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Tinto Talks #25 - 14th of August 2024

Welcome to another Tinto Talks, the 25th one, the Happy Wednesday where we give you lots of information about our upcoming, still secret and unannounced game, with the codename of Project Caesar.

Today we delve into the mechanics of colonialism, another aspect of painting the map.

Power Projection
One important factor that has a big impact on the colonialism game is Power Projection. Each country has a power projection value, and it is primarily to allow a country to be able to exploit those with a lower power projection. Power Projection is very dependent on how advanced a country is, where each age has an advance that gives you about +10 of it. It is also modified by societal values, rank of the country and more. One important aspect is that the +10 advance for Age of Traditions is in the advance tree from the Meritocracy.

You do not gain Power Projection by doing specific actions, like in EU4, but it's entirely based on your country's current setup.

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Sadly, the “Sweden is properly balanced” modifier has not been developed yet..


Colonial Charters
So, how does colonization work in ‘Project Caesar'? Well, you colonize by starting a colonial charter in a province for an upfront fee in gold. Then each month some of the population will be moving from the homeland to the colonial charter, until all locations that can be owned are owned by you.

In almost all cases, there are people living in a location you want to colonize, so for you to be able to have a charter to flip to your ownership there are a few rules. A location needs to have at least 1,000 people living there, and a certain percentage of the population needs to follow your state religion and be of an accepted culture of your country.

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Progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged!

This percentage depends heavily on the difference in power projection of your country and the countries in the location. Yes, I said countries in plural, and next week you will understand what we are talking about. This has the implication that at the start of the game, Yuán could in theory start colonizing Europe, if it only had been closer and discovered. How the countries and pops already present in a location react to your colonization is something that will be clarified in a later Tinto Talks.

As long as you have a colonial charter, people from your owned locations will start moving to the locations in the colonial charter. The amount of people moving is rather low in the beginning of the game, but there are advances that will increase it in later ages. Societal values have an impact on it, and so does the distance to the colony.

One thing to take into account is that colonization does not magically create new pops out of thin air, and being able to create a huge colonial empire is not a feasible strategy as a low population country.

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Full speed ahead! Only 40 months per location to get to 1,000 pops!

Colonial Charters are not free, and moving people are definitely not free, and countries need to support them. The higher the population in the target province, the more expensive it is to colonize, the distance also has an impact, but colonizing in the same area or region as your capital is significantly cheaper. You can always cut costs to your charters, but that will also reduce the amount of pops moving every month.

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Not too expensive, so we can easily afford it..


Colonial Nations
When a colonial charter is finished, and all possible locations in that province have become yours, you have multiple options for what you want to happen to that charter. If the province is close, and you think you can get decent enough control over it, you may want to just keep the locations as a part of your home country. You also have the option to have the province form a new colonial nation, or have it join an adjacent colonial nation.

Colonial Nations are a subject type that can not be annexed, but has a few advantages, or disadvantages depending on your point of view, in that while they start transferring less gold than a vassal would, they also grant some manpower and sailors, while also giving part of their merchants to their overlord.

To clarify, you can make colonial nations anywhere on the map where you can colonize.

Supporting the Colonies
If you feel that your charters or colonial nations are not growing enough, there are two tools you can use in the cabinet. Both of these become available from advances in the Age of Discovery

With ‘Supporting a Colonial Charter’ you will move pops from a province you decide upon and to the colonial charter you decided. The amount of pops getting moved depends on your current colonial migration capacities, so when you use it you can about double the migration to a specific

With the ‘Supporting Colonies’ you can move 100 pops every month from a selected province to a target province in a colonial nation subject. This can be useful when you want to boost a colony and you have overpopulated provinces at home, or when you think your country would be in a better situation if you could expel some minorities.

Restrictions on Colonization
There are several ways which can block other nations from colonizing certain places, including diplomatic treaties. At the start of the game, Norrland, Finland, Karelia and Kola are under the claims of Sweden and Novgorod who have divided the area between them.

We also have the situation ‘Treaty of Tordesillas’ where the New World will be split among two Catholic powers, causing lots of interesting dynamics.


Next week we will be back to talk about the difference between countries, and why owning locations is not all there is to life…

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And what is this teaser for next week about?
 
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The focus is always on a specific target location until it flips, then it moves to another one. Currently it's weighted towards coastal locations of high population.
I would really very much prefer for the player to have the ability to choose which location in a charter we can focus our colonization efforts in, especially when it comes to replicating such colonization tactics as Portugal around Africa. I don't like it to be out of my control.
 
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Mhh hmm MMM HMM I quite like what I'm reading here. And I bet I'll like it even more with next week's look at the natives! The ability to colonize even settled centralized countries sounds like quite the fun way to bully people!

Is the Power Projection requirement simply to exceed the target by any amount, or does it need to be by some larger portion (so E.g. England can't start sending people to Spain just because they have 101 PP to spain's 100)?

As a landed country, do you get a CB on a country colonizing you as soon as the charter is formed? Or do you need to wait for the locations to flip before you can declare a war of reconquest? I hope that 'dismantle charters' is a general peace option against countries with more PP than you.

The 1000 people in a location to flip feels a little steep- for example, all of Russian Alaska had maybe a couple thousand Russian-speaking people in the Napoleonic era, so with historical migration the player could flip MUCH less than what's traditionally represented as Russian Alaska on a map. True it is historical, and avoids downplaying the amount of de facto autonomy the natives had at the time. But given the map-painting tendencies of the Paradox GSG player base that is a VERY bold move!

Is the amount of money you can shovel into a charter unrestricted so long as you have the coin, or is there a cap? I'm mainly wondering how much of an advantage a large country will have over a small one in a race for a province. You mentioned that it's not viable for a small population nation to build a vast empire, but to my reading the amount of people that migrate is dependent only on the funding you province, and POPs will not migrate 'on their own' unless the colony is in the same market. Relatedly, will the cost of a charter be higher if your own locations are sparsely populated or very urban, indicating a lack of people inclined to move across the ocean to start a farm on the rough frontier?

Just stop the colonial charter once you have your single location outpost flipped.
Makes sense. Is the AI smart enough to do this when they colonize Africa?
If a location becomes 0 population, it will become tagless/uncolonised
Makes sense for core regions, but for peripheries (low control, not core provinces, colonial regions, etc) this should be amended to going out of your control if you reach zero accepted culture population. That way if a country has a Bad Time their hinterland provinces can become 'uncolonized' again even if there's a surviving native population.
 
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You can't specifically choose to send religious minority pops, and the system is biased towards sending pops from true faith majority home locations. It would be a waste of time anyway as you need pops to be of your culture and religion for a colony to flip in your favour.
What if instead of pops having to be of your culture and religion to win a colony, there was some sort of check for a pops "home country" and whichever home country has the most pops wins the colony?

It doesn't really make sense to remove the concept of expelling religious and ethnic minorities to maintain an arbitrary connection between own culture/religion and fully colonizing a location.
 
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I don’t think the region needs less that 1000 pops, but to flip to your control needs >1000 pops and a certain percentage of the population must be the correct cultures and religion. So less populated regions are easier to colonize since it’s about pushing the population, almost all of which will be of your culture and religion, over the 1k threshold vs somewhere like West Africa, where most locations are well over that threshold but are populated with barbarian heathens, making crossing whatever culture and religious threshold there is much harder.
Ok thanks. So for instance a Moroccan location with 5000 pops would need 5001 Catiallan colonists to turn into a colony and a German minor with 2500 Catholics and 2500 protestants would need 2501 Chinese colonists.
 
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you might consider, instead of 0, the threshold to be 1000, just like the colonization threshold. If you have more than 1000 and met the %conditions, you control the location. If you have less than 1000, then you lose the control of the location
Check the maps threads, plenty of owned locations with <1000 pops at game start
 
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Can we only colonize a specific location or will it always be a random location on the province of the Colonial Charter?

For example: As Portugal i only want to colonize 1 specific location in Cape Verde. Can i choose wich one or will it be a random location from the 5 provinces (islands)?
 
you might consider, instead of 0, the threshold to be 1000, just like the colonization threshold. If you have more than 1000 and met the %conditions, you control the location. If you have less than 1000, then you lose the control of the location
That's most of Iceland wiped on the first tick :D
 
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Great TT; I failed to understand the difference between "Supporting a Colonial Charter" and "Supporting Colonies" cabinet actions. As far as I understood, the first one doubles the speed of emigration, the second one gives a plain 100 pop speed per month. Does this mean that the first one is mostly a boost with fewer countereffects but a more subtle effectis, while the second one is more effective but brutal and can lead to unbalances in the mother land? I guess that the cost for the second one would be higher, and potentially lead to unrest...
 
This is regarding the Balkans map which has a geographic inaccuracy about Dobruja's terrain, sorry for the very off-topic comment. I just don't think you guys are reading new comments from older posts. Dobruja, or at least a big part of it is a Plateau. I was recently on the black sea coast and went to South Dobruja to visit multiple historical sites, especially on the coast. And the altitude on all the places was very high (especially visible on the coast because there were no beaches but just a 90-degree upward curve from the sea to the coast and it was like a rock mountain haha. I have 2 Wikipedia pages to back my claims up (and I didn't do much research due to time constraints, so if you tried to I am sure you can find more proof). One is about a plateau in Romania that is in English: (I can't post links, just type Dobrujan Plateu and the Wikipedia page will pop up), and another one is in Bulgarian about the Dobrujan Plateau in the Bulgarian part (cuz there isn't in English so your going to need to translate it, which you can do through an option on the three dots on the top right part of your google tab: (I can't post links so copy-paste: Добруджанско плато
 
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Can a European Tag colonize part of the new world (lets say Florida) and "move the capital" to Florida and that becomes the new "mainland" of the country.

I would love to be able to "flee" to the new world as some european countries (ie byzantium, portugal, scotland, iceland, etc)

Please make this a reality!
 
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Ok thanks. So for instance a Moroccan location with 5000 pops would need 5001 Catiallan colonists to turn into a colony and a German minor with 2500 Catholics and 2500 protestants would need 2501 Chinese colonists.
They didn’t say you needed a majority, just “a certain percentage”, so I imagine you don’t need an absolute majority just an adequately sized minority. I’d be shocked if it was less than 10% (the threshold for appearing on the map) but it’s probably not >50%.
 
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Q1: Is the ‘Supporting a Colonial Charter’ impacted by the Control in the source location?

Q2: Will there be any reason for England to colonise Ireland, as happened historically? Or will that be represented differently, e.g. through a cabinet action to try to assimilate them into the overlord's culture?
 
Can you colonize within your own territory? Encourage migration within your own territory, perhaps try to move own-culture pops to newly conquered regions?
EDIT: From another staff reply, "Not through the colony system, but there are various tools at your disposal including Cabinet Actions if you want to... adjust your country's population distribution."
 
Can i Play as a CN? And if that is posibble? Can i become independent and Form my own "new" country ? Like in Eu4 you can Form Texas and so on.. =)
And if that is possible will these new nations get more content then in Eu4?