• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

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...

1712136748556.png




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.

EaMX4E1GNzy0P9fHqbFWuoyX3mTUo0i8He3V3QHENQ5s7GCgU534Pg30YtA5_9AeZZn1wTdCFUc1n5Pl88qbfm1YOW3BsFDQQkRjvlDWr2ydETNKCk9_3zNeRVQ8YQuznfJXxTdsIgZLE8GBuecztX0

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.


1712141069161.png


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.

LkfBoN7Vx3MIHx2sSqcN7jYlJFbRYR6EzczGu3xlsixWZ-jSIxbGI_cC2i64-13G3SrtT0wVZ8XeXZDI8pXnpPlUBw2ZGPmYVqwoVfXEsu1kkQf3TAia9shMDkEf6oE83ihwG2VtA_CCydlJeXuaULM


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.
 
  • 385Love
  • 210Like
  • 21
  • 9
  • 3
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
I've noticed there being a manpower pool. I know the game plans to model levies at the beginning and slowly transition into standing armies. So I'm assuming at the start, you directly convert peasents into manpower.

I wanted to ask, when that transition occurs, will there be a 'soldier' and/or 'officer' pop type? To represent professional military workers. I think having such a pop type similar to what was done in vic2 would be interesting. Especially if we could encourage or discourage soldier pop promotion, by changing military wages and other factors.
 
Can we have an occupation to work like in Imperator, if the province capital and all forts in a province are occupied, the rest get occupied automatically?
 
  • 1Love
Reactions:
Sounds like a more complex form of EU4's autonomy system, which seems cool. I wonder if control dropping to 0% in some places (particularly overseas provinces, or faraway land provinces with other nation's cores) will declare independence.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Absolutely love the idea of a control and proximity based mechanic, I think it's a nice way to represent administrative control and the need for vassals to indirectly manage land.

Just wanted to ask if there will be the option to build up your settlements and depend on foreign nations for food/grain imports? Think it would an interesting mechanic when trying to build tall.
 
One is Riga (city) and second tag is Riga (archbishopric).
I posted with knowing that.

What I said is the possibility of the dynamic tag based on locations.
 
This game is not a "map painter", though. Nothing in the dev diaries point to blobbing and warfare as the main point of the game. This very dev diary tells about a feature that would make the player think twice before grabbing another bit of territory.
CK comparison is pretty spot on: using levies is one of many ways to interact with your vassal characters, which is the point of the game, and in Project Ceasar using levies is one of many ways to interact with your Estates, which is the point of the game, from what I understand.
Obviously, I'm kind of that this as of yet unannounced game is, in fact, EU5. It may not be, of course, but if it is, then I would expect it to continue the general direction of its predecessors, with all of them being map painters with various degrees of clunkiness. If it seeks to stray too far from the core aspects of the series, then it should be another franchise entirely.

Pretty much everything in previous EU games, every system and mechanic, revolved around expanding one's empire by claiming new lands, thus expanding the economy in the process, in order to fuel further expansion, rinse and repeat. By having levies, however, that - and here's another assumption - you would need to raise and disband time and time again, possibly because of the strain they would put on the economy, warfare would indeed be made harder, but I question the fun factor in such a mechanic. Apart from the micromanagement aspect of such a system, it would indeed make expansion slower, but I'm not sure that's the right way to do it.

If, as you say, the new game's systems would actually make it harder to expand, then the game would need to have other systems and mechanics in place for the player to engage with instead of fighting wars. CK games revolve around interacting with other people living in the world around your own character. Victoria is about interacting with and shaping societies. Even Stellaris, though it is, in essence, a map painter as well, has colonies to develop, species to engineer, galactic parliament to engage with, discoveries to make. In EU games, what is there to do, if you're not at war? You can turtle up in your small mountain country, developing your provinces and engaging in diplomacy, but that tends to get old rather quickly, since none of these systems are fleshed out well enough to provide any meaningful depth. I fear that in the case of this game here, it may still be the same, but now with more bothersome war mechanics in place.
 
  • 8
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
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:
Well, I am looking forward for that, it will be much more realistic game and a game with much more strategizing. And not idiotic like in EU4 where you beat Ottomans get 98% warscore, get their manpower to 0, peace out, take 5 freaking provinces AND THEN - after 2 years Ottomans are like new, ready and fresh for another war with 200K manpower AGAIN!
 
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
It would however provide at least some context for anyone not bothering to click the links, unlike linking the post like you did. Linking the post just shows the start of the dev diary/OP itself in your post which seems kind of pointless in this case. Unless people actually click the link they will likely think your question is just a general comment to the dev diary, and not a follow up to a previous comment by Johan 15 or so pages ago. Using the quote button would also provides a hyperlink to the post you are quoting, and it generates a notification to the poster (which they may or may not read) unless they have turned them off, so it still has better functionality than just posting the direct link to the relevant post.
Aye, in retrospect the better solution would have been to type out the context. Linking wasn't making the context any better than the one-word quotes.

(in response to: "I hope lower taxation doesn't just mean money disappearing into the void, but rather that the local population gets to keep it for its own use.")

yes.
Can the local pops (or estate they belong to) use that money to undermine the government if they don't like it?
 
Obviously, I'm kind of that this as of yet unannounced game is, in fact, EU5. It may not be, of course, but if it is, then I would expect it to continue the general direction of its predecessors, with all of them being map painters with various degrees of clunkiness. If it seeks to stray too far from the core aspects of the series, then it should be another franchise entirely.

Pretty much everything in previous EU games, every system and mechanic, revolved around expanding one's empire by claiming new lands, thus expanding the economy in the process, in order to fuel further expansion, rinse and repeat. By having levies, however, that - and here's another assumption - you would need to raise and disband time and time again, possibly because of the strain they would put on the economy, warfare would indeed be made harder, but I question the fun factor in such a mechanic. Apart from the micromanagement aspect of such a system, it would indeed make expansion slower, but I'm not sure that's the right way to do it.

If, as you say, the new game's systems would actually make it harder to expand, then the game would need to have other systems and mechanics in place for the player to engage with instead of fighting wars. CK games revolve around interacting with other people living in the world around your own character. Victoria is about interacting with and shaping societies. Even Stellaris, though it is, in essence, a map painter as well, has colonies to develop, species to engineer, galactic parliament to engage with, discoveries to make. In EU games, what is there to do, if you're not at war? You can turtle up in your small mountain country, developing your provinces and engaging in diplomacy, but that tends to get old rather quickly, since none of these systems are fleshed out well enough to provide any meaningful depth. I fear that in the case of this game here, it may still be the same, but now with more bothersome war mechanics in place.
Just to be clear: have you read the Dev Diaries and Johan's responses to the questions people were asking (you can click on "show only dev responses" to easily check all dev responses under the diary or in any forum thread)? Johan has been pretty clear about the design direction of Project Ceasar, and it's not going to be the same as in the previous EU games. Which might backfire, since as you correctly point out people would expect the next game of the franchise to be more of the same and might be disappointed by the change in direction, but that's how it is. The game will have the main gameplay loop around interacting with your estates, slowly wrestling control from them in favor of the centralized state, and shaping your society (see Societal Values in one of the dev diaries) through various means (passing laws balancing your long-term interests and estates demands, developing economy together with your pops etc.). Wars and diplomacy would be important too (to ensure your survival, increase your wealth and prestige), but conquest won't be the ultimate goal of the game with everything else existing to support it or make it more challenging, as it was in the previous games of the EU franchise. Instead it will be one of the tools you use. You will be able to map paint too, if you wish, just like you can in Victoria or CK, but it won't be the playstyle the game is designed around.
 
  • 5
Reactions:
About mission trees.

A way of making them dynamic would be to give each new ruler an "ambition" based on the current situation of a nation and/or some personality traits. Then the ruler that manages to fulfil the ambitions (or mission tree) could get a cool title and the dynasty could get some kind of bonus. It would add more importance to this aspect of the game which was completely unimpressive in EU4.
 
  • 4Like
  • 1
Reactions:
how does one upgrade a town to a city specifically?

is it like 1 button click and now it has city status or are there several "rights", "freedoms" , "power" that can be granted to a city that would result in a city status being gained?

will there also be events of towns/cities trying to break free or amass more "freedoms" from their overlord?
 
Have you considered delaying the game's release due to how much a complex game it would be? So there would be not such a situation as it was relaese of Vic3 or Imperator Rome.
 
What happens to the resources of an area that dont get utilized by your control? Do they get utilized by the local authorities? Are there systems that make local authorities specific to an area more loyal or disloyal that arent just affected by the estate system? It would be great to have to manage the loyalty of areas that each have their own needs based on their specific conditions, like a certain disloyal noble in charge, or a disloyal demographic with the local authority being aligned with the will of the people if they are native too etc.