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Tinto Talks #26 - 21st of August 2024

Welcome everyone to the 26th Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we tell you interesting information about our super top-secret game with the code name of Project Caesar.

Previously in Grand Strategy Games, playable entities, or countries as we usually refer to them, always required you to own land, and their existence was based upon owning land. You annexed and eliminated a country by taking all their land. Now during the four years since we created the first iterations of this system, things have changed, and you will soon have landless playable characters in Crusader Kings III.

Anyway, in Project Caesar we currently have four categories of playable countries.

country_type.png

This tooltip may make it 100% clear?


We have been talking about making a navy based country type, and it would be fairly easy to do, but we haven't really found any country that fits that category.

Settled Countries
These are countries that are based on owning locations. These function the same as you would expect a country to work in a GSG, these countries own land, they build buildings, have cores, raise armies, etc.

Army Based Countries
This type of country is very similar to the location based countries with a few differences. While they can still do everything that a location based country does, they also have one strong advantage and a strong disadvantage in comparison.

The advantage is the fact that as long as they have an army, then the country will still continue to exist, which we use to simulate REDACTED amongst other things.

The disadvantage, depending on your point of view, is that if the country does not have an army at all, it can shatter into multiple pieces.

Many of the Steppe Hordes at the start of the game are ‘ABC’, which fits nicely into their other mechanics. Yes, I do like the acronym ABC for “Army Based Countries”

Extraterritorial Counties
These are countries that are based around the buildings they own. They can’t own land directly, but can have subjects that own land. Their buildings often have pops directly linked to the building, and those pops are also tied to the country.

One risk with them is that they need to keep positive relationships with the places they have buildings in, or they may not be able to survive.

map.png

Various banks, holy orders and Hanseatic League holdings in 1337..

There are many types of playable entities that we simulate with these systems, and here are a few of them..

Banking Countries
There are a few of these countries in Europe at the start of the Game, with Peruzzi and Bardi, and later on you get Fuggers and more. They have main offices in certain cities and have the possibility to build more branches around the world.

Other countries can request loans from them, and they also have the diplomatic ability to take over any estate loan that a country has, and force that country to pay interest to them instead. They also have far lower interest rates on their estate loans, so they can easily become rich from other countries' debts.


banking_advance.png

This is an advance only available for banking countries.


Trade Companies
During the Age of the Reformation you can set up Trade Companies in overseas places, which will be a good subject to get trade going to benefit their overlord. We will go into more detail about these in a later Tinto Talks.

Hanseatic League
This is represented by a building based country which has a few subjects that are normal land owning countries. This is a playable country from the start, and one that is really fun if you want to focus on a purely trading game.

hansa.png

Maybe the trade monopolies estate privilege is less than good for us..

We also have Holy Orders, as a building based type of country, and while I can’t go into details about it at this point, at the start of the game, the Daimyos of Japan are using the building based country mechanic..

Society of Pops
This is one of the most challenging types of countries in the game, as most of the mechanics are not available to them. They own no land, but instead are entirely based upon the pops associated with them. As they own no land, they do not interact with RGO’s nor can build most buildings. Almost all of them start without advances for taxation, codifying laws or constructing cities.

A lot of the world has different societies of pops, where larger groups of people live but are on the fringe of more organized and advanced states. In the New World there are a mixture of settled countries and society of pops.

These types of countries can migrate their pops from one province to another over time, and they can also force the allegiance of pops to change to them through warfare with another society.

The borders between different societies and even settled countries are extremely fluid, and they can be in the same location as either of them.

They can raise levies directly from their pops, and their armies can live off the land anywhere, gathering some small amount of food from any type of land. Their armies can always force any pop of their culture and religion to swear allegiance to their society.

Amongst the ways they can stop being colonized is forcing colonizers to the peace table, forcing them to cancel their colonial charters.

A settled country can in a war force a Society of Pops to abandon pops that they own, and if they no longer “own” any pops, that society will no longer be an existing country.

A society of pops can attempt to settle if they achieve certain advances, after which they will take control over all locations where they have pops and are the dominant culture and religion, and then become a Settled Country.

Currently though, the gameplay experience is not where we want it, and unless that is improved by beta, they are very likely to be AI only at release.

kvenland.png

Here the Kven People have settled…

And to clarify, Society of Peoples and Army Based Countries have ways to become Settled Countries through mechanics, but there are no other normal ways of changing Country Types, except through special events.

Stay tuned, as next week we go into detail about buildings you can build outside your own country.
 

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could it be possible to create a new banking country/vassal from your own territory like in a gold producing province. or even force a country to release a banking country

that sounds a bit op if it gives some advanges - and why would a country realistically do it rather than just develop their financial institutions. however, if banking countries could form by themselves (if some conditions are met) as independent obviously, that could be fun. also if banking countries can die as well (go into bankruptcy or something)
 
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I read "Extraterritorial" as "Extraterrestrial" and immediately thought about Prussian Space Marines.

This could be a setup for a Jan Mayen joketag. "The Blorg is an Extraterrestrial Country, they will exist in the game for as long as there are planets in the sky. Ayylmao"

Meanwhile, Jay Mayen itself would be a BBC (Bear Based Country). Also inexplicably have a British accent even though they're from Norway.
 
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Not a big fan of "Society of Pops" as nomenclature. I'd prefer something more immersive like disorganized societies I guess. I also really really hope they will be playable in release or eventually. Waiting for Pavía to post them tribes.
 
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2)it makes no sense for a banking family to not be able to purchase land and to switch over a particular type of signoria / plutcracy. Like, why shouldn't they be able to do that, just why?

Well i think it's a bit more complicated... like say you play as the medici. Would the gameplay be to "purchase land" in Florence location? Or to have your ruler be voted in as Florence's Doge and form a personal union?
 
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Not a big fan of "Society of Pops" as nomenclature. I'd prefer something more immersive like disorganized societies I guess. I also really really hope they will be playable in release or eventually. Waiting for Pavía to post them tribes.
Yes, I'm not sure about having "Banking Countries" that aren't actual countries either.
Maybe an option is to replace "countries" with "societies" or "entities"
So you have for example:
Land-based or Territorial Societies (LS, TS)
Army-based or Military Societies (AS, MS)
Extraterritorial Societies (ES)
Stateless Societies (SS)
 
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You guys should include the various South Indian trading guilds as extraterritorial countries given their large influence on the history of the region and given the fact that they pretty much functioned as independent states of their own, operating internationally without any oversight from the various landed rulers of the area. They could have their "Pattinams" serve as their equivalent of the Hanseatic Kontors, with them having Pattinams spread from South India to Sumatra. In 1337, the most powerful of these guilds would be the Ayyavole.

On a separate, yet related, note, it would be nice for migration to be possible between the various locations extraterritorial countries have buildings in, with workforces of various buildings able to move to other understaffed buildings if necessary. This could help represent the continued spread of the Tamil minority in Southeast Asia.

As a bonus, here is a map of Tamil influence in Sumatra. The various "settlements" labelled on the map can be represented as unique-buildings called "Pattinams", as I suggested earlier:

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Fascinating, so are rebels an ABC? I’m thinking specifically the Hungarian revolution against the Austrians, In which 100,000 Russians were required to stomp it. Had the Russians not intervened, Hungary might have once again been independent. Playing as rebels could be pretty fun…
 
We have been talking about making a navy based country type, and it would be fairly easy to do, but we haven't really found any country
Pirates! Or Pirate Republics or whatever you call them. We have ships= we can plunder!
We have no ships = we hang ×_×

Existance of such things would also imply, there are means to do: conquest / force tribute/ naval access/ other diplomatic actions using mostly navy/navy only.