Welcome everyone to another Tinto Talks, the Happy Wednesday where we inform you about how things will work in our super secret game with the codename Project Caesar.
In today's Tinto Talks we will delve into a few different and not entirely related topics, but they are important for what we need to talk about as they will be referenced a fair bit in future Tinto Talks.
Prosperity & Devastation
In Project Caesar this is a single value in a location ranging from -100% to +100%, where positive is prosperity and negative is devastation.
Prosperity represents how prosperous and resourceful a location is. A prosperous location increases development over time. Prosperity will slowly rise, unless different negative circumstances reduce it. If it goes negative it will cause devastation.
There is no direct way for the player to increase prosperity, but having a peaceful country will have it increase slowly over time.
‘Market Fairs’ is a nice privilege to give.
Devastation represents how ravaged a location is. It includes burnt-down farms and abandoned villages, and the biggest sources of devastation are blockades and occupation.
It has a rather huge impact on a location over time, reducing how much food and raw materials it produces and the population over time.
If you have high devastation in any location in a province, the Age of Renaissance has an advance that enables a cabinet action, where you can focus on recovering devastation in a province, until it has recovered fully.
Ideally, you do not want any sort of war or conflict happening on your own lands.
Not ideal, let's end this war asap…
Development
One concept that has been in many of our previous GSGs is development. It has been used for various things, but in Project Caesar development represents how cultivated the land is, and how much it is used by the pops living there. The higher the development, the more people can live there, and the more it can be exploited.
As mentioned in earlier Tinto Talks, this is a value that the player mostly only has indirect control over, but you can have your cabinet working on improving development in an entire province at once.
Development helps a fair bit in improving the quality of a location, but all of these values here are still constantly being balanced.
The Woods probably has some other advantage…
Roads
We have had roads in many of our former games, and this game will also have roads. In Project Caesar this includes one of the most in-depth systems of roads we have ever made. A road is basically a connection between two land locations that reduces the proximity calculations from 40 down to 20. Most settled nations start with the capacity to build gravel roads, but there are three advances in later ages that will introduce new types of roads that can be built. Those roads will reduce proximity further, and increase movement speed for armies.
Now this may sound like it could be a lot of micromanagement if we had used the ways railroads were built in Victoria 2, or how roads were built in Imperator, but we have a few easier ways to build or upgrade road networks.
Here we have Kalmar selected and we are looking at building a road to Idre, which technically is in Norway at the start of the game. You can always build a road INTO the location of any country that has a positive opinion of you, so road networks can and will be connected for trade.
Road building is one of the most important and fun parts of the control-growing gameplay loop.
Piracy & Privateers
To clarify here, a privateer is a pirate sponsored by a specific country. The ability to sponsor privateers has several different ways to unlock. First of all, every nation has access to an advance in the Age of Absolutism called Letter of Marque that reduces the cost for privateers while also making them sturdier. There are also unique advances in the Age of Discovery for some countries that allow them to hire privateers, while if you pick the Diplomatic Focus in the Age of Renaissance you have the possibility to recruit privateers that early.
Sponsoring a Privateer can be done in an area, and cost about 250 sailors per privateer, and 10 sailors each month they are active. A pirate/privateer in an area, depending on its current strength, can reduce the maritime presence of all non-friendly countries in all sea zones in that area. This hurts relations and will give them a way to get a casus belli on you though.
So how do you fight privateers? Well, you have a fleet of ships in any location in that sea area, and they will actively reduce the capacity of those pirates. Galleys are a bit better than heavy ships at hunting pirates, but light ships are by far the best at dealing with pirates, where a single light ship is about ten times as effective as a heavy ship at the start of the game.
You need sailors for your privateers, or they disappear..
There is a situation in the later half of the 16th century where piracy will start to grow in certain areas of the map. Pirates also have a chance to spawn from locations with pirate covens. These are buildings that peasants will build in coastal locations where control is very low.
This privilege when granted to the Burghers will help your privateers be more cost effective…
Stay tuned, as next week we will focus on Conquest, Integration and Casus Belli’s.
In today's Tinto Talks we will delve into a few different and not entirely related topics, but they are important for what we need to talk about as they will be referenced a fair bit in future Tinto Talks.
Prosperity & Devastation
In Project Caesar this is a single value in a location ranging from -100% to +100%, where positive is prosperity and negative is devastation.
Prosperity represents how prosperous and resourceful a location is. A prosperous location increases development over time. Prosperity will slowly rise, unless different negative circumstances reduce it. If it goes negative it will cause devastation.
There is no direct way for the player to increase prosperity, but having a peaceful country will have it increase slowly over time.
‘Market Fairs’ is a nice privilege to give.
Devastation represents how ravaged a location is. It includes burnt-down farms and abandoned villages, and the biggest sources of devastation are blockades and occupation.
It has a rather huge impact on a location over time, reducing how much food and raw materials it produces and the population over time.
If you have high devastation in any location in a province, the Age of Renaissance has an advance that enables a cabinet action, where you can focus on recovering devastation in a province, until it has recovered fully.
Ideally, you do not want any sort of war or conflict happening on your own lands.
Not ideal, let's end this war asap…
Development
One concept that has been in many of our previous GSGs is development. It has been used for various things, but in Project Caesar development represents how cultivated the land is, and how much it is used by the pops living there. The higher the development, the more people can live there, and the more it can be exploited.
As mentioned in earlier Tinto Talks, this is a value that the player mostly only has indirect control over, but you can have your cabinet working on improving development in an entire province at once.
Development helps a fair bit in improving the quality of a location, but all of these values here are still constantly being balanced.
The Woods probably has some other advantage…
Roads
We have had roads in many of our former games, and this game will also have roads. In Project Caesar this includes one of the most in-depth systems of roads we have ever made. A road is basically a connection between two land locations that reduces the proximity calculations from 40 down to 20. Most settled nations start with the capacity to build gravel roads, but there are three advances in later ages that will introduce new types of roads that can be built. Those roads will reduce proximity further, and increase movement speed for armies.
Now this may sound like it could be a lot of micromanagement if we had used the ways railroads were built in Victoria 2, or how roads were built in Imperator, but we have a few easier ways to build or upgrade road networks.
Here we have Kalmar selected and we are looking at building a road to Idre, which technically is in Norway at the start of the game. You can always build a road INTO the location of any country that has a positive opinion of you, so road networks can and will be connected for trade.
- The green locations are locations you can afford to build a road from Kalmar to at the moment.
- Striped locations are locations with a road network.
- The white-outlined locations are the proposed path for the road between Kalmar and Idre.
Road building is one of the most important and fun parts of the control-growing gameplay loop.
Piracy & Privateers
To clarify here, a privateer is a pirate sponsored by a specific country. The ability to sponsor privateers has several different ways to unlock. First of all, every nation has access to an advance in the Age of Absolutism called Letter of Marque that reduces the cost for privateers while also making them sturdier. There are also unique advances in the Age of Discovery for some countries that allow them to hire privateers, while if you pick the Diplomatic Focus in the Age of Renaissance you have the possibility to recruit privateers that early.
Sponsoring a Privateer can be done in an area, and cost about 250 sailors per privateer, and 10 sailors each month they are active. A pirate/privateer in an area, depending on its current strength, can reduce the maritime presence of all non-friendly countries in all sea zones in that area. This hurts relations and will give them a way to get a casus belli on you though.
So how do you fight privateers? Well, you have a fleet of ships in any location in that sea area, and they will actively reduce the capacity of those pirates. Galleys are a bit better than heavy ships at hunting pirates, but light ships are by far the best at dealing with pirates, where a single light ship is about ten times as effective as a heavy ship at the start of the game.
You need sailors for your privateers, or they disappear..
There is a situation in the later half of the 16th century where piracy will start to grow in certain areas of the map. Pirates also have a chance to spawn from locations with pirate covens. These are buildings that peasants will build in coastal locations where control is very low.
This privilege when granted to the Burghers will help your privateers be more cost effective…
Stay tuned, as next week we will focus on Conquest, Integration and Casus Belli’s.
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