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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.

power_projection.png

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.

colonial_progress.png

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.

monthly_migration.png

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.

colony_cost.png

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…

fun_map.png

And what is this teaser for next week about?
 
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If we make a colonial nation too big, will that increase their desire for independence? Can multiple small colonial nations unite to fight their overlord if we make them unhappy?

they will unite yes
 
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Can you colonize your own country? If you want to grow population of some location?

no, but there is the Settlement building

 
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But won't it allow the players to plan the most optimal way to get to the trade goods they desire, e.g. gold, by cherry-picking the locations they want to colonise / vassalise / occupy?

you can't cherry pick locations, you make a charter for a province.
 
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So, provinces in the new world can have a wild mix of all the European cultures that attempted to colonize that area? Wow, very cool.

yes, its one of the fun side effects
 
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What happens with unaccepted pops moving to the Colonial Charters, such as Puritans moving to New England, will they not be counted as colonial settlers as they don't have the state religion/accepted culture. Unless you only have to have either the state religion/accepted culture. But then that only kicks the can down the road when it comes to unaccepted culture+religion pops moving to the new world; such as Irish Cathlics moving to the New England Colonial Charters.
 
I was wondering if its possible to have a colonial claims map mode, coloring basically all your claims that you don't actually control a shade of yours.Like those spanish empire maps for the 16th century when most of the Americas is portrayed as spanish even when they only claimed those lands.
 
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To clarify, you set up the charter for the entire province but gain control of each location once the location itself reaches the conditions?

yes
 
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Looks really cool! How does it work from the perspective of the colonized? If I'm playing as the Aztecs and France starts colonizing me, can I stop them through diplomacy or war?

War blocks it.

But if I am france, i'm not gonna bother sending colonists into the aztec lands, but a small army to conquer it..
 
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This system allows for it. You need to be able to move enough population over that you get close to a majority of the target location for it to flip. Not really something you would do in most places, except a columbian exchanged ravaged america, or later in the game where the european countries may have gotten a significant advantage.

Sure, getting a single location in west africa may be possible by 16th century, but with the coastal locations having about 8 to 15k pops in them, even with the very decentralized peoples living there then, would still require at least 40% of the pops to be your culture and religion, which is non-trivial to move in those amount, especially to areas with diseases killing you off.

Does that mean a Swedish or Danish gold coast is basically not something you are aiming to make possible? Is there a magic tech in the 17th century unlocking it? Or would there be tags in the area allowing for purchase/conquest there instead?
 
Woah this is insane, absolutely blows all previous Pdx colonization systems out of the water

Dynamic colonial nations anywhere in the world, direct ownership at will, colonization pulling from real pops, a tunable "Expel Minorities"... basically everything people asked for!

I do have some questions of course:
1) We can colonize provinces of fully fledged tags, like we could with EU3 hordes? What is the difference in Power Projection that lets you colonize provinces?
2) Is there a way to actually push out only specific pops from your province, rather than just picking one with a lot of minorities?
3) Is it possible to break restrictions at the cost of relations, slower growth or such? I.e. France colonizing a Spanish Tordesillas claim or Lapland? What about Portugal breaking the Tordesillas line at an even higher cost?
4) What happens if multiple nations are colonizing the same province? They divide the location? Do we still get to form or assign colonial nations if the province is fully colonized, but not fully owned by us?

1) currently > 10.
2) no
3) we are still working on how ToT will work, that why I was so super-vague.
 
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So distance influences both the rate at which people migrate and increases the cost making it more difficult to colonize a far away province. Put from the screen shot it seems that the distance is calculated from your capital rather than your nearest cored province. Does this mean that there is no advantage to first colonizing an area closer to your capital as a stepping stone to a rich/strategic province you are after further away?

Not really.
 
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I really like the systems but don't really understand why have it allow for colonization of regular landed countries with low PP. What is the historical precedent for this or where would a player ever use this? I can't think of a single case in the timeframe of the mod.

The Americas are supposedly already well-represented by the grey land colonization, traditional conquest and buildings. The other cases of settler colonialism I know of are in South Africa and Australia which likely are also grey land, and New Zealand which may or may not be grey land but could be well represented by conquest if it wasnt. There's also French colonization of Algeria but that's only in 1830 and it began with conquest.
 
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? Also, would the Treaty of Tordesillas also be enforced on me, or would I be immune to it? That's assuming New World nations will be playable at all.

Unless you are catholic you don't really care about what the Pope says.
 
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Can a location become uncentralised? Say hypothetically a newly finished colonial charter finishes, which is now a province, and has a disease outbreak so the population falls under the 1000. Does that location then become uncolonised/uncontrolled?

only if it does down to 0
 
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Is it -25 pops in home location = +25 pops in colony, or do some get subtracted due to disease, dying on the way etc?

some may die on the way yes
 
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Is the culture and religion metric universal to all countries or is it law based where some countries might need just culture and others just religion?

currently yes
 
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What are the pro’s and con’s of establishing multiple small colonial nations vs fewer larger colonial nations?

Do you want them strong and able to do more? or weak to control better?
 
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