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Tinto Talks #33 - 16th of October 2024

Hello everyone and welcome to another Tinto Talks. This is the Happy Wednesday where we discuss the details of our rather secret game Project Caesar!

Today we will go deep into how the diplomatic system works in Project Caesar. The core of the system is similar to our other grand strategy games, but has much in common with EU4, Imperator and Victoria 2 in particular. Some of you may be very familiar with something we are talking about today, but not everyone reading this has played 5,000 hours in every GSG we made. So there are parts of today's Tinto Talks that will be “wtf man, I know this already” for many of you.

Also when it comes to diplomacy, we have based our interface solutions for diplomatic actions from two paths. First when you have a country selected, you can get the classic way of seeing diplomatic actions related to that country, but we also have the sometimes more useful way of first selecting a diplomatic action and then seeing which countries would accept it.

Diplomats
While this game may not have the immortal envoys of EU4 that limited how much diplomacy you could do at one time, in Project Caesar you have a “diplomatic corps”, or Diplomats as we refer to them as. This represents how much diplomacy a country can do in a given time. Some advances, laws or societal values will increase this amount, and there are also some buildings that will have an impact.

Every diplomatic action you do requires at least one diplomat, and while they are a renewable resource, you may need to ration them.

diplomats.png

Maybe we should become an Empire instead?

Opinions
In almost all GSG games we have made, we’ve tracked relations between countries, often in the completely natural and intuitive range of -200 to +200. Early on the relation was a single value, but in EU4 over a decade ago we introduced the concept that Country A could view Country B one way, and Country B could view Country A another way. This game is no different in that regard.

These opinions are calculated depending on the various states between countries, like religion, culture, diplomacy and much more, and can have temporary impacts from actions.

Opinion is how much a country likes or dislikes another country. The difference between trust and opinion is that a high opinion will stop a country from being hostile, but we would need trust to be able to work together.

You have multiple ways to influence this with diplomacy, but the most direct ones you would use often is the “improve relations” & “send gift” diplomatic actions.

  • Improve Relations - This uses some of your monthly diplomatic actions to improve the target country's opinion of you over time.
  • Send Gifts - This gives you an instant opinion increase for a sum of money.

opinion.png

Soon our conflicts are all forgotten..

Trust
Trust represents how likely one country finds it that another country will act honorably towards them. Whether friend or foe, Trust is a crucial component in forging lasting agreements.

Trust is hard to get, and easy to lose.

You can always send a diplomat to profess trust, which will increase their trust in you, but your diplomatic reputation will be lowered for the next 5 years.


Favors
Favors represent how much one country has promised, or otherwise owes, to another country. Favors can be spent to ask the other country to do something. If favors get too unbalanced, refusing to do these things can cause a loss of trust or even diplomatic reputation.

You gain favors by helping your allies, and supporting them at need.

You can also use some of your diplomats on currying favors. This will reduce the monthly diplomats you gain each month, but at the same time grant your country favors on the target country, and they get favors on you.

favors.png

Yes, the numbers feel 100% perfectly balanced..

Spy Networks
This describes the extent to which a country has infiltrated another with a network of informants, double agents, and general turncoats, and thus how much inside knowledge they have of that country. It can be used to perform a variety of insidious diplomatic actions.

You need to use a diplomat to start building a spy network, and while it is then active, you will gain less diplomats each month.

The speed with which your spy network is built up depends on your spy network construction capacity, and the target country’s counter espionage reduces it.

The size of your spy network in a country impacts your siege ability and how much aggressive expansion you get from treating them badly..

spy_network.png

Why is our network construction so bad, and why is portugals counter espionage so bad?


Diplomatic Reputation
This represents how highly regarded a country is in international relations. There are advances that will increase it, but it is also increased by your country's prestige and decreased by your aggressive expansion.

AI countries look very much at diplomatic reputation when it comes to accepting diplomatic offers.

reputation.png

If we went really belligerent, we would have NO reputation…


Diplomatic Range
This is a concept we introduced in Imperator, where you can’t just do diplomacy with every country on the map. In earlier games we had this hidden from the player, and it was merely something that the AI kind of used. Now this is something that matters, and it is based primarily on advances and the rank of the country.

Diplomatic Range limits the physical distance our diplomats can travel to conduct diplomacy. The distance to be traveled is from one capital to the other.

diplomatic_range.png

The dark gray is where Aragon can not send diplomats in 1337, as they are out of range..


Rivals
In Project Caesar we have the system of rivals, which is fairly similar to the one in EU4, with a few differences.

First of all, the selection of rivals is less opaque and follows a few simple rules. A valid rival is someone within a geographical area that is of a similar or higher rank, or shares a culture group. The geographical area for an empire is the same continent or adjacent sub-continent, while for a county is the same area or adjacent province definition. Of course you can always rival someone that has declared you as a rival.

Secondly, if you don’t pick enough rivals, your actions that increase aggressive expansion will give you more, and your spy networks become far weaker.

Thirdly, you can always create a casus belli on your rivals if you have a spy network built up there.

Finally, there is no cooldown on replacing a rival, but it will cost you 25 stability.

Remember that a rival is a country that is perceived as having conflicting interests, and will block you from having alliances. Any countries that share rivals will get higher opinions with each other.

possible_rivals.png

So these are the possible rivals for Aragon at the start of the game..

Diplomatic Capacity
As suggested by many of you back in Tinto Talks #12, we changed the diplomatic relation slots system to become a diplomatic capacity system instead, where the cost for an alliance depends on the power of the ally, and similarly, subjects cost different things depending on their type and size.

diplomatic_capacity.png

Aragon only has 1 vassal at the start, but it's not that small..


Diplomatic Action and Treaties
Today we will not talk more about unions or subjects, as they will be covered in a later Tinto Talks, we will however thoroughly discuss as many as possible of other types of diplomatic treaties and actions. A diplomatic action costs a diplomat to do, but not all of them create a treaty.

A Treaty is something that lasts over a period of time, and can be anything from an alliance to food access for your armies.

Friendly Actions
This category of actions also include some of the ones mentioned above, like improving opinions, professing trust and curry favors, some of the other friendly actions include the following.

Some of the friendly actions include the following..

  • Defensive Leagues - Some of you may recognise this from Imperator, but it's basically a defensive alliance.
  • Guarantees - In this game you can also ASK a more powerful country to guarantee you.
  • Propose Ruler - If you got adults of your dynasty that are not your current ruler, you can propose that they become the ruler of another monarchy, if they are in a regency without any valid heir.
  • Share Maps - This allows you to give the maps of an area to another country, if they have not discovered it.

anti_piracy.png

For just 50 favors, you can get any country to not send privateers near you …

Hostile Actions
These are the actions that tend to be rather offensive to the receiving part, and damages the opinion and trust. Some of these include..
  • Intervene in War - Any Empire can join in on the defenders side in a war if the opinion that the country has of you is high enough.
  • Isolate from Allies - This will make them break an alliance they have, but this will cost you a fair amount of favors.
  • Send Insult - Reduces their opinion of you, but they will get a casus belli on you.
  • Threaten War - If you got a casus belli for a province you can use this to threaten with a war, and they have a chance of accepting it. Only Kingdoms and Empires can do this.

Covert Actions
These are the actions that you need a spy network in the target country to be able to do. While you could view them as hostile, they are a bit more sneaky here. Some of these include the following.
  • Corrupt Officials - Reduces the effectiveness of their cabinet.
  • Infiltrate Administration - Removed the Fog of War over their country for a set period of time.
  • Steal Maps - For when you really really want that map of the Caribbean.
  • Support Rebels - This is something that unlocks in the Age of Renaissance, that can help you truly weaken your enemies.

Economy Actions
These tend to be actions that are more of a gray zone between totally friendly and totally hostile, and are more or less related to the economy part of the game. Some of these actions include..
  • Block Building in Country - This will block them from building buildings in your locations, which can be useful when you don’t want some English Trade Offices in all your cities.
  • Embargo Nation - This will reduce the market attraction of their markets on your locations, making them more likely to trade in other markets. Their trades will no longer be allowed to enter your territory as well.
  • Request a Loan - This is something you usually send to a banking country, so you can get money from them..
Access Actions
There are 3 types of access here, Military Access, where you can march your armies through another country's territory. Food Access, where you can have ýour armies supplied in another countries territory, and Fleet Basing Rights, where you are allowed to base your ships in their ports.

All of them have the option to offer it to another country and request it from them, while military access can now also be requested to be bought.

Of course there are many country specific diplomatic actions, but they will be talked about after christmas when we start with the flavor talk, and the subject actions will be talked about in the Tinto Talks about Subjects.

Stay tuned, next week will be something completely different…
 
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1. Do stronger countries get more favors per month on a country that is more weaker?
2. Do fleet basing rights cost gold maintenance?
3. Does country guarantee use a diplomatic cap and does it incur any favors?
4. Does it cost anything to share or request maps?
5. Are those covert actions unlocked at start of the game because in a certain another game I forgot they existed because it took awhile to unlock them.
6. Can you specify how much gold you want to send in Send Gift?
7. War subsidies option from some certain game?
8. Do gifts or war subsidies incur any favors?
9. Is envoy travel time a thing?
 
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Speaking of the anti-piracy agreement, I think this is one of those things which sound cool on the surface, but actually make less sense. Privateering, meaning state sponsored privacy is a pretty hostile action in itself, and it makes very little sense, that you can first build up favors with a country that is covertly or even overtly hostile towards you, then use said favors to ask them to stop.

IRC you said there will be some form of 'natural' piracy in the game (not just tag vs. tag), so presumably there will also be some kind of naval action you can do against that. I'd much rather have the anti-piracy agreement work in a way which is then beneficial to both parties of the agreement, for example a fleet on patrol would also help reduce the pirates' effect on the partner country's maritime presence.
 
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I am a little puzzled about the food access option. Does it mean that military access gives access for your troops but if you want to feed them you also need the food access, or does military access always give you the food access and the food access essentially allows you to form supply lines through the country in question but not move troops through it?
 
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1. Having 0.3 of a diplomat feels just so wrong... Maybe just use the term 'diplomatic power' or 'diplomatic ability'...
I get what you are saying. If I were designing Project Caesar, then Diplomats would be named characters with varying abilities, because in the late medieval and early modern era, ambassadors were not the bland puppets of their government (apologies to any diplomats reading!) that we know today. The slow piece of communications, and the more personal nature of politics, meant that diplomats' personal qualities could make or break negotiations.

However, given we have the system we have, I don't see a problem with "gaining 0.3 diplomats per month" as long as diplomats are employed in integer quantities. It takes time to train a diplomat, so it does makes sense that you can have 0.3 of a diplomat's ability. And while we've not been told how much Diplomatic Actions cost, it's perfectly sensible that you might send a team of 3 diplomats to negotiate an alliance but only need 1 to build a Spy Network, etc.
All who write about diplomatic radius, maybe at the beginning of the game there is a difference between the Christian and Islamic world. Moscow princes had business in Italy Rome/Venice but Persia seemed something more distant...
This is a good point in theory, but I'm not sure whether that applies in the case of Aragon, since they had centuries of experience of dealing with Islamic rulers. To fully represent this you'd need something like CK3's Cultural Acceptance mechanic. PC already seems to be tracking Cultural similarity, Court Language, and something called Cultural Influence (which I think is new in this TT?) so it should be possible to add these cultural factors into the calculation.

Looking at that map, it also seems to me that the calculation is seriously underweighting the ease of coastal travel relative to land travel in the 14th century. Coastal shipping was faster and safer than roads, especially for diplomats who wouldn't have access to other countries' networks of posthorses etc., and would be in danger of lengthy delays every time they crossed a border or even encountered a castle ("who are these armed foreigners in my domain?!").
 
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To me it is very odd to have particular diplomats travelling between countries all the time. Especially with an embassy building I would except there to be some representation of the diplomacy later in this game's period.
 
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How come Aragon has diplomatic range all the way to Russia, but the Mamluks are out of range? What's going on here?

Yeah, just found out why.

The algoritm is "if capital is not a port, then its 'straight distance between port and capital' which is an instant calculation, and then we have the distance between ALL seazones cached...

The slight problem with Mamluks here is that the closest port for Cairo is Suez... so the algoritm goes "oh, we have to go all the way around africa"

And the closest port for the Golden Horde is on the Caspain Sea, so it can't reach anywhere :(
 
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The distance to be traveled is from one capital to the other.
Seems like it could create odd situations where you'd be literally neighboring someone you can't do diplomacy with. How would this work if you, say, as Portugal, conquer a location in India? Will you still not be able to conduct any diplomacy there? Or is the intended idea to create a "Portuguese East Indies" subject to do so on your behalf, until you have the tech to do it directly at least?

if you don’t pick enough rivals
How many would that be? Is it a variable or fixed amount? If variable, what would be the factors?

Friendly Actions
This category of actions also include some of the ones mentioned above, like improving opinions, professing trust and curry favors, some of the other friendly actions include the following.

Some of the friendly actions include the following..

  • Defensive Leagues - Some of you may recognise this from Imperator, but it's basically a defensive alliance.
  • Guarantees - In this game you can also ASK a more powerful country to guarantee you.
  • Propose Ruler - If you got adults of your dynasty that are not your current ruler, you can propose that they become the ruler of another monarchy, if they are in a regency without any valid heir.
  • Share Maps - This allows you to give the maps of an area to another country, if they have not discovered it.

anti_piracy.png

For just 50 favors, you can get any country to not send privateers near you …

Hostile Actions
These are the actions that tend to be rather offensive to the receiving part, and damages the opinion and trust. Some of these include..
  • Intervene in War - Any Empire can join in on the defenders side in a war if the opinion that the country has of you is high enough.
  • Isolate from Allies - This will make them break an alliance they have, but this will cost you a fair amount of favors.
  • Send Insult - Reduces their opinion of you, but they will get a casus belli on you.
  • Threaten War - If you got a casus belli for a province you can use this to threaten with a war, and they have a chance of accepting it. Only Kingdoms and Empires can do this.

Covert Actions
These are the actions that you need a spy network in the target country to be able to do. While you could view them as hostile, they are a bit more sneaky here. Some of these include the following.
  • Corrupt Officials - Reduces the effectiveness of their cabinet.
  • Infiltrate Administration - Removed the Fog of War over their country for a set period of time.
  • Steal Maps - For when you really really want that map of the Caribbean.
  • Support Rebels - This is something that unlocks in the Age of Renaissance, that can help you truly weaken your enemies.

Economy Actions
These tend to be actions that are more of a gray zone between totally friendly and totally hostile, and are more or less related to the economy part of the game. Some of these actions include..
  • Block Building in Country - This will block them from building buildings in your locations, which can be useful when you don’t want some English Trade Offices in all your cities.
  • Embargo Nation - This will reduce the market attraction of their markets on your locations, making them more likely to trade in other markets. Their trades will no longer be allowed to enter your territory as well.
  • Request a Loan - This is something you usually send to a banking country, so you can get money from them..
Access Actions
There are 3 types of access here, Military Access, where you can march your armies through another country's territory. Food Access, where you can have ýour armies supplied in another countries territory, and Fleet Basing Rights, where you are allowed to base your ships in their ports.

All of them have the option to offer it to another country and request it from them, while military access can now also be requested to be bought.
This is very nice, but how aggressive will the AI be on these actions? In EU4, it would very rarely use some actions like support rebels (which was kind of a gimmick for how unimpactful and how late we got it anyway), intervene and threaten in war. Having the AI be more assertive with these actions to further its own interests would make it feel far more alive.

Also, will send insult have any tangible repercussions here? In EU4 it is quite underwhelming, only useful to get some PP and with pretty much no consequences.

Diplomats
While this game may not have the immortal envoys of EU4 that limited how much diplomacy you could do at one time, in Project Caesar you have a “diplomatic corps”, or Diplomats as we refer to them as. This represents how much diplomacy a country can do in a given time. Some advances, laws or societal values will increase this amount, and there are also some buildings that will have an impact.

Every diplomatic action you do requires at least one diplomat, and while they are a renewable resource, you may need to ration them.

diplomats.png

Maybe we should become an Empire instead?
Kind of odd to say "0.30 diplomats", isn't it? Not a real problem, but maybe calling it directly "diplomatic corps" would make more sense?
 
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Also, might be better to change this to diplomats capacity or something like that so sending diplomat to one location minor won't consume the same amount as sending diplomat to China.
 
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I'm curious about diplo range. Is it a purely distance based calculation, or does it have additional modifiers? For example, sharing a culture/culture group/religion/religious group should in my mind increase diplo range while the opposite would decrease it.
 
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Diplomatic Range
This is a concept we introduced in Imperator, where you can’t just do diplomacy with every country on the map. In earlier games we had this hidden from the player, and it was merely something that the AI kind of used. Now this is something that matters, and it is based primarily on advances and the rank of the country.

Diplomatic Range limits the physical distance our diplomats can travel to conduct diplomacy. The distance to be traveled is from one capital to the other.

View attachment 1202680
The dark gray is where Aragon can not send diplomats in 1337, as they are out of range..
So Aragon can’t send a diplomat to the Chagatai Khanate in 1337, but historically Castile could send an ambassador to Timur in 1404. Did something revolutionize travel in those 7 decades or the Castilians had some ultra secret technology, that the Aragonese ignored?
 
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Question: Why is it that crown of Aragon is unable to interact with the rest of the Mediterranean in grey, notably the western Levant and Egypt. While not for the time period, using the Orbis Map of the roman empire and going from Tarraco(Tarragona) and then going to Jerusalem it would take 24.3 days, while if you went to Aquincum(roughly modern budapest) it would take 35.9 Days. I imagine that time travel wouldn't be too dissimilar in this period as we are still talking about boats, horses, carriages, or on foot for travel methods.

Moreover it would mean that say the kingdom of Jerusalem is reformed by a successful crusade or by the Hospitalar knights, then they can't interact with the Iberian polities and thus their crusading knights that might be useful for them and vice versa.

Its because of a problem with the range algoritm and using closest port.
 
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It looks like it's basically EU4/IR diplomacy all over again: click a button, wait X years for the target country's opinion to go up, then click another button - and that's pretty much all there is to it. I had hoped that the diplomacy in PC would prove to be more engaging, but alas.

My biggest gripe with this system is that is has extended periods of idleness baked into it, and once a desired action is finally taken (like forming an alliance), then there's literally nothing else to do. I don't see this changing all that much here.

Moreover, because all DA require precise amounts of diplomatic resources (like opinion or favors), it makes is trivially easy to determine the outcome of one's actions on the world stage. I know exactly which and how many provinces I can safely take to not have a coalition form against me. I know exactly which nations will be annoyed with me and how much they'll hate me, and, consequently, how long it'll take for them to stop hating me. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd like there to be more unpredictability to international politics, perhaps in the form of a random factor that can be hidden from the player, but which will have its impact felt in how various countries react to my (and each other's) actions. The factor could be further impacted by the various countries' internal dynamics, like which estates have the most pull at the moment, or what the ruler's personality is, or even to which dynasty he belongs. Which would also mean that a country's internal politics would have an impact on its international relations, as is the case in the real world.
 
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