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Tinto Talks #15 - June 5th 2024

Welcome to the 15th Tinto Talks, where we ask for feedback on our extremely crazily top secret game which has the codename Project Caesar.

One thing that many have asked for has been a more in-depth dynastical gameplay, so here it is.

Characters
Before we delve into the dynamics of dynastic gameplay, we must first talk about their building blocks, the characters.

european (1).jpg


Here is a European King with an early 18th century background.

While not copying the Crusader Kings mechanics, a Character in Project Caesar is a bit more alive than in let's say EU4. A character is born, lives, and eventually dies.

Every character has Administrative, Diplomatic and Military Attributes ranging from 0-100. Of course, these attributes will not add any sort of mana, but they will impact how well the character will perform certain roles. One example is that the diplomatic ability of an admiral impacts the morale of the navy he leads.

Newborn characters start with 0, but that grows until they are adults depending on what childhood trait they have. You can also assign your rulers’ children and grandchildren a specific education during their childhood

gifted.png

This is a trait that when on the heir of the player it increases the chance of hunting accidents by 200%.

Characters ruling a country will gain up to 3 traits, depending on how long they have ruled.
They are gained while ruling a country. Characters that are generals or admirals will also get traits after combat. There are also unique traits for characters that are REDACTED or OTHER_SECRET_THING.

Characters also have a culture they come from, a religion they follow, they keep track of where they were born, and where they currently are living. They belong to an estate, which for most characters tends to be the nobles estate.

Many characters will have a father and/or a mother as well. For some historical characters at the start of the game that will not necessarily be true.

The number of spouse(s) a character can have depends on religions and laws, but the number of children they get depends more on the fertility of the parents.

So what can you do with characters? Well, this is not Crusader Kings, so the characters themselves are not as important, and there are no character specific events like in Imperator either. In this game, characters are tools to be used for the greater good. If that means marrying off your daughter to secure an alliance with France, then that's what you have to do. You can arrange marriages in your country, send less useful characters into convents, ennoble great people, and much more.
ashanti (1).jpg


This is an African ruler, in his throne room, which while beautiful, is just a background image…


Speaking of marriages, royal marriages in Project Caesar are not just sending a diplomat, here it is far more limited, as you have to actually marry real characters, and often this is a vital action. If you can’t arrange a royal marriage with a country of enough prestige, that has a young consort, you may be forced to marry a local noble from your country, or worse, even a lowborn.

A Royal Marriage between two rulers will immediately form a union between those two countries. Every country has its own inheritance laws, which if they differ, may cause a Union to break, as the rulers would be different. This is probably not the audience where I need to explain the difference between Salic Law and Semi-Salic Law right?


bjälbo.png

And who was the founder of this dynasty?

Dynasties are important, as they impact diplomacy in direct and indirect ways. As some inheritance laws prefer their own dynasty, and having the same dynasty can improve opinions between countries.


As in almost all previous GSG, the game will keep track of who has ruled that country before, just so you can go back and admire them. We have tried to get in as much history as possible here, even if my heathen content designers refuse to have Odin as the original King of Sweden!

ruler_history.png

Of course regnal numbering and actual names depend on many different things..


Stay tuned, next week we’ll be back and we will then talk about how the cabinet will work.
 

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How does this work for republics? Does the country have an existing set of character milling about that can be electoral candidates, or is a new character with their own dynasty generated whenever an election replaces the ruler? I see the Teutonic Order has a dynasty, though I can't fully make out the letters.

Why is Denmark without a dynasty? Are they in rebellion like Scotland is?

The King of Denmark had pawned away basically his entire country at this point, and it was owned by outsiders.
 
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I’m loving the new dynastic stuff and I’ve always wanted proper royal marriages compared to Eu4 where it’s created out of thin air to boost relations. But from the sources whether it’s the book ‘a brief illustrated history of the Romanians’ or everyone’s favourite, Wikipedia. Principality of Moldavia was established until 1346 so shouldn’t Moldavia be disunited with separate entities in 1337 before the Hungarians unite it as a defensive barrier against the Hordes?
 
Please consider allowing italian patrician republics such as Florence to have royal marriages, or at least allow the AI to marry noble characters from republics/theocracies. Dynasties such as the Medici, Rovere and Orsini were very relevant and their dynastic alliances were very relevant, even though most of them had most of their power as noble families under republics or the Papacy.

Catherine de Medici didn't marry Henry II of France because she was a daughter to the duke of Urbino, but rather because she was a niece to the Pope (and, in fact, the bethrotal consolidated an alliance between France and the Papal States).

If Estates are represented by characters as well, this could be 'fixed' by allowing marriages between Nobility estate characters of different realms (this way, these italian families could continue to be influential even when they're not in power). Still, the traditional type of royal marriage for alliances should absolutely exist for theocracies and republics, given Catherine de Medici's example and many others.

Well, she was also Countess of Auvergne in her own right (having inherited it from her aunt), and thus was one of the most important nobles of France as well...
 
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I don't know if the "di Aragó" dynastic name is just you testing something but in case it isn't I must tell you it should be "D'Aragó" and not "di Aragó". Hope it helps as feedback :):)

It should be "De Barcelona" anyway.
 
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Some of the dinastic choices seem a bit inconsistent, in Castille you have positioned the d'Ivrée dinasty even though no king of Castille went with such surname, they instead went with "de Borgoña". Now, the "de Borgoña" line was a caddet branch of the de Ivrea house, that's true but the same is true for the "de Valois" dinasty in France (which was a cadet branch of the Capet dinasty) and they are represented by the dinastic name they went by.
Similarly I take issue with the aragonese dinastic name being "d'Aragó" instead of "de Barcelona" the kings of Aragón were of the same dinasty that the counts of Barcelona had been, so I see no good reason to change the name.

The problem is that the Kings of Portugal were descended from the Dukes of Burgundy while the Kings of Castile were descended from the Free Counts of Burgundy, which were two completely different states and dynasties (the former Capetian in origin, the other Italian and actually partially Carolingian). They need to be differentiated from each other in some manner, as anyone not knowledgeable in this rather obscure bit of medieval genealogy who is looking at the game will very likely think that any "of Burgundy" dynasty will be the same, when, due to having two Burgundies at the time of the start of the game, they aren't. It's unfortunately a long-standing, confusing mess (even chroniclers of the time thought that the two Burgundian princes who arrived in the area at the same time were related, when they weren't), and this is probably the best way to differentiate the two, given that the Dukes of Burgundy would have the senior title. Or, maybe have them Capet-Burgundy and Ivrea-Burgundy?
 
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I'm getting increasingly worried that the game will be wide as an ocean, but deeps as a puddle.

That said, I hope you will keep the "mandatory" character management to a minimum. If I want to play a medieval matchmaking and tutoring sim I'll just play ck2, but most of the time I'm not interested in that. The character management in project Caesar will therefore likely either be largely ignored, or the game itself will be ignored.
I was thinking in the same direction. Obviously they’re trying to adapt some mechanics from I:R, but it would be nice if they limited it to the stuff that worked and was actually used. The character management was not part of it.

And it doesn’t fit to EU anyway because EU not only covers a longer time period but also used to be on a more abstract level, modelling overall societal power mechanics. And in this context, rulership often even leaves little place for anything other than consequential political realism and not Sim-like character traits or what the king had for breakfast.

Creating another medieval Sims will be very, very wrong.
 
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Why does Novgorod has a Rurikovich dynasty? They invite to rule, yet it is not dynastic. It has a veche over all, after all.
Because a Rurikovich was the invited ruler there in 1337. Just because they have one at game start doesn't mean that they will continue after the current ruler dies. Although Novgorod never chose a non-Rurikovich anyway.
 
Im sorry I got to speak about these 3d models. I dont mean disrespect to the artist but they seem weird. I think it would be better to change them before lunch.
 
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A couple more questions:

1.Why isn't the Bruce dynasty showing up in Scotland?

2. Why are all of the previous English kings not wearing crowns? Will only the current monarch wear a crown? It's not a big deal if so, just curious.
 
Will capturing military leaders or nobles, ie. capturing a mercenary captain and recruiting them, capturing an enemy commander and executing him to help win a war, sieging a capital and capturing royal family to gain war score, etc. be a thing ? Would this impact PUs ? Can you recapture character ?
 
Will there be characters beyond the ruling family? Meaning, will there be characters which belongs to the estates who you have to cooperate with or keep in check, like rebelious nobles or clergy?
Or what about historical characters like Leonardo Da Vinci or Cristopher Columbus?
 
I am very worried with the recent trend of Vic and CK3 not having ingame chat for multiplayer, will "Project Ceasar" have ingame chat and if no, then why not?
There was a Vic 3 Q&A back around release where they said the reason newer PDS games don't have chat is accessibility and moderation requirements changed (both from laws and from new platform requirements) and now it's considered an expensive feature to add with all the supporting subsystems that would require.
 
Being a modder makes me pre disposed to dislike 3d assets for characters unfortunately. I am sure that in time these models will look better and I may end up enjoying them in the end, however I dearly hope that it will be feasible to replace them with 2d art via modding. I am somewhat afraid that such a thing will not be possible however, and I would be very sad to have to remove all the character portraits for my future mod.
I am keeping an open mind and I am hopeful that in the end PDX will have a solution for folks who do not have the means to acquire their own 3D artists for our projects. I know that PDX Tinto is just as passionate as all of us are about this game, so with any luck the backlash to these portraits won't harm moral too much. We all just want the best and most customizable game we can get, after all! :>
 
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Would they have known about that specific situation if it wasn't for people such as myself pointing this stuff out early on in the Tinto Talks?

I play that region a lot so this specific thing is personal to me and it's why I will continue to point it out until it gets addressed.
From Romanians being included in the South Slavic culture group to the awful borders of Crusader Kings 2 in the Carpathian region after release, these types of small details are easily overlooked by the dev teams and once the game is released it's harder to bring attention to these types of errors.
It's especially harder when it's a region such as Carpathia which doesn't have a large number of players in it compared to Western Europe, especially not the 2 Romanian principalities.

This is why I'm here in this forum posting about these kinds of things in the hopes that when the Carpathian region is discussed hopefully enough people like me already pointed out a lot of these inaccuracies and some of the devs have the complaints stored in the back of their minds.
If we remain silent, we will get once again a parody of balkans :(
 
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Personally, I think 2.5D portraits (2D portraits with animations, i.e like. Stellaris) are better than 3D portraits. They can be made to look more natural and beautiful (provided there is enough variety), are much more moddable for normal folks, and consume much less CPU resources.

Let's hope this follows the CK3 style of portraits (those actually look good, and mods make them beyond amazing)...and not the horrendous Victoria 3 style of portraits (with its bad below-the-chin angles, inbred potato faces, utterly limited clothing that never changes across time, bad cartoonish poses etc.) because V3 portraits only look good when you have pre-made historical characters. And also not the Imperator style of portraits (look decent but less variety in clothes and armour, complete lack of any headgear and crowns and helmets that were never implemented despite multiple requests, resulting in every character looking same, and ultimately ending up looking poor due to abandonment).

Very excited about the simplified dynasty and family tree feature. Always wanted that in an EU game.

I sincerely hope they port this to Victoria 3 too, so that we can have three quasi-hemophiliac first-cousins with big mustaches, all ruling their own imperial superpowers, fighting each other in one of the most brutal wars in human history.
 
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