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Tinto Talks #58 - 9th of April 2025

Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talk, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about our entirely super-top-secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today, I will be your host instead of Johan since we will be talking about the flavour mechanics. These will be basically IOs, Situations, and Religions, and we will be talking about a bunch of them for some weeks, although from time to time Johan will come back to present some other stuff. So, let’s start without further ado with the Holy Roman Empire, the most convoluted organization invented by mankind only Imperial polity that existed in Western Europe for most of the game period.

In 1337, it’s a very different beast compared to previous installments in other PDX GSGs. The Great Interregnum that started in 1254 after the deaths of Frederick II and Conrad IV of the House of Hohenstaufen, and the double election of two contenders (Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile) in 1257 led to a period of weak and diminishing Imperial Authority. In the coming decades, the Houses of Habsburg, Luxembourg, and Wittelsbach would fight for the Imperial election, making the Electorates increasingly more important.

HRE Map.jpg

A beautiful beast! The color code for every country:
  • Yellow: Emperor
  • Light Blue: Prince-Elector
  • Middle Blue: Archbishop-Elector
  • Dark Blue: Imperial Prelates
  • Light Green: Free Imperial Cities
  • Middle Green: Republics
  • Pink/Brownish: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Grey: Imperial Princes
  • Purple Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land

Here is an overview of the HRE IO panel and all the different member types that you can find by scrolling down on it:

HRE Panel1.png

Prince-Elector.jpg

Archbishop-Elector.jpg

Free Imperial City.png

Imperial Prelate.jpg

Imperial Peasant Republic.jpg

And here is the sub-panel that show all its members:

HRE Members.png

The HRE comes with a bunch of mechanics and features, which you can easily grasp in the IO’s tooltip:

HRE Tooltip.jpg

HRE Tooltip2.jpg

Let’s start with the most important base feature, the Imperial Authority, which is the currency used by the Holy Roman Emperor to enact Imperial Laws. There are a few sources to either add or subtract Imperial Authority:

Imperial Authority.jpg

Note: the missing +0.01 comes from value rounding which is not reflected in the tooltip.

Imperial Laws create different effects that impact the members of the HRE. At the start, there are only two available:

Imperial Laws.jpg

You may notice that there’s a category, ‘Fundamental Laws’, with only one policy possible, the ‘Golden Bull’. This was the single most important law approved in the HRE, becoming its base political constitution up until its dissolution after being enacted in 1356. In Project Caesar, the Emperor has a very high incentive to pass it as soon as possible, as it unlocks additional laws and actions:

Golden Bull.png

When you have 35 Imperial Authority, you can try to enact it, and a Vote in the Imperial Diet will happen:
Golden Bull vote.jpg

That works quite similarly to country parliaments, as you have to secure a positive vote of the different HRE members:

Golden Bull Diet.png

And this would be the situation after the law passes, with 8 new Imperial Laws available:

Imperial Laws2.jpg

Imperial Laws3.jpg

In general terms, most of the laws have 5 policies available, with the starting ones usually being in the middle positions of the 5. This is how it works (these are 'instructions' in the script):

#With the enactment of the Golden Bull, most HRE laws are set to the 3rd policy which has limited or no modifiers active at all
#The HRE Emperor can try to change the policy to the next adjacent one (so from 3rd tier to 4th or 2nd tier)
#The left tier is the 4th and 5th and is more in favor of benefitting the HRE as a whole
#The right tier is the 2nd and 1st and is more in favor of benefitting the HRE Emperor first and foremost

#Some laws have only 3 policies in which cases there are not pro-Emperor vs pro-Member positions

#The only law which does not follow the rule is the power_of_the_emperor_law which starts at improved_imperial_authority_policy (4) policy.
#The reason for this is to delay the unification of the HRE + there is not much design space for an even further decentralized HRE.
#As such, having 2 policies for the decentralized HRE are not really doable.

# LAW
# Pol 5 Pol 4 Pol 3 Pol 2 Pol 1
# |--------------|--------------|--------------|--------------|

Let’s take as example the Imperial Voting Law:

Electorship Law1.jpg

Electorship Law2.jpg

The Imperial Election is then a key feature, since it elects the Holy Roman Emperor, who then sets all the Imperial Laws, Diets, etc. Here you can see an example of how it works:
Imperial Election.jpg

The King of Bohemia got backed by most of the Electors, and thus, became the Holy Roman Emperor after the death of Ludwig IV of Upper Bavaria.

This event will trigger if a different country gets its ruler elected as Emperor, as in this example:

Imperial Coronation1.jpg

Imperial Coronation2.jpg

One of the factors behind the election is the Dynastic Power, a new value that is currently only used for the HRE mechanics (although it could potentially be used for other IOs, as it’s a scriptable/moddable feature), which impacts the likelihood of a certain country from a powerful dynasty to be elected or re-elected as Emperor:
Dynastic Power1.jpg

Dynastic Power2.jpg

Dynastic Power3.jpg

Last but not least is the Imperial Contribution. It is an amount of money and manpower that any member of the HRE may contribute to the Emperor, who can later spend it in Imperial Actions, and also defending the Empire (in theory…):
Imperial Payments1.jpg

Imperial Payments2.jpg

… And that’s all for today, since it’s already a very long TT! Next week, we will be taking a look at the Catholic Religion and the Catholic Church IO. Cheers!
 
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Well, after the Golden Bull passes a double Election should not really be possible anymore, you need at least 4 of the 7 electors to vote for you which makes a double vote impossible.

In 1314 this was only possible because the list of 7 Electors was already established, but that was just based on custom, not on written rules. This allowed the candidates some leeway, there were some titles where it was not quite clear who was the legitmate elector. In this case these were the titles of King of Bohemia and Duke of Saxony. For Bohemia there were two rival claimants, King John of Luxembourg who was widely acknowledged as King and Herny of Carinthia, who had been King before John, but had been deposed by the Bohemian nobilty. Saxony meanwhile had split up into several Duchies and they did not agree which one of them was the actual Elector.
It still happened once more after the passing of the Golden Bull.

There is no historical reason to implement this, Prussia never left, neither did Switserland officially (although de facto it did but not because of its size), same thing for Netherlands.
Switzerland officially left the HRE in 1648 as one of the provisions of peace of Westphalia. Though true, not because of its size, but their penchant for caving in Habsburg skulls.
 
It's looking great! I have a small quarrel with the map tho. To me, the colour for the prelates pops up way more than the ones for the emperor or the electorates, which I think is the main thing you wanna be looking at when checking the map.
 
Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talk, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about our entirely super-top-secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today, I will be your host instead of Johan since we will be talking about the flavour mechanics. These will be basically IOs, Situations, and Religions, and we will be talking about a bunch of them for some weeks, although from time to time Johan will come back to present some other stuff. So, let’s start without further ado with the Holy Roman Empire, the most convoluted organization invented by mankind only Imperial polity that existed in Western Europe for most of the game period.

In 1337, it’s a very different beast compared to previous installments in other PDX GSGs. The Great Interregnum that started in 1254 after the deaths of Frederick II and Conrad IV of the House of Hohenstaufen, and the double election of two contenders (Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile) in 1257 led to a period of weak and diminishing Imperial Authority. In the coming decades, the Houses of Habsburg, Luxembourg, and Wittelsbach would fight for the Imperial election, making the Electorates increasingly more important.


A beautiful beast! The color code for every country:
  • Yellow: Emperor
  • Light Blue: Prince-Elector
  • Middle Blue: Archbishop-Elector
  • Dark Blue: Imperial Prelates
  • Light Green: Free Imperial Cities
  • Middle Green: Republics
  • Pink/Brownish: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Grey: Imperial Princes
  • Purple Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land

Here is an overview of the HRE IO panel and all the different member types that you can find by scrolling down on it:


And here is the sub-panel that show all its members:


The HRE comes with a bunch of mechanics and features, which you can easily grasp in the IO’s tooltip:


Let’s start with the most important base feature, the Imperial Authority, which is the currency used by the Holy Roman Emperor to enact Imperial Laws. There are a few sources to either add or subtract Imperial Authority:

View attachment 1278913
Note: the missing +0.01 comes from value rounding which is not reflected in the tooltip.

Imperial Laws create different effects that impact the members of the HRE. At the start, there are only two available:


You may notice that there’s a category, ‘Fundamental Laws’, with only one policy possible, the ‘Golden Bull’. This was the single most important law approved in the HRE, becoming its base political constitution up until its dissolution after being enacted in 1356. In Project Caesar, the Emperor has a very high incentive to pass it as soon as possible, as it unlocks additional laws and actions:


When you have 35 Imperial Authority, you can try to enact it, and a Vote in the Imperial Diet will happen:

That works quite similarly to country parliaments, as you have to secure a positive vote of the different HRE members:


And this would be the situation after the law passes, with 8 new Imperial Laws available:


In general terms, most of the laws have 5 policies available, with the starting ones usually being in the middle positions of the 5. This is how it works (these are 'instructions' in the script):



Let’s take as example the Imperial Voting Law:


The Imperial Election is then a key feature, since it elects the Holy Roman Emperor, who then sets all the Imperial Laws, Diets, etc. Here you can see an example of how it works:
View attachment 1278922
The King of Bohemia got backed by most of the Electors, and thus, became the Holy Roman Emperor after the death of Ludwig IV of Upper Bavaria.

This event will trigger if a different country gets its ruler elected as Emperor, as in this example:


One of the factors behind the election is the Dynastic Power, a new value that is currently only used for the HRE mechanics (although it could potentially be used for other IOs, as it’s a scriptable/moddable feature), which impacts the likelihood of a certain country from a powerful dynasty to be elected or re-elected as Emperor:

Last but not least is the Imperial Contribution. It is an amount of money and manpower that any member of the HRE may contribute to the Emperor, who can later spend it in Imperial Actions, and also defending the Empire (in theory…):

… And that’s all for today, since it’s already a very long TT! Next week, we will be taking a look at the Catholic Religion and the Catholic Church IO. Cheers!
The colouring of HRE states on the map should be changed

I can't distinguish that:
  • Light Green: Free Imperial Cities
  • Middle Green: Republics
1744357779857.png

without staring for a minute

What about red, purple, pink, and white colours?

Also, this blue is too strong
1744295493433.png
 
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It still happened once more after the passing of the Golden Bull.


Switzerland officially left the HRE in 1648 as one of the provisions of peace of Westphalia. Though true, not because of its size, but their penchant for caving in Habsburg skulls.
No Switzerland left de facto, never de jure. An extract from Peter H. Wilson's Heart of Europe:

Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, the Peace of Westphalia did not confirm Swiss independence, but merely extended the privileges of 1499 to the city of Basel, which only joined the Confederation in 1501. Austria renounced jurisdiction over some Alpine communities in 1652, but retained some rights, as well as over Konstanz, which it had annexed in 1548. Change was gradual and was hindered by the difficulties in deciding whether sovereignty lay with the individual communities, the cantons or the Confederation as a whole. Solothurn stopped requiring its citizens to swear loyalty to the Empire only in 1681. Other symbolic ties like coats of arms were not removed until around 1700.
 
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Some based on historical situations. For instance, these are the policies possible in the 'Power of the Holy Roman Emperor' law:

-image snip-
>renovatio imperii

Oh yes.
 
Some based on historical situations. For instance, these are the policies possible in the 'Power of the Holy Roman Emperor' law:

View attachment 1278997
I think it is a bit strange that Outlaw Internal Warfare (essentially ewiger landfriede) is considered second to Renovatio Imperii, when Ewiger Landfried was historically established around the early 16th century and found its origin already way earlier. This period is also a period of way stronger decentralization then before. I think this law should be seperate from this policy path and instead be attached to the Landfriede one.
 
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View attachment 1278986

If these are the rules, then how can the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Bavarian Duchies, etc. exist?

It would seem logical to me that states would not be able to change their rank on their own, but rather, once they met the conditions, they would ask the Emperor to grant them a rank increase. Then, depending on their attitude towards him, it would be granted or not.

You could become king IN Prussia, but not of Prussia;)
 
It still happened once more after the passing of the Golden Bull.

Yes, there was another double election in 1410 with Sigismund and Jobst. However in that case Sigismund quickly lost most of his support when the Electors realized that he had sold the Margravate of Brandenburg to Jobst a few years earlier und could therefore not use Brandenburgs vote to elect himself. Whether Sigismund could have sustained his claim if Jobst had not died a few months later is uncertain. Once Jobst had died, Sigismund was elected with the correct slate of electors. Sigismund then accepted the second election, which is kind of an admission that the first one was illegitimate.

So yes, it could sitll happen even with the Golden Bull in place, but this is the only example with it in place and it was quickly resolved.
 
The two more decentralized voting laws seem rather bland, simply giving more diplo reputation. Here is an idea of mine: What if the most decentralized voting law "Re-election Right" would allow an elector to call an HRE election early if they wished, even before the emperor died? That would fit the theme of a super powerful electorate, right? Maybe some limitation, like with a long cooldown, or a grace period of a couple years preventing a re-election spam right after an election happened.
 
You have to wait until Reformation to change it. It also only supports Christian confessions; otherwise, the Empire wouldn't be Holy. :p

I really feel like the HRE shouldn't have an official religion until after the wars of religion, or at least, Catholic being the "official relgiion" shouldn't stop someone from a different christian tradiiton being elected anyway.

The chief problem with the way it's represented in EU4 is that protestants aren't even eligible to the Emperorship until they win a league war (or fight one to a standstill), when in actual history everyone understood that if four electors became protestant it would likely lead to a protestant being elected, so the Catholic emperors did their best with the Reservatum Ecclesiasticum and then the putting down of the Bohemian Revolt to prevent exactly that from happening. Equally, events like the Cologne War and the Bohemian Revolt were on the protestant side partially about securing those electorates so a protestant emperor might be elected.

If a majority of electors end up Protestant, or Hussite, Anglican, Lollard or whatever, I don't think the game mechanics should prevent them electing an emperor of their confession. It's fine if there's war over this stuff, of course, but it should be "thing happens, which causes war" not " thing cannot happen until a war is fought". Gebhard Truchsess was forbidden by law from retaining Cologne when he converted to Calvinism, but he did it anyway and there was no game mechanic declaring his country officially catholic to stop him, only bloody siege warfare managed that.
 
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I tried matching the colours more closely to EU4's HRE mapmode, and have included an image below.
Incidentally, I do wonder if @SaintDaveUK tried this already and opted for something new, or if we might see something closer to this in the final release?
ueX5LJI.png

  • Red: Emperor
  • Brown: Prince-Elector
  • Yellow: Archbishop-Elector
  • Grey: Imperial Prelates
  • Dark Blue: Free Imperial Cities
  • Light Blue: Republics
  • Mauve: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Green: Imperial Princes
  • Black Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land
 
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I tried matching the colours more closely to EU4's HRE mapmode, and have included an image below.
Incidentally, I do wonder if @SaintDaveUK tried this already and opted for something new, or if we might see something closer to this in the final release?
xALeYEK.png

  • Red: Emperor
  • Brown: Prince-Elector
  • Yellow: Archbishop-Elector
  • Grey: Imperial Prelates
  • Dark Blue: Free Imperial Cities
  • Light Blue: Republics
  • Mauve: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Green: Imperial Princes
  • Black Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land
I think the Imperial Prelates could benefit with being brighter with a slight touch of blue

hre toothpaste.png
 
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I tried matching the colours more closely to EU4's HRE mapmode, and have included an image below.
Incidentally, I do wonder if @SaintDaveUK tried this already and opted for something new, or if we might see something closer to this in the final release?
xALeYEK.png

  • Red: Emperor
  • Brown: Prince-Elector
  • Yellow: Archbishop-Elector
  • Grey: Imperial Prelates
  • Dark Blue: Free Imperial Cities
  • Light Blue: Republics
  • Mauve: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Green: Imperial Princes
  • Black Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land
Brown should be reserved for an "archduchy" once Privilegium Maius is forged, to represent how full of caca the dynasty in question is.
 
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Hello, and welcome to another Tinto Talk, the happy Wednesdays where we talk about our entirely super-top-secret game with the codename Project Caesar.

Today, I will be your host instead of Johan since we will be talking about the flavour mechanics. These will be basically IOs, Situations, and Religions, and we will be talking about a bunch of them for some weeks, although from time to time Johan will come back to present some other stuff. So, let’s start without further ado with the Holy Roman Empire, the most convoluted organization invented by mankind only Imperial polity that existed in Western Europe for most of the game period.

In 1337, it’s a very different beast compared to previous installments in other PDX GSGs. The Great Interregnum that started in 1254 after the deaths of Frederick II and Conrad IV of the House of Hohenstaufen, and the double election of two contenders (Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso X of Castile) in 1257 led to a period of weak and diminishing Imperial Authority. In the coming decades, the Houses of Habsburg, Luxembourg, and Wittelsbach would fight for the Imperial election, making the Electorates increasingly more important.


A beautiful beast! The color code for every country:
  • Yellow: Emperor
  • Light Blue: Prince-Elector
  • Middle Blue: Archbishop-Elector
  • Dark Blue: Imperial Prelates
  • Light Green: Free Imperial Cities
  • Middle Green: Republics
  • Pink/Brownish: Imperial Peasant Republics
  • Grey: Imperial Princes
  • Purple Stripes: Imperial Land not owned by an HRE member
  • Other stripes: Land owned by an HRE member not yet incorporated as Imperial land

Here is an overview of the HRE IO panel and all the different member types that you can find by scrolling down on it:


And here is the sub-panel that show all its members:


The HRE comes with a bunch of mechanics and features, which you can easily grasp in the IO’s tooltip:


Let’s start with the most important base feature, the Imperial Authority, which is the currency used by the Holy Roman Emperor to enact Imperial Laws. There are a few sources to either add or subtract Imperial Authority:

View attachment 1278913
Note: the missing +0.01 comes from value rounding which is not reflected in the tooltip.

Imperial Laws create different effects that impact the members of the HRE. At the start, there are only two available:


You may notice that there’s a category, ‘Fundamental Laws’, with only one policy possible, the ‘Golden Bull’. This was the single most important law approved in the HRE, becoming its base political constitution up until its dissolution after being enacted in 1356. In Project Caesar, the Emperor has a very high incentive to pass it as soon as possible, as it unlocks additional laws and actions:


When you have 35 Imperial Authority, you can try to enact it, and a Vote in the Imperial Diet will happen:

That works quite similarly to country parliaments, as you have to secure a positive vote of the different HRE members:


And this would be the situation after the law passes, with 8 new Imperial Laws available:


In general terms, most of the laws have 5 policies available, with the starting ones usually being in the middle positions of the 5. This is how it works (these are 'instructions' in the script):



Let’s take as example the Imperial Voting Law:


The Imperial Election is then a key feature, since it elects the Holy Roman Emperor, who then sets all the Imperial Laws, Diets, etc. Here you can see an example of how it works:
View attachment 1278922
The King of Bohemia got backed by most of the Electors, and thus, became the Holy Roman Emperor after the death of Ludwig IV of Upper Bavaria.

This event will trigger if a different country gets its ruler elected as Emperor, as in this example:


One of the factors behind the election is the Dynastic Power, a new value that is currently only used for the HRE mechanics (although it could potentially be used for other IOs, as it’s a scriptable/moddable feature), which impacts the likelihood of a certain country from a powerful dynasty to be elected or re-elected as Emperor:

Last but not least is the Imperial Contribution. It is an amount of money and manpower that any member of the HRE may contribute to the Emperor, who can later spend it in Imperial Actions, and also defending the Empire (in theory…):

… And that’s all for today, since it’s already a very long TT! Next week, we will be taking a look at the Catholic Religion and the Catholic Church IO. Cheers!
Is the Imperial Contribution only applied to the lands of the HRE? If half of my lands are in HRE but half are not, will only the HRE part be taxed?
 
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