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Tinto Talks #35 - 30th of October

Hello everyone and welcome to another Tinto Talks, as it's a Happy Wednesday, the day of the week where we spill information about our super-mega-fantastically-secret game with the code name of Project Caesar.

Today we’ll talk about three relatively related topics, relating to Country Ranks, Great Powers and Hegemonies.

Country Ranks
There are four ranks that countries can have in Project Caesar. It is more similar to EU4 than Imperator in that changing country ranks is something you actively do on your own. Besides having various rules on what a country can do, they also give some benefits, and rather importantly to the player experience, they impact what the countries are called.

The code supports multiple types of ranks at the same level, so modders could in theory add dozens of variants of a duchy rank if they so desire.

The default rank is the County Rank, which all countries default to, unless set up to be something else.

The first rank above that is the Duchy Rank, where you can now guarantee other countries, and a little bit higher diplomatic capacity and power projection. Countries that start on this level include the Duchy of Brittany or the Duchy of Lithuania. To be able to upgrade from a county to a duchy, you can not be in any International Organizations that disallow rank changes, but you also need at least 100,000 pops of your primary culture.

The next rank above that is the Kingdom Rank, which requires 1 million pops of your primary culture and gives a larger diplomatic range and other abilities. This includes countries like the Kingdom of Sweden and the Sultanate of Delhi

The final rank, the Empire Rank, which is the hardest to promote to, allows for a wider variety of diplomatic actions, and other abilities. At the start of the game there is only one Empire in Europe though, the Eastern Roman one. A country must become a Great Power before they are able to attain this rank, and there are special restrictions on Catholic countries from pretending to be emperors without the Pope’s permission.

become_kingdom.png

Yeah, Livonian Order with about 380 Prussians has a bit of a challenge here..

Great Powers
A great power is a country that through advances, population, land area, development, and other factors has risen to be one of the most powerful countries in the world, and as such gains the ability to influence other countries simply by throwing its weight around.

The countries with the highest great power score become great powers. Subjects and countries fighting for their independence may not become Great Powers.

1730281525724.png

The countries you’d perhaps expect to be Great Powers in 1337 right?


Currently there are always eight different countries that are the Great Powers, but this is not a design we are 100% satisfied with. We have been talking about making the amount variable per age, or by using a threshold. We’ve also talked about mechanics for regional powers, but all designs so far have some severe drawbacks, for example how we would define the geographical area to make it feel good.

gp_benefit.png

There are some advantages to being a Great Power after all…


Hegemony
This is another feature that was introduced in the ‘Emperor’ DLC for EU4, but here will be a part of the base game. In that game this was a late game mechanic that would pit the most dominant countries against each other. This created a mechanic that most people never saw, and if they saw it in single-player, it was merely a tool to make the player even more powerful when he had already won the game.

In this game, however, the Hegemony mechanics unlock through an advance in the Age of Discovery.

We currently have three types of hegemony, Military, Navy and Economic, in the game, similar to EU4, and you can only be one type of Hegemony at the same time. We could be open to adding maybe a Cultural Hegemony as well, as the next few weeks Tinto Talks will show things about Culture-related systems.

To proclaim a Hegemony you need to be a Great Power, and then have a bigger army, navy or economy than all other great powers. After you proclaim it, you get a bonus where most of it scales with how long you have held the hegemony.

In a game where a casus belli is not always easy to get, the fact that you can always create a Casus Belli on any hegemon, if you are not one yourself, can be beneficial.

If you ever lose a war as a hegemon, you will lose your hegemony.

And remember, if you lose your hegemony, your prestige and diplomatic reputation will suffer.

hegemon.png

This one is kind of fun to have..

Stay tuned, as next week, we will do the first development diary about our new cultural mechanics in Project Caesar.
 
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Didn't expect JAPAN of all countries to be a great power at this time. Sure they defeated the Mongols but not the first country(or.. any number of consequent countries) to come to my mind when I think of '1330s Superpowers'
I guess it's because the Shogunate is portrayed as a technically unified country, and I guess Japan as a whole was far from poor in the 14th century (and therefore they get a good score in the game), but in reality we never think of Japan as a significant power in this age because the central government was very weak and the nation was locked in internal political struggles.
 
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are you sure that France should be the second great power ?
i think that spot should be for Egypt or Delhi while france be below england in this precise time period
and i say this as a french myself . i think even novgorod had more prestige than france in this time frame . the only glorious period france had in this whole era was under phillip August when he carpet sieged all english holdings to a point the king of england became known as Jean sans terre ( in england they simply call him king john but the real titles of the 2 brothers was in french since they were french by blood and language , coeur de lion for lion heart and sans terre )

but back to the main subject , i dont think france should be near that top . we talking about empires who's armies shake the ground and can stand the mongols and who are bigger , more developped and who have bigger populations than france . so why france is second ?
 
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small other thing

why is Japan a GP but Majahapit no? This is about the absolute height of that empire, and at the time they were the second richest country on earth. Where are they?
 
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1. How about making it so that anyone with a score within ~5% of the number 1 great power is a great power? I find the 8 limit very limiting for historical gameplay.

2. Please add Diplomatic and Cultural Hegemonies.
 
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How much of this lives in script? You mentioned that the allow blocks are in script, but what about the rest?

Like, if you don't add, say, regional great powers or regional hegemonies, can I?
 
Not so sure about the population limit on some of these. For example, would Brandenburg still be able to become the Kingdom of Prussia without having 1 million Saxons? And would other non-primary culture pops not count here (e.g Prussians)? Or would there be a different mechanism to attain that rank without the population limitation?
 
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If i am a hegemon, and my ally calls me into a war, will i loose my hegemon if my ally lose the war?

How is great power score calculated? Will advancements and institutions play a role in the score? Will score from development (or population) be scaled by control?

yes you will lose it.

Here are the factors for the Emperor of the HRE at the start of the game.
1730299361740.png
 
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Hegemony
This is another feature that was introduced in the ‘Emperor’ DLC for EU4, but here will be a part of the base game. In that game this was a late game mechanic that would pit the most dominant countries against each other. This created a mechanic that most people never saw, and if they saw it in single-player, it was merely a tool to make the player even more powerful when he had already won the game.

In this game, however, the Hegemony mechanics unlock through an advance in the Age of Discovery.

We currently have three types of hegemony, Military, Navy and Economic, in the game, similar to EU4, and you can only be one type of Hegemony at the same time. We could be open to adding maybe a Cultural Hegemony as well, as the next few weeks Tinto Talks will show things about Culture-related systems.

To proclaim a Hegemony you need to be a Great Power, and then have a bigger army, navy or economy than all other great powers. After you proclaim it, you get a bonus where most of it scales with how long you have held the hegemony.

In a game where a casus belli is not always easy to get, the fact that you can always create a Casus Belli on any hegemon, if you are not one yourself, can be beneficial.

If you ever lose a war as a hegemon, you will lose your hegemony.

And remember, if you lose your hegemony, your prestige and diplomatic reputation will suffer.

View attachment 1209269
This one is kind of fun to have..

Stay tuned, as next week, we will do the first development diary about our new cultural mechanics in Project Caesar.
Johan! What about there being a fourth "religious" hegemony?
Essentially, the "head" of the most popular religion (either official religious head, or the strongest/biggest country of that religion) gets bonuses related to clergy power and religious conversion and such. The "hegemonic religion" would be calculated based on primarily the number of pops following the religion, but the number of countries following that religion and also the relative strength of those countries (like their military might, rank, great power status etc.) would also be used.

The religious hegemony would likely be contested between the strongest Sunni nation (or Caliph) and the Pope for most of the time frame.
 
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For determining great powers, why not base it on Rivals? Would be great power, all countries that have no countries too powerful to rival at basic diplomatic range. Probably a couple cases like the HRE preventing you to be one if not an elector / emperor could complete it

Yes, it could lead to having something like a mesoamerican country being in the list, but they would lose their place the moment someone from the other side of the ocean come knocking
 
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@Johan I have a few questions:
- Shouldn't Bulgaria be an empire too at the start since they are a Tsardom?
-Wouldn't it make more sense for the Livonian Order primary culture to be Baltic German instead of Prussian?
-It's not a question but you said that to become a catholic empire you need the permission of the Pope but that should be for kingdoms rather than empires, also it shouldn't be possible for Catholic(and depending on the patriarchate for orthodox as well) tags to become an empire since in Christian theology the last and only Christian empire in the world should be Rome, which in the case of the catholics is the HRE, that's why despite being known as empires many European colonial countries like Spain were never elevated into one(France under Napoleon was an exeption because he didn't like the religion)
 
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Is the Holy Roman Roman Empire not considered a singular great power? Does the emperor get any special points to boost him in the great power rankings?

yeah, they get a +250 bonus for being emperor, but Upper Bavaria in 1337 is a tiny country on its own.
 
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How will the x amount of primary culture pops play with the various historical duchies and kingdoms which had almost no primary culture pops? I.E. Latin Empire or the Mughals?
 
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If we had a threshold over who could be a great power or not, that would work...
You could set the threshold to be dependent on the top two countries‘ score. Let’s say 60% of France‘s score is necessary to become a great power at game start. This way you could sidestep the Yuan breaking everything and you could simulate a duopolar world order, instead of just the multipolar one the current setup provides.
 
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Thanks for a great TT!

A couple of questions on the topic and older topics:

  1. Can you declare war on hypothetical early hegemon Yuan as a European nation if you have not discovered China?
  2. Can a nation lose its Government rank?
  3. What about using characters as diplomats instead of abstracted '0.1 diplomats'?
  4. We should be able to liberate the slaves of all accepted cultures, not only primary culture. As France we should be able to bring home Languedocien and Provancale guys, not only those from around Paris :D
  5. What about adding the request 'Sell province' to the peace deal to simulate the bilateral peace deals when you want to buy the land? This way it will be formally one-sided peace deal and easier for UI. The price will be defined by some unified algorithm.

1 . no
2 . no
3. no
4. yes
5. that would still be the main problem of performance and ai
 
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I think this is because in certain specific situations you shouldn't be able to increase your rank, such as trying to become a kingdom in the HRE. So if it's automatic, it'll leave some players wondering why their rank isn't going up when it normally would at that point.

Its one of the reasons yes.
 
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If we had a threshold over who could be a great power or not, that would work...
How about scaling the treshold around the #1 great power?

Somthing like Yuan has 1000 score, anyone within 10% is also a great power.

So than any country with more than 900 score is considered a great power?
 
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