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Tinto Talks #16 - 12th of June 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, you know, the happy Wednesday, where we talk about the top secret and very much unannounced game we refer to as Project Caesar. Today we’ll talk about another rather new, and more or less, unique system.

The Cabinet is one of the core functionalities in the game, covering areas which in previous games have been handled by envoys or mana, or may not have scaled nicely. The Cabinet in Project Caesar is a core part of many aspects of the game.


Last week we talked about characters, and we inferred roles like generals, admirals, rulers and regents. We also mentioned two roles we were not ready to talk about as well. Being in a cabinet, while being a good use of a character is NOT one of those roles, so you still have two other things to look forward to regarding characters.

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Can you trust Sir Robert???

The size of your cabinet varies depending on several factors, the most important though, is how advanced your country is. At the start of the game, most countries will have a cabinet size of two, while every age will add at least one. Some government reforms or laws may also grant a bigger cabinet size, for some other drawbacks.

Who you pick for your cabinet matters as well, as each cabinet member from an estate gives +10% power to that estate. And it may not always be ideal to have a cabinet member of the wrong religion or bad culture, no matter how great they are. One example, includes the fact that the Pope might be upset if you employ an heretic as a Catholic ruler.

There are currently 45 different actions that can be assigned to a cabinet position, and more are added as the game develops. Some of these are always available, some require more advances, and some are unique that only a few have access to. Each action belongs to one of three categories, administrative, diplomatic or military, which determines which attribute is used for it.

Some actions impact the entire country, and some impact a province.

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Increasing control in a single province may be good, but it's but a single province…



How efficient is a cabinet action then? The relevant attribute from the ruler and the cabinet member has a big impact, but your societal values, laws, reforms and even some estate privileges can affect it. Not to mention your crown power.


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If you want people to leave Stockholm, winter is not enough.

Speaking of migration, next week we will talk more in detail about how the pops function when it comes to migration, growth, how they change, and what they need.
 
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Hi Johan. Thanks for this wonderful dev diary!

My take away was that every country will have a number of people as part of their cabinet and these people can perform certain actions (administrative or diplomatic) on behalf of the country. Is that correct? If so, my question is, did the team consider not having a fixed limit on the size of this cabinet and instead have it be based on how many people the country can afford? Having an arbitrary limit here sorta feels like mana (using a more general interpretation of that word). Basically, my reasoning is that a unified China should be able to do as many total things if not more (like say improve control in location X) than a fragmented China since the number of things a state can do at a time is bottlenecked by how much money the state has (barring any administrative inefficiency issues). To elaborate more, under the current system, a unified China will have say 2 cabinet positions whereas the same region split in 10 countries will have 20 total cabinet positions.

Now, I think certain actions (like cultural conversation) can be less effective if you don't have the right technology or your country has not discovered the right ideas or other conditions but having a limit on how many things you can do feels sorta arbitrary. Would love to learn If you think I'm missing something or if this imbalances the game or introduces other issues.
 
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I'll talk more about it in detail, but development is a value in a location between 0 and 100% that can increase over time if you build buildings and have high prosperity in a location. Venice is like 40% at the start of the game while Ísafjörður is at 1%.
What's the reasoning behind capping it at 100%? Shouldn't they be able to develop infinitely, as you can always imagine higher and higher density?
 
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It is anti-snowballing mechanics similar to CK2/3 and EU4: 20 OPMs would grow the land much faster than one 20 province empire.
That's not really accurate though. The USA for example, would be unfathomably poorer and less developed if it was 50 totally independent states.

I understand why we may not want that type of thing in a game. But we should acknowledge the fact that larger states are often more effective at developing their country.
 
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It is anti-snowballing mechanics similar to CK2/3 and EU4: 20 OPMs would grow the land much faster than one 20 province empire.

yes
 
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I notice that the Cabinet members in the screenshots appear to be lay people in a Catholic country. Since Cabinet members are tied to an estate, can we assume that it will be possible to appoint clergy from appropriate religions to Cabinet roles? This was very common in Christian countries in this era, e.g. Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu in Catholic France, and Archbishop Laud in Protestant England. And while Islam doesn't have 'clergy' in the same sense, there were certainly men who exercised both political and religious authority.
 
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Will Cabinet members have roles like Minister of Foreign affairs, Internal affairs, state treasurer, Minister of War, Trade and etc?

And wouldn’t it be better if there were 3 cabinet members at the start to give players a bit more freedom of choice?
 
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could call it "diplomatic skill" instead
The issue isn't the name, but rather that its primary effect is international relations and making the AI do something even though it has no tangible, realistic backing of what it actually is.

For example, if I want to secure an alliance the AI might not be willing to accept due to me not being strong enough, being too far away, sharing contested provinces, etc. But then I park a cabinet member as 'Diplomatic Relations', get +2 diplomatic reoutation and now they're willing to accept. What did they actually get? I didn't get stronger, closer, or give up claims to a province. I just pressed a button and the magical +2 dip rep modifier made the AI accept an alliance that previously it wasn't interested in. There's nothing tangible to it and it's very board-gamey.
 
Can you appoint some tipe of vassal rulers as members of your cabinet like in CK? It woulm make a lot of sense for some countries specially in the first few centuries
 
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