default trees except countries like the ottomans, spain, austria and france?
 
Loving these dev diaries so far! I got a question about the sheer size and scope of the game. Will there be any systems about automating things like building buildings, developing your towns or cities (or its equivalents) and so on? I don't mean a simple auto-build function but something more diegetic. Maybe got a high-ranking advisor that puts your policies (i.e. develop all my cloth-producing provinces) in practice or something like that. I'm asking because imagine micro-managing being an enormous hassle for tags that grow past their home region, especially if colonizing is a thing, and the scope of the game seems to be rather macroscopic like EU4 or Victoria 3. It seems very out there for the player to inevitably micro-manage every egyptian village in their roman empire run.
 
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I just have 2 small ideas to make the UI clearer.

It would be nice to have an option/setting that rounds the percentages in Effective Control (or other things with many percentages) so it's easier to understand.

It would be cool to have a visual thingy in the estates screen to make influence clearer. I'm thinking that a certain percantage of the bar is darker or highlighted or something similar. I've made a paint mockup.

eu5_ui_idea.png
 
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As a Turk and a Horde enjoyer, will Hordes also build roads and bailiffs for control? Or will they have a completely different system for it considering they are nomadic? Might as well ask how will the populations work for nomadic nations? Will they be same as settled cultures or different? If it will be different, will there be differences when they conquer an already settled city?
 
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Excellent!
just a little question regarding the change of names of the estates, can we assume that for a republic, “The Crown” will be renamed “The Republic” or ”The State”?
 
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Let me start off by saying that I'm loving what I'm seeing but there is something that worries me:

My biggest problem with CK is how it goes completely off course after a couple years, and while I don't expect a faithful recreation of history I also don't want to see France being annexed 90% of the time, never seeing the formation of Prussia or a Polish-lithuanian commonwealth, no war of the roses etc. Will there be a way to make that happen so that there is some variation but not a completely alternate history? The way it was done in EU4 was good but the longer the game lasted the less accurate it became and I'm afraid that starting so early will lead to wonky results.
 
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with no bailiff or similar, you won't have control.

Will access rights through another country help with this? It would give some extra value to a mostly useless diplomatic interaction in EU4.
 
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The gameplay concept of 'Projet Ceaseri' looks great, but it doesn't look great.

I know it has already been stated that the UI is a placeholder, but I'm commenting to express my concern, which is also a concern shared by many in the community:

1) My only gripe is that the graphic UI is too bland; it resembles a mobile game. Please don't go for the modern UI route for this game. I love textured UIs like in EU4.

2) From what I've seen, the UI is too big. EU4's UI is the best because the map is always visible. Please don't create a menu-heavy experience. that is the biggest flaw of CK3

3) I also find the UI font ugly. It feels too soulless.

4) The icon for the is too modern seen by estate icon, cultur icon, law icon and otger; for 'Project Ceaser,' I don't mind if you used an old asset from a previous title for the icon.

Even though this sounds negative, I am genuinely excited.
 
Are roads a one-level building or are they multi-level? I am curious if they should be expanded to match the growth of population and provide x amount of proximity whether there is enough of them for a certain amount of pops.
 
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Since new estates are on the table, will slaves be their own ‘estate’? Most entities used slaves in some form or another in the game period, so they are a clear omission of the population chart.

Colonization will probably be a ways off from being discussed, but on a related note: Will the game have a way of portraying mulattos, mestizos and creoles?

This would make it more interesting to portray the independence of the Latin American colonies. Combined with a slave estate, the much overlooked Haitian Revolution could be simulated more realistically as well.

Besides slavery being an obviously important aspect to finally do justice in portraying in a game about the Early Modern Age. I wonder how project Caesar handles it.
 
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I have a question regarding Switzerland, whether it will be like in EU4, or will it have new starting countries like Berne, Valais or Zurich, like the treatment that was given to Geneva and the three leagues
 
There are buildings that you can build, like a Bailiff that will act as a smaller proximity source, but that has the slight drawback of adding more nobles to the location, and with a cost in food for them.
Will "Bailiff" be the universal term used by all cultures and tags or will there be regional variations? Also, wasn't Bailiff a title/office? How exactly does one "build" a title?
 
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Its not a dynamic name for Lübeck :p thats all I will say now
Ooh might this be one of the ‘tags that do not hold land’? Are separate corporate/financial entities included perhaps?

Seeing banks and trade companies as well as religious orders and mercenaries be their own entity with their own interests, much like the estates, would be amazing!
 
Is the relative estates power / crown power something which can evolve only with increasing control, or is it something which can also be granted or taken from, like in EU4 ?
I mean specifically the grant land / take land interactions.
Or give burghers rights to purchase nobility title (which would make burghers satisfaction equilibrium higher, and noble satisfaction lower, but at the same time slowly increase the numbers of "nobles" while reducing the number of burghers)
 
How does population change over time, is it a constant base increase, or is population growth affected by other things?
For example is population growing faster percentage wise in rural areas, and slower in cities,
are the player's policies affecting population besides of war, plagues and famine (can you increase pop growth) ?
Also, are migrations simulated trough events in the Old World, or can you make large populations move, and how much can war/foreign occupation affect population?
 
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