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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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That sounds amazing. I will love to play with it.
How moddable is this system? Are the winter stages/ amount of stages moddable?, e.g. can we change it to 7 stages, where e.g. stage 0-2 could model very hot summer to warm summer summer, 3 would be the "no" winter and 4-6 would then be the normal winter system?
 
Will it be possible to allow/disallow armies marching over freezed water? So that they won't find paths through water, in case I forget about them and they are in the middle of the Baltic in April?
 
If most of the food comes from domesticated plants, than food production is impossible during a cold weather (<0 °C).
Hunter-gatherers were able to sustain themselves during winters, but there were not that many of them.
 
It might sound stupid but what happens if my troops are on a frozen lake because of harsh winter and the next day it is not frozen anymore because it is now mild ? Do I lose them ? What if that happens during a battle ?
 
Is the Republic of the Philippines included in this project
In 1337? I'd very much hope not...

There'll probably be a Tinto map including how the Philippines islands are handled some Friday in October or November, check back then along with your sources as to why everything they drew is horribly wrong.

:)
 
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If most of the food comes from domesticated plants, than food production is impossible during a cold weather (<0 °C).
Hunter-gatherers were able to sustain themselves during winters, but there were not that many of them.
Well, that's why they had animals as well - it's not all the food, and I believe winter was time to slaughter the livestock kept purely for food. That sounds like food production to me, even if we don't need to get so granular as to track how many pigs Farmer Smythe has in Oxford. (Although there are some societies and religions that encourage vegetarianism, I can't say for certain but I suspect they would prefer a bit of meat to famine, on the whole.)
 
I hope you will add a special event for the Great Frost of 1709, given how big it was its impact on Europe, with entire countries totally frozen for more than a month, rivers and lakes frozen etc.
 
Very interesting! Will there be similar mechanic (maybe reversed?) for countries closer to the equator? I think "winter" is the nice time of the year in some part of the world.
 
What about frozen rivers and travel going through them? In places up north like Lithuania. Winter travel on frozen rivers would sometimes be more rapid than spring or autumn if there was no good road and muddy weather. Ice roads like these were important for the trade of goods and travel.
 
How long will it take to cross a frozen sea? It must be carefully balanced, so that armies are not lost too often.

Will a formerly frozen fleet be instantly available for battle as soon as their tile thaws? Historically, preparing ships for sailing, least combat, after the winter break took some time and work.
 
If the columbian exchange doesn't happen, does the little ice age?
When e.g. Krakotoa goes boom, does that result in unusually correlated winter onsets (and lack of summers) for a year or two, or is all variation just locally correlated by random spread?
 
If the columbian exchange doesn't happen, does the little ice age?
When e.g. Krakotoa goes boom, does that result in unusually correlated winter onsets (and lack of summers) for a year or two, or is all variation just locally correlated by random spread?
Krakatau's major eruption was not in the time period (1883). But Laki and Tambora would fit.
Anyway, I suspect that there is no scripted weather (yet).