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Tinto Talks #8 - 17th of April 2024

Hello, and welcome to the eighth iteration of Tinto Talks where we talk about what we are doing in our very secret future game, with the code name Project Caesar.

Btw, on a completely unrelated note, Paradox Tinto has just announced our new expansion ‘Winds of Change’ for EU4. Go check out its cool contents and trailer!




This week we’ll continue talking about the economical part of the game. Last week we talked about the different items in the monthly budget, and now we’ll continue with explaining some of the core concepts of the economy. Please be aware that all images here are tooltips or parts of tooltips, and some are very much Work in Progress!


Loans and Bankruptcy
Let's start with Loans, which will work a fair bit differently than any other previous Paradox GSG. At first glance, it is kind of similar to previous games, where you can take a loan, you get money, and you pay interest on it for a set period of time. However, in Project Caesar, there are some new changes. Take a look at this WiP tooltip for taking a loan:

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Yeah, 10% interest is perfectly fair…

In this game, you are not borrowing money from an abstract national bank, but instead, your internal loans are taken from what the estates have made available. The estates invest money they have, not only in immediate gains for their own power, or other ways that benefit the country, or other [REDACTED], but they also invest in having money available for the country, where they will benefit from the interests.

If there is no money to borrow from the estates available and you have no ducats left, you will go bankrupt, which is a little bit more severe than in, let's say EU4...

There is also another way to get gold, you can send a diplomat to one of the banking countries, like Peruzzi and Bardi, if there is one that you know of within diplomatic range, to request a loan. Make sure you don’t forget to pay them on time, or default on the loans, or you may never be able to loan from them again.


Core Concepts
So let’s continue, by taking a look at the tooltip for a location, so we can quickly have a reference to some important aspects in the rest of this development diary.

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Enjoy the nice placeholder icons, sadly the forum does not allow for nested tooltips, like the game does…


Food
If you notice the line of food above, you see that Kalmar is not self-sufficient in food, and needs to rely on the rest of Östra Småland for food, unless they buy it from the local market.
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Even the small town of Kalmar needs food from nearby locations…

Primarily, there are a lot of burghers here that consume a lot of food. There are also a lot of modifiers that impact how much food the location produces as well.

If the granaries in Östra Småland are close to full, we would sell their surplus to the local market in Riga, but only get about 56% of the profit, as we only have 56% control in Kalmar. If the entire province lacks food, we would have to buy food at 100% of the current price in that market. The price for food is different in each market, and depends entirely on how much food is sold to that market.





Taxes
We mentioned taxes in last week's Tinto Talk, and specifically mentioned Tax Base there. The tax base of an estate is based on the total of all their Tax Base in all the locations they are present in.


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Quickly find the error in the text in this tooltip!

We are slowly increasing our control over Kalmar up to 58.2%, so the tax base will be slowly increasing, and if we would get it to the 100 maximum, it would be even bigger.

As you can see here, the nobility and the burghers have a fair bit of power here, and the peasants have basically none. Currently, we are able to tax more from the burghers each month, and could probably go above the 25% tax rate we have currently set on their estate.

To clarify, only the money that is in the “potential” row exists, and anything you don’t tax on that goes to the estates. So you get 0.05 ducats there (perhaps more, but Paradox rounding), and the remaining 0.37 goes to the estates.



Raw Materials
As you noticed in the tooltips above, we talk about Raw Materials and Resource Gathering Operations. Every location has one raw material possible that can be extracted, this includes things like lumber, stone, grain, amber, or copper. Of course, there are other ways to get access to the raw materials than merely owning and controlling a location.

Only peasants and slaves will work on gathering raw materials, and how many will work with it depends on how big of an infrastructure you have built up for that. Pops that are working with this will not be producing food, unless the goods are food related.

The maximum size of an infrastructure that can be built up depends on population, development, technologies, and societal values.


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We mentioned buildings in one tooltip earlier, and next week we will talk about how they work in Project Caesar.
 
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I think the problem with the system as it stands is it somewhat conflates the local law and order of a province and the ability of the central government to exercise its authority there. Say that Portugal through some disgusting circumstances manages to wrest Stora Kopparberget under its control and manages to stabilize the situation there over some decades. Is it really reasonable that this enormous hub of copper production doesn't see local development just because the Portuguese clergy, nobility, and state struggle to make a profit off of it themselves and it doesn't really see much investment from the Portuguese state and estates?

Now I don't know exactly how this game will work on a detailed level so this might not be how it plays out in practice, but if geographical distance to the capital becomes a death sentence for the development of a province without centralized estate and state investment (seemingly strongly disincentivized due to return on said investment) even if it has a well educated populace and great economic potential I think that breaks a bit with the pillar of immersion.

I understand the concerns with design and performance, though and I am not exactly sure how this is best fixed. In a system like that of MEIOU I think I would simply have the province reinvest in its own industries and maybe trade whatever that looks like. In a more quantized system with something more resembling building levels I would maybe make this money pool that almost exists for rebel funding actually exist for generated zones of somewhat autonomous provinces/locations associated with a certain culture and have it fund rebellion if they are unhappy and improvements if they are happy (not as a binary switch - this should shift gradually
If its under portuguese control, then yeah, its all more or less fine.

if its not, you create a subject of some sort.. feudalism works
 
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I think the penalty for not paying back loans should not be the complete inability to get new loans, but rather it should damage your reputation at lenders, which then would force you to pay higher interest rates on new loans. This should have a cooldown though, maybe a decade or so.
 
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The dogma forbade a lot of things which were handily ignored whenever deemed necessary.

Properly speaking, doctrine, not dogma.

Usury is still forbidden by most Christian churches - it is just the understanding of what constitutes usury has changed. Same reason that a Catholic heart surgeon doesn’t need to confess to committing murder each time he performs a heart transplant.
 
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You bring up a valid point about distant territorial control, similar to the situation in Goa. Though uncertain about the game's handling of these issues, I believe taxation in Goa was probably internalized and overseen by the governor. The Portuguese main goal was trade, and Goa became renowned for its black pepper exports to Lisbon, to the extent that the Portuguese effectively monopolized black pepper in Europe. I look forward to learning more about distances and control affects.
It can be modelled as a colonial subject

I wonder if some control building could counterbalance distance though, at list for single isolated locations

Hopefully we wouldn't need to have one subject for each trading post either to max local control
 
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can a location change the raw resource collected? like you start colonizing southeastern santa catarina state in brazil and initially produces wood because of the incredibly good woods from the atlantic forest but then change it to coal later on because it has coal there, or even change to fish for being coastal, or rice because of the plains?
and if the resource can be changed does it take time or is it instant?
 
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According to this metric, when the Portuguese conquered Goa all economic output in the region should have halted because the connection to Lisbon was bad.
Specifically with regards to this, remember that "maritime presence" also affects control. We will probably have to wait for the colonialism TTs to be sure.
 
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Personally, this dev diary was rather disappointing. The control <-> tax base system still seems really opaque and counterintuitive, not to mention the fact that low control means a reduced local economy. According to this metric, when the Portuguese conquered Goa all economic output in the region should have halted because the connection to Lisbon was bad.

The game simulates the benefits a country can get out of land. I am pretty sure that Portugal instituted local systems for control in Goa to benefit from it, but considering the distance, there were less efficiencies and many pockets lined before the government in Lisbon saw their share. Many of the overseas territories of european powers were basically feudal subjects for all practical purposes, with local administrators and governors.


My question here though is "what is the economic output, that the government and the estates is not taking, used for, in a gameplay aspect ?"
 
If its under portuguese control, then yeah, its all more or less fine.

if its not, you create a subject of some sort.. feudalism works
I can see that the system you propose does incentivise feudalism in a way that EU4 never really did. I.e., create subjects in low control areas or all that income vanishes into the ether!

But I think it incentivises feudalism for the wrong reasons. Feudalism shouldn’t effectively create wealth out of thin air. Zero central control shouldn’t mean economic activity / internal investment ceases.

I appreciate the design choice seems to have been made already, and fully respect it. Looking forward to PC!
 
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The game simulates the benefits a country can get out of land. I am pretty sure that Portugal instituted local systems for control in Goa to benefit from it, but considering the distance, there were less efficiencies and many pockets lined before the government in Lisbon saw their share. Many of the overseas territories of european powers were basically feudal subjects for all practical purposes, with local administrators and governors.


My question here though is "what is the economic output, that the government and the estates is not taking, used for, in a gameplay aspect ?"
A capacity to be looted by other armies? "Local wealth" is "local loot", and would encourage frontier territories to be raided by its neighbors due to the potential gains and the lack of the state's capacity to actually deal with those raids.
 
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The game simulates the benefits a country can get out of land. I am pretty sure that Portugal instituted local systems for control in Goa to benefit from it, but considering the distance, there were less efficiencies and many pockets lined before the government in Lisbon saw their share. Many of the overseas territories of european powers were basically feudal subjects for all practical purposes, with local administrators and governors.


My question here though is "what is the economic output, that the government and the estates is not taking, used for, in a gameplay aspect ?"
Can the ‘uncontrolled’ economic output be used by local pops for their consumption of goods?
 
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My question here though is "what is the economic output, that the government and the estates is not taking, used for, in a gameplay aspect ?"
If prosperity is still a thing, it could be used for that, or maybe as a pop growth modifier?

But honestly im not sure it would result in better gameplay, and disappearing seems fine to me
 
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Zero central control shouldn’t mean economic activity / internal investment ceases.

There is just no mechanics or systems for that money.
 
If prosperity is still a thing, it could be used for that, or maybe as a pop growth modifier?

But honestly im not sure it would result in better gameplay, and disappearing seems fine to me

We had money not disapearing, and it didnt work.. it made it far better to just conquer stuff and not build up infrastructure.

The core of the game -systems has been semi-playable since autumn of 2020, and we have tested so many things so far.
 
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We had money not disapearing, and it didnt work.. it made it far better to just conquer stuff and not build up infrastructure.

The core of the game -systems has been semi-playable since autumn of 2020, and we have tested so many things so far.
To be fair, isn't that kinda the case? Wasn't that the very system (conquering for the sake of getting money out of it) the sorta thing that propelled Timur's empire to such heights (and ultimately led to its swift demise when the wealth was all spent and everyone was too busy fighting each other to actually go and get more), and the Ottomans as well? Were the Ottomans not literally "conquer the Balkans and use the loot to fund conquests in every other direction, run out of space to conquer due to running up against a sufficient-enough 'wall" (i.e. Austria) that no more loot is to be gained in that direction, then spend years reconfiguring the economy to account for the fact that these conquest gains were no longer a thing"?

Conquering very much was lucrative in this time, but once you run out of stuff to conquer... well, things aren't gonna go too well for you with a whole lot of stuff you're having to pay for and no actual income generation to maintain any of it.
 
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I'm gonna be needing that all that industrial-trade gold to finance by bawler Renaissance/Baroque/Rococo court.
Absolutism is undoable without the aesthetics
 
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