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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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I was referring back to the +1 advisor giving a currency the Rheagar was talking about. I wonder if traits (like what were mentioned for generals) would cover the 'lots of varied' bonuses that were also attached advisors.

I do not feel that we will get percentages or percentages but rather the sum of percentages of values (or the sum of weighted values).

If I think about development (that is % itself) I imagine that its growth by advisory action would be something like 30% (from advisors skill) * 0.1% (defined in action base) * fn(time of continuous action) * delta * 1/current value.

EDIT: Players would have hard time understanding the impact of choosing 24% advisor over 28% advisor.
 
Hmmm. I can see a good argument against the cabinet scaling with size just based on how much micro is expected of the player, but it does seem like there are other ways that you can more effectively hamper snowballing that make more sense (like increasing corruption with country size, making larger countries with more ethnicities and religions more unstable, greater land areas being more difficult to effectively control, et cetera).
 
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?
Outside of Project Caesar's timeline, today's civilisation is starting to learn that infinite development can't happen. There's only so much infrastructure you can put in one place before you have problems like sink holes or the whole land sinking. An inconvenient reality for people who want to believe numbers can go up forever.
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.
We had this debate many Tinto Talks ago: do you represent the USA as one megablob or 50 tags in a superstructure (like an International Organisation or a regular vassal swarm)? Within Project Caesar's timeline, it's reasonable to argue one government body trying to rule a megablob won't be as good at it as several government bodies that work together. Now, what the game will do to encourage centralised absolute monarchy states has yet to be revealed.
 
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To be honest, while this character system and cabinet is hardly an elegant way to represent ruler policies I am not sure I understand the love for that kind of style of history. Grand historical forces remain important but few historians are committed to so structuralist a position nowadays that they think it erases the individual. In an era of small governments and personality-based rulership persons do actually matter a lot. I always thought national foci were, like 'the spirit of the nation' very cartoony. So much of actual history in this period is defined by the lack of information and agency leaders have to act on their domains and the challenges to make their mark or expand their tools while relying on subordinates and their abilities.

An amorphous edict meant nothing without someone to enforce it. EU4's lack of characters was, frankly, a big mischaracterization - a failure to capture a period where powerful individuals counted for a lot. I don't think the cabinet system is that much better but it is a more concrete acknowledgement that rulers were not geists imposing themselves on the country but had to act through subordinates.

But are characters really persons? My main problem with presented system is that it is really redress of mana that now flows into certain provinces. Game starts, you assign two provinces to grow development there and that's it. There is little trade off and granularity is too high or too low, depending on what direction you look.

I'm still thinking this out - but for now I believe the advisor system from EU4 was... cleaner? And more flexible.
 
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But are characters really persons? My main problem with presented system is that it is really redress of mana that now flows into certain provinces. Game starts, you assign two provinces to grow development there and that's it. There is little trade off and granularity is too high or too low, depending on what direction you look.

I'm still thinking this out - but for now I believe the advisor system from EU4 was... cleaner? And more flexible.
Given that development also has to do with the number of buildings built in a place, I think that these cabinet-related boosts (like the one for control) are much more ephemeral. They're meant to bolster a place temporarily as you build up more infrastructure, rather than be the way that you increase development in a province.

Johan mentioned, for instance, that the control boost one would not last especially long once the person was removed. I suspect development is similar.
 
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Imperator's ui is just white marble, ck3 ui is mostly dark grey, vicky is your choice of green, blue or purple. Only Stellaris is kind of navy blue.

Imperator's ui is pretty good, although there's a lot of features that are accessible in unintuitive menus, like releasing vassals or creating a colony (how is that a culture right?). Also, you can't access the most relevant menu by clicking on ressources at the top.

Ck3 ui is great. It's just plain old great. It's dense, things are where they should be, and in 1000+ hours of playing it, I never had to hit the wiki to find where I can access a feature. The notification system is somewhat clunky, however.

Vicky 3 ui is a bloated mess and nothing is where it should be.

But EU4? First of all, it's the only one where the UI is actually navy blue. There's buttons everywhere, always more button, and everything is hidden in menus with more buttons, and sometimes there are things that you think are just there to be cute that are in fact... buttons! I'm thinking, for example, of the button to access the institution menu, which is the least button-looking button I ever had the chance to gaze upon (first gen pdx games notwhitstanding). Sure, the notification system is good, and the macro builder is sometime useful, but EU4 is clearly behind games like ck3 or imperator and it shows. I seriously believe this is how people that praises EU4 ui as the best ever created think :

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As for your other, not-ui related points, I love zoroastrian Brittany as much as the next person, and if that's what you meant by directly referencing the pop system, I guess I agree with you. I also generally agree with your critic of advisors and I personnally would prefer a more abstract system, although I don't have strong opinions on the subject.
 
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Short but Sweet!

Can't wait for meddling nobles, clergy and/or burghers to vie for the control of my State, while I have to keep them happy. And now they have faces and names that I can curse to when they make my politicking live hell! Curses upon Sir Robert if he sells me out to the Estates! Off with his head!

Venice gonna have quite an interesting time I'm sure
 
Ck3 ui is great. It's just plain old great.

I don't understand this, CK3 UI is awful, it is basically a nice looking prototype. And they are stacking even more things on it like court room that are completely unusable.
 
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I might be crazy and it's already been answered, but in peace deals, will you be able to take individual little cities, or just overall provinces? (please be individual little cities)
 
Outside of Project Caesar's timeline, today's civilisation is starting to learn that infinite development can't happen. There's only so much infrastructure you can put in one place before you have problems like sink holes or the whole land sinking. An inconvenient reality for people who want to believe numbers can go up forever.

We had this debate many Tinto Talks ago: do you represent the USA as one megablob or 50 tags in a superstructure (like an International Organisation or a regular vassal swarm)? Within Project Caesar's timeline, it's reasonable to argue one government body trying to rule a megablob won't be as good at it as several government bodies that work together. Now, what the game will do to encourage centralised absolute monarchy states has yet to be revealed.
Depending on what you mean by development, I can always decide to upgrade my buildings.

Do not put fantasies motivated by ideology in a videogame blog please.
 
I might be crazy and it's already been answered, but in peace deals, will you be able to take individual little cities, or just overall provinces? (please be individual little cities)

In peace deals You would be able to take separate locations, not provinces.
 
Its out of context but I think that it would be great to be new system for artillery. For example if player stack wiped the army, he would capture X quantity of cannons. also would be great to be army composition like: 15000 infantry, 4000 cavalry and 80 artillery. I think it would be more real :)
 
probably, but we call it development in so many games.. and then people would say "but roads and buildings are infrastructure"
Has anyone ever suggested the word urbanization? This seems to fit more with what development attempts to be, since it is a percentage and not an absolute value. In general cities boost productivity by concentrating services boosting economic output. Furthermore, it is independent from population as you can have a highly concentrated but small population in a location. Also it would more intuitively suggest why nomadic tribes do not like it.
 
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Has anyone ever suggested the word urbanization? This seems to fit more with what development attempts to be, since it is a percentage and not an absolute value. In general cities boost productivity by concentrating services boosting economic output. Furthermore, it is independent from population as you can have a highly concentrated but small population in a location. Also it would more intuitively suggest why nomadic tribes do not like it.
It doesn't really work with rural locations though, and most of your locations will be rural.
 
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Has anyone ever suggested the word urbanization? This seems to fit more with what development attempts to be, since it is a percentage and not an absolute value. In general cities boost productivity by concentrating services boosting economic output. Furthermore, it is independent from population as you can have a highly concentrated but small population in a location. Also it would more intuitively suggest why nomadic tribes do not like it.

only fits when you have a town and/or city.
 
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Since the post does not go into detail at that point:
If you can only boost the control of one province at the same time, maybe in addition to a strong temporary control boost there can be a slower-growing permanent control boost (increasing average control or equilibrium or whatever you want to call it) as form of "manifastation" of promoting control in this province.