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Tinto Talks #28 - 4th of September 2024

Welcome everyone to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we talk about the top secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will delve into the most hated of all seasons, Winter. Luckily for us, we don’t have to live with it for the entire year…


Climate and Winter
So what impacts whether a location has winter or not? Well, primarily it depends on the climate, but also on the time of the year and the level of winter currently nearby. Of course, when there is winter it is different for the northern and southern hemispheres. Every day each location does its calculations for when it should be changing its winter level.

There are three levels of winter. Technically it is four, but “no winter” is not really winter is it. And during the course of a season, a location could experience all types of winter. We have mild, normal and severe winters.

What is common for all levels of winter is that they affect attrition for your armies, so winters will always kill off some of your soldiers.

Pops living in climates that regularly experience winters have a higher demand for fur.

Food in Winter
Food production is severely reduced when winter comes, while pops still eat normally. A mild winter is a reduction of 25%, while severe winters basically reduce food production to 0. So unless there is a lot of food stored in the province, a severe winter may cause starvation in your locations.

Constructions
One other drawback of winter is that normal and severe winters will impact constructions, and with impact, we are talking about stalling them completely. This affects everything from constructing a building to building a ship. It makes the gameplay experience in a country like Sweden or Norway a bit more difficult, as you have to plan around the fact that you lose several months of the year at times.

stalled.png

Placeholder icons for locking, but useful tooltips..


Freezing Seas
Narrows, Inland Seas and Lakes have the possibility of freezing over during winter. This can happen when a seazone has had severe winter for over a week, and will then last until winter is no longer severe in that location.

A frozen seazone can be traversed by armies and this allows greater military control over the lands it reaches; however, it will cause navies to get stuck until it thaws. Be careful when the weather changes, it can thaw with catastrophic consequences if an army is on the ice. Navies can also not enter any seazone that has frozen over.

frozen_over.png

When Storebælt and Lillebælt freezes, you don’t need navies to reach København…


Mountains
You already know that warfare during winter is a bit more risky, but Project Caesar adds another element to it. Any location with the topography of “Mountain” will be blocked for army movement during normal and severe winters. This can help create natural borders, and some interesting strategic gameplay.


winter_level.png


Tooltips are always helpful..

Sadly there will not be a Tinto Talks next week as we have a holiday that day, but after that we will be back and talk more about roads, development, prosperity and more..
 
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This looks like a fun feature, but I hope the gain is worth the pain....
I like that winter plays an important role. I just hope it doesn't become a disaster/trap for the AI.
This sound absoltely amazing. How's AI handling it so far? Not being able to move through places sometimes. Getting its armies swallowed by the cracking ice?
I share the worry that the AI might not cope well with this. I can see problems where the AI keeps ping-ponging between two routes without reaching the destination, especially if it's a long journey (something like Italy or Spain trying to reach St Petersburg via the Baltic vs a land route across the Alps). It starts off on one route that gets blocked by sea ice, so that it diverts to a land route that gets blocked by mountain snowfall, and then back again. Real-life generals know that winter is temporary, but accounting for that makes path-finding much more complex. Have the AI programmers got the time and performance budget to handle this?
no, but you can tell by seeing nearby areas thawing
To a lay person, this looks like the kind of pattern recognition that the AI won't do unless it's specifically programmed. I've no doubt that Tinto's clever programmers could do it, but have they been given time to do so?
Will there be arctic sea zones that are always frozen over and theoretically traversable by armies?
There's no point the devs wasting time coding/scripting this since it's only theoretically traversable.
 
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It is awesome that sea tiles can freeze over, but you cant walk over for example the Gulf of Finland but still you couldnt really sail your ships there during winter either, because the coasts were fully frozen.

So it would be cool if there was a milder version of freezing where the coasts freeze aka only blocking naval movement there. Alternatively, if the sea tiles are small enough you can just have the coasts freeze and achieve the same thing.

This would model the fact that warm water ports are important and have for example fueled russian foreign policy for a while.
 
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I felt that there was something odd about the title image of this TT but I couldn't figure out what, then I realized there is NO SNOW ON THE ROOFTOPS OF THE HOUSES
 
Loving the idea that winter will finally have a proper effect on the game!

I'm lookig forward to the Little Ice Age being implemented in some way in the span of gameplay. (Something akin to a midgame crisis in Stellaris maybe?)

Also, completely unrelated to the topic, but I really hope the UI doesn't stay looking like this. It really just looks like a cheap paradox knockoff mobile game to me.
 
Inland seas and lakes freezing? we'll be able to see some winter war actions!
can you capture enemy ships frozen?
 
Very cool stuff! I hope we could have other large weather and climate effects in the game - stuff like monsoon season affecting the Indian Ocean, hurricanes and typhoons in many tropical places, major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions disrupting stuff, etc.
 
Any location with the topography of “Mountain” will be blocked for army movement during normal and severe winters.
Will there be a special modifier, advancement, or commander trait that let's you do this anyway despite some crushing attrition? Something like a rare "Student of Hannibal" trait would be so cool.
 
Does this mean I could send in a sacrificial army to hold the enemy's huge army on a frozen sea until it melts and kills them?
 
Should there also be a BONUS to FUR PRODUCTION in places with harsher winters ?

Places with harsher winters have animals growing thicker winter coats, meaning more fur production.
Besides the higher demand for clothing, we should also have a higher demand for heating resources.


i.e. Greater demand for FUR, but also more FUR PRODUCTION and more demand for firewood?
 
Food production is severely reduced when winter comes, while pops still eat normally. A mild winter is a reduction of 25%, while severe winters basically reduce food production to 0. So unless there is a lot of food stored in the province, a severe winter may cause starvation in your locations.
By food production you mean agricultural production, right? Reducing fish production in Lofoten during the winter would be complete nonesense. That's when the cod moves there from the Barents sea to spawn. As many people were living off a combination of fishing and farming, the winter is generally also the time of year when they would have more time for fishing. If anything, fish production should increase during the winter, at least in Norway.
 
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Pops living in climates that regularly experience winters have a higher demand for fur.

Are other goods affected as well?
More lumber because people need to light many fires, or medicaments because immune systems are weaker in the cold?
 
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Welcome everyone to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we talk about the top secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today we will delve into the most hated of all seasons, Winter. Luckily for us, we don’t have to live with it for the entire year…


Climate and Winter
So what impacts whether a location has winter or not? Well, primarily it depends on the climate, but also on the time of the year and the level of winter currently nearby. Of course, when there is winter it is different for the northern and southern hemispheres. Every day each location does its calculations for when it should be changing its winter level.

There are three levels of winter. Technically it is four, but “no winter” is not really winter is it. And during the course of a season, a location could experience all types of winter. We have mild, normal and severe winters.

What is common for all levels of winter is that they affect attrition for your armies, so winters will always kill off some of your soldiers.

Pops living in climates that regularly experience winters have a higher demand for fur.

Food in Winter
Food production is severely reduced when winter comes, while pops still eat normally. A mild winter is a reduction of 25%, while severe winters basically reduce food production to 0. So unless there is a lot of food stored in the province, a severe winter may cause starvation in your locations.

Constructions
One other drawback of winter is that normal and severe winters will impact constructions, and with impact, we are talking about stalling them completely. This affects everything from constructing a building to building a ship. It makes the gameplay experience in a country like Sweden or Norway a bit more difficult, as you have to plan around the fact that you lose several months of the year at times.

View attachment 1183438
Placeholder icons for locking, but useful tooltips..


Freezing Seas
Narrows, Inland Seas and Lakes have the possibility of freezing over during winter. This can happen when a seazone has had severe winter for over a week, and will then last until winter is no longer severe in that location.

A frozen seazone can be traversed by armies and this allows greater military control over the lands it reaches; however, it will cause navies to get stuck until it thaws. Be careful when the weather changes, it can thaw with catastrophic consequences if an army is on the ice. Navies can also not enter any seazone that has frozen over.

View attachment 1183437
When Storebælt and Lillebælt freezes, you don’t need navies to reach København…


Mountains
You already know that warfare during winter is a bit more risky, but Project Caesar adds another element to it. Any location with the topography of “Mountain” will be blocked for army movement during normal and severe winters. This can help create natural borders, and some interesting strategic gameplay.


View attachment 1183436

Tooltips are always helpful..

Sadly there will not be a Tinto Talks next week as we have a holiday that day, but after that we will be back and talk more about roads, development, prosperity and more..

Will rivers also simulate freezing over? For example, will army river crossing penalties be null in a severe winter?
 
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we want to be confronted with problems kings of the past have been confronted too...
Is this such a problem though?
I felt that there was something odd about the title image of this TT but I couldn't figure out what, then I realized there is NO SNOW ON THE ROOFTOPS OF THE HOUSES
How familiar are you with actual snow? With how little snow there is on the ground I would expect any snow landing on those roofs to be gone fairly quickly, either due to falling off the rather steep roofs, melting due to heat leaking through the roof or due to sunshine, or it simply having been blown off the roofs.
 
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