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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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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.
We already know that slave pops are in the game and will be present in nations that allow slavery. This was mentioned back in Tinto Talks #3. But because slaves have no political power, they will not have a corresponding estate. It wouldn't make any sense for them to.
 
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It strikes me…

Clearly we won’t have two tags RIG, and considering Johan’s words, “Riga”s’ coexistence is not expected, so…

Maybe these two Rigas are not defined by two different tags, but by two different locations, just like CK3?

I can’t figure out other reasons why there are two Rigas and Johan doesn’t expect them.
One is Riga (city) and second tag is Riga (archbishopric).
 
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We already know that slave pops are in the game and will be present in nations that allow slavery. This was mentioned back in Tinto Talks #3. But because slaves have no political power, they will not have a corresponding estate. It wouldn't make any sense for them to.
Great! I did not recall that they were. Though I agree slaves should not have power as estates, freed and escaped slaves certainly could and probably should be represented as such, if other influential groups get the same treatment.
 
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Great! I did not recall that they were. Though I agree slaves should not have power as estates, freed and escaped slaves certainly could and probably should be represented as such, if other influential groups get the same treatment.
Freed slaves would almost certainly promote to the peasant pop, which in turn falls under the banner of the Commoners estate. Ditto for escaped slaves.
 
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A few question about the city mechanics:

I am quite worried about the city mechanic in places like Flanders/Brabant with many significant cities like Bruges, Ypres, Ghant and more. Will those states recieve food buffs,will several smaller cities be marked as towns or will they start with buildings that improve the food production of the county?


Also, can a county lose city/ town status? It would be really cool to see major cities like Constantinople crumble into obscurity due to mismanagement and a lack of population/food.
 
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A few question about the city mechanics:

I am quite worried about the city mechanic in places like Flanders/Brabant with many significant cities like Bruges, Ypres, Ghant and more. Will those states recieve food buffs,will several smaller cities be marked as towns or will they start with buildings that improve the food production of the county?


Also, can a county lose city/ town status? It would be really cool to see major cities like Constantinople crumble into obscurity due to mismanagement and a lack of population/food.

If it's measured only by population, I'm willing to bet none of those would be cities at the start of the game.
 
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I dont want specifics bug I do wish to know, will there be a sizeable amount of content for Ireland and the various celtic kingdoms here?
I always feel as if Ireland is sidelined in favour of the English.
 
Johan, I love the settlement/city mechanic you guys are pulling from Imperator. As a more recent Imperator player however, I'm not familiar with much of the early criticisms of that game. Was the settlement system a major issue for the community and, if so, what changes will be made to it this time around based on what you've learned?
 
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But if a town or city can be depopulated or maybe also destroyed.. means players can work to invade another country and wipe out/destroy their population ?
I mean.. what if AI does the same ? :eek:
 
Will the game have Goods types? For Example Raw Goods, Manufactured Goods?
Raw Goods like Livestock, Grain, Wood, Iron and etc being made in Rural settlements, Manufactured Goods like Paper, Cloth, Dyes, Glass and etc produced in Towns and Cities, Cities giving more Goods produced and higher trade value than towns.
Maybe even allowing players to choose the Goods produced in a Town or City once the settlement is upgraded
 
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Will the Game add Port Cities for African Colonization? Because historically, Europeans never actually conquered much land in Africa until late 19th century and only had Port cities to syphon trade.
Also, will Trade Steering make a comeback? Because I hope it doesn’t, it makes no sense to lose most of my trade value to the Spanish simply because they control most of the Guinea Coast even tho I as Britain control South Africa and Channel trade zones.
 
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If it's measured only by population, I'm willing to bet none of those would be cities at the start of the game.
The power struggle between cities, dukes and kings/emperor is however a very important aspect of the history in that region around the 14th century, resulting in the Burgundian stuff from eu4.

So even neglecting that a few of them would soon be among the most populous European cities at the time, terminology matters for flavour.
 
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are we going to have a Kurdish formable in the game ?
since you can have many form of a nation
even in the Ottoman Empire time they had a map named Kurdistan which represant the Kurds land
 
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Since control over land may depend on proximity, and that proximity may be lowered for land connected to a river, is it safe to assume that blockading a river's estuary may decrease control of the upstream land, or at least bring some sort of devastation to it (simulating inland raids) ?
I do not know if I'm clear though
Pretty much the same interrogation about roads : if an army occupies one province in which a large road goes through, is it safe to assume that the provinces to which the road leads will have their control decreased ?
 
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My two cents.

1. The food mechanic can be fun to engage with, but it can also provide a whole lot of micromanagement to the game - the painful kind, not the fun one. In Imperator: Rome, there are many provinces (especially the desert ones) that simply can't generate enough food for themselves, forcing you to import them from other provinces, or even from other empires. But, since the import slots are limited, and the amount of food being imported with the use of one such slot is small enough that only 20 minutes later there's the alert that the province is starving once again. It's a nuisance. It's just not fun to constantly putting out fires like that, and I would hope that here either the entire mechanic would be different, or that it would be less fiddly and time-consuming to manage - especially if one plays a sprawling empire with potentially dozens such provinces.

2. I see that on one of the screens there's a levy size modifier. Eh, if it means that we're gonna have levies, like in CK/I:R, then it's really a bummer. I don't like the mechanic - like, at all. Again, it forces the player to deal with busywork of constantly raising and disbanding armies, then waste huge amounts of time to get them moved to wherever they need to be, rinse and repeat. While in CK games it's kind of less of a pain, since they are not inherently map-painters, but in I:R it's really bothersome - again, especially when I have a large empire that even with the road network it takes years for my armies to move to the area I want to expand into. I don't see the point, and the argument of 'realism' is something I don't agree with, as every mechanic should bring something fun to engage the player with, and levies doesn't offer anything of the sort. I much prefer to have my armies constantly present on the map, like in all the EU games up to this point, since I can just build them whenever I deem to have enough economy to support them, and then move them to whatever place I find would be best, either to defend from potential threat at one of my borders, or in preparation for the next expansion.
 
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This has nothing to do with the current Tinto talk but it's been something I've been wondering. All of it has to do with seafaring, ships, and naval strategies.

Currently, none of the games give a sense of the risk and hardships at sea. The Spanish armada failed mostly because of a storm, ships lost for unexplained reasons were extremely common, and even today fisherman is one of the deadliest professions.
  • Will storms be in the game? (not just attrition)
  • Will pop characteristics make a difference? (superstitions and fear of the open sea, which could work like taboos and obsessions in Vicky 3)
  • Will tech make a difference?
More on tech:
Historically, the types of ships made a key difference in the capabilities of a country. For instance, Venice prioritized galleys with lines of rowers which made them competitive in trade and combat in the Mediterranean but nearly impossible to navigate in the open ocean (and preventing any colonial presence in the Americas or Indies). Reversely, Portugal's caravels allowed them to sail in the open Ocean and colonize. Spain had to do both but relied a lot on allies to dominate in the Mediterranean (Knights, Italian city-states) up to the 1700s.

Will this be reflected in the game?
 
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How will colonies and colonization work? Will it be different? And will every mainline nation get unique colonies/colony names?

Hope that the nation creator also comes back.
 
Hi, I saw that navigable rivers are not going to be a thing because it doesn't make much sense for big ships which I agree to.

However I consider that big rivers like the Danube, the Nile etc had a very important role as barriers for armies and made the spots were you could cross the river strategially important (Example: Zaragoza in Spain had a lot economic and military importance because it controlled one of the few points were you could cross the Ebro river safely among other things).

So, my point is if you would consider adding more "weight" to those rivers with some kind of feature like straits or something in key points and maybe make them navigable but only for some quind of ships (like early tech ships that might be smaller).

Anyways the post looks amazing, feels like a very strong project. Hope my thoughts make you have some new ideas maybe.
 
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