CK2 Dev Diary #112 - Wonderful News

[2000wires]

I don't know if anyone has asked this but will the wonders give events every now and then besides just modifiers? LIke events of your character doing stuff in or around the wonders? I'm just wondering if they add any flavor events is all.

 

[Irish Crusader]

Will there be some fun and sinister decisions with some of these wonders, such as a tournament of death for all your prisoners in the coliseum with the last one standing walking out free or having a chance to become a Commander in your court if they choose to do so (similar to the blood game system, but with way more flavor events and participants)? Also will these wonders get map icons similar to the pyramids currently in game, or perhaps a map mode to see where they're at in the world?

 

[Prometheus_1]

Can you make a way to convert cities into castles or church into castle or city and viceversa?

 

[jose2534]

I want to customize my castle/palace or build an impressive palace, you know... having an impressive home with an observatory, a library, an armory and such would be nice.

 

[mauzel]

'Forbidden City' for Chineese Imperial?

Or a more generic "Palace Complex" should also work... As for presets, maybe the Great Wall of China? Since the western end of the great wall is on the map (Dunhuang, Jiuquan's Jiayu Guan, Yu Men etc.), perhaps slowing down movements across the provinces?

 

[tribnia]

Maybe some moais like those on the Easter Island? I know it will be strange for them to be in the game, but it will also be quite cool and interesting.
Maybe...as an Easter egg?

 

[TheDarkMaster]

Expanding on the special retinue wonder idea, I think trying to create an elite fighting force lends itself well to being a wonder.

Let's say you want to make an elite group of knights, what do you need for that?

• Really good horses, which would come out of an extensive and well financed horse breeding program. You'd need to import the high class horses, build extensive stables and farms, then run the program for decades before the horses were ready. After that you've got a world renowned stable, but it still needs a lot of money for operating costs.
• Excellent armorers and extensive smithies, you want your elite units that take years to train to die as infrequently as possible. So you want the best armor available for them. In fact, you'd probably be employing armorsmiths that are developing entirely new techniques for both smithing and armor structuring. The shear number of experts needed in one place to get the job done alone is going to lead to at least some breakthroughs.
• Large riding and training grounds, these knights are going to take years to learn their craft, beyond it simply being a family skill passed down from knight to squire. Much to the dismay of your nobility, a lord seeking to make an elite team of cavalry of this size has to find, attract, recruit, and train a lot more people just to get the combatants, let alone all the support staff needed for them.
• And on top of all that you need the facilities to house these professional soldiers that aren't going to be doing much other than training and fighting wars, as well as all the artisans and support staff.

It's a whole complex with different parts dedicated to putting everything together. This isn't something that a wealthy and powerful feudal ruler couldn't do, but it's an extensive project to put together on par with building a great temple or mighty mountain fortress.

EDIT: Even better, the wonder has a good way of being a generational project. A lord might want to run a large horse breeding program for various reasons (prestige, profit, better messengers, diplomatic gifts), which would start the wonder foundation as the horse breeding program. A later lord decides they want to also make armor suitable for the horse to sell alongside them, so they start the armory project. Now a grandson with a mind for stewardship comes along and decides to expand the operation, so they add on extensions and larger infrastructure to support all these people and horses. Finally a noble skilled in the ways of battle decides to take the existing facilities and convert them into an engine of war instead of prestige and profit, so they start the elite heavy cavalry training program as the final step.

Original post here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-wonderful-news.1152921/page-23#post-25171525

 

[WilliamTheIII]

Palaces are likely going in, some of these we might need to cut but currently we plan on having them.

If y'all were to do something like palaces then maybe have an like that of the merchant republic mansion. It would make upgrades pretty easy as well as being a display of your power and what not

 

[Woifee]

Maybe some moais like those on the Easter Island? I know it will be strange for them to be in the game, but it will also be quite cool and interesting.
Maybe...as an Easter egg?

Badum-Tssss

 

[Karlingid]

Oh god, please have this not mean Egyptian paganism is being added. Hellenic pagan was bad enough, we don't need more ridiculous revivals of dead religions added.

The chain for Hellenism is based heavily on Gemistus Pletho. In fact, in this case, history is stranger than fiction: Pletho also advocated the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Sparta in a feudal structure, with "helot" peasants giving a third of their harvest to the military aristocracy as tax. This man not only had the ear of the Byzantine emperor, but several notable Italian nobles as well - including Cosimo de Medici. He went on to found several (neo)Platonic academies where, reportedly, his students offered votives to statues of the Olympian gods. What CK2 gives, instead, is an event chain inspired by him, including his own excuses for being a practicing pagan, as well as a single province where population data for the time was relatively scarce but there was reportedly a remnant pagan presence in the earliest start date. With this in mind, as well as Pletho not being the only Neoplatonist to be called a pagan by his contemporaries (but standing out in our extensive records of him detailing how open and even boastful he was of it), both the Studying Classics event chain and the Maniots are within CK2's timeframe and reference real-life historical personages and populations.

Egyptian paganism was likewise not dead in the Middle Ages, with the caveat that it was not alive in Egypt. The Beja, in the earlier half of the Middle Ages, were firmly practicing pagans - Cushitic mythology (including groups like the Somalis, but most famously in the Kingdom of Kush) is heavily reflective, and potentially even derivative, of Egyptian mythology. Cushitic "Amani" can be clearly connected to Late Egyptian Amun, while the falcon god "Huur" is an obvious allusion to Horus. The Beja were nominally Christians or Muslims at times, but in other periods were pagans in full force - not even nominally being otherwise, and would act as the best conduit for a restoration of Egyptian paganism. There exists a parallel among the Berbers as well, and though their variant was less 'urban', it still featured many of the same features. Berber mummies and the monumental tombs constructed by otherwise-nomadic populations attest well to their cult of the dead, for instance. The Egyptians also claimed several of their own gods were shared by, or even originated from, the Berbers - such as Neith (Egyptian "Nit", or "Tanit" with Berber grammatical structure), Amun ("Ammon", also possibly "Ba'al Hammon" in Carthage), Amunet (who was depicted with "Libyan" headdress traditionally), and potentially Osiris. According to Herodotus, both Isis and Set were recognized by the Berbers, who had dietary customs similar to the Egyptians due to their reverence of these two deities. That the Oracle of Amun was in a primarily Berber region should be an indication of the connection the Egyptians and Berbers shared. While some names differ more significantly, such as Ifri and Gurzil, these still have potential Egyptian identifications that can't be ignored.

In short: Neither of these is extinct by 769. In fact, both have followers by the end date: the Guanches and the students of Pletho. You can't expect absolute destruction of these things so soon after they have fallen out of majority, so soon after they made their last hurrahs, and so soon in the history of both Christianity and Islam.

 

[TheDungen]

The chain for Hellenism is based heavily on Gemistus Pletho. In fact, in this case, history is stranger than fiction: Pletho also advocated the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Sparta in a feudal structure, with "helot" peasants giving a third of their harvest to the military aristocracy as tax. This man not only had the ear of the Byzantine emperor, but several notable Italian nobles as well - including Cosimo de Medici. He went on to found several (neo)Platonic academies where, reportedly, his students offered votives to statues of the Olympian gods. What CK2 gives, instead, is an event chain inspired by him, including his own excuses for being a practicing pagan, as well as a single province where population data for the time was relatively scarce but there was reportedly a remnant pagan presence in the earliest start date. With this in mind, as well as Pletho not being the only Neoplatonist to be called a pagan by his contemporaries (but standing out in our extensive records of him detailing how open and even boastful he was of it), both the Studying Classics event chain and the Maniots are within CK2's timeframe and reference real-life historical personages and populations.

Egyptian paganism was likewise not dead in the Middle Ages, with the caveat that it was not alive in Egypt. The Beja, in the earlier half of the Middle Ages, were firmly practicing pagans - Cushitic mythology (including groups like the Somalis, but most famously in the Kingdom of Kush) is heavily reflective, and potentially even derivative, of Egyptian mythology. Cushitic "Amani" can be clearly connected to Late Egyptian Amun, while the falcon god "Huur" is an obvious allusion to Horus. The Beja were nominally Christians or Muslims at times, but in other periods were pagans in full force - not even nominally being otherwise, and would act as the best conduit for a restoration of Egyptian paganism. There exists a parallel among the Berbers as well, and though their variant was less 'urban', it still featured many of the same features. Berber mummies and the monumental tombs constructed by otherwise-nomadic populations attest well to their cult of the dead, for instance. The Egyptians also claimed several of their own gods were shared by, or even originated from, the Berbers - such as Neith (Egyptian "Nit", or "Tanit" with Berber grammatical structure), Amun ("Ammon", also possibly "Ba'al Hammon" in Carthage), Amunet (who was depicted with "Libyan" headdress traditionally), and potentially Osiris. According to Herodotus, both Isis and Set were recognized by the Berbers, who had dietary customs similar to the Egyptians due to their reverence of these two deities. That the Oracle of Amun was in a primarily Berber region should be an indication of the connection the Egyptians and Berbers shared. While some names differ more significantly, such as Ifri and Gurzil, these still have potential Egyptian identifications that can't be ignored.

In short: Neither of these is extinct by 769. In fact, both have followers by the end date: the Guanches and the students of Pletho. You can't expect absolute destruction of these things so soon after they have fallen out of majority, so soon after they made their last hurrahs, and so soon in the history of both Christianity and Islam.

Got to disagree with you there, while there may be spinnoffs of Kemetic religion still remaining Kemetic religion is not ever consistent over time and region while it was still the state religion of egypt. Claiming these regions inspired by egyptian paganism are holdouts is missing the point. The ptolmaic kingdom or pagan roman egypt would not have recognized these as kindred religions they too diverged from what came before and in a very diffrent direction, with syncretism towards hellenism. In fact the cult of Isis was one of the bigger contenders for roman state religion at one point. Challenging the cult of Mithras and the cult of Sol invictus. All three stronger than both christianity and hellenic paganism in the final prechrsitan days of the roman empire. If Kemetic would make a return it would be based on the one practised in egypt before christianity or on the cult of Isis not on some backwater version that remained in a region long forgotten by the people north of the sahara.

edit: Heck the cult of sol invictus itself could be considered a spinnoff of the cult of Ra (Or would it be Amun-Ra?). It's intresting that the possible contenders for state religion of the roman empire are all eastern faiths. Two egyptian cults and the cult of Mithras is Persian. And last but not least Chrstianity which is from the levant.

 

[Karlingid]

Got to disagree with you there, while there may be spinnoffs of Kemetic religion still remaining Kemetic religion is not ever consistent over time and region while it was still the state religion of egypt. Claiming these regions inspired by egyptian paganism are holdouts is missing the point.

It's not really missing the point if medieval scholars write of the Beja worshiping "Isis", "Serapis", "Osiris", "Priapus" (Min/Khnum), and "Mandulis" (Horus), or when the Berbers just happen to practice many of the same rituals we typically associate with Egyptian paganism even when they don't mesh with a nomadic lifestyle very well. When Justinian closed the Egyptian temple at Philae, the Beja rallied in arms attempting to capture and reopen it. They were only stopped by the Nubians, newcomers to the region - more specifically the Christian kingdom of Nobatia. That was in the 6th century. By all means, the death throes of paganism in Egypt were felt by the Beja, the Egyptian temples as if their own, and when paganism died in Egypt it was the Beja who returned the attack. They are as much the same as Widukind's Danish allies. They are as much a holdout of Kemetic paganism as the Zhangzhung, the Zunbils, or the Lithuanians. The Berbers are in much the same boat, with the distinction that most are Muslim in the game's timeframe.

 

[TheDungen]

It's not really missing the point if medieval scholars write of the Beja worshiping "Isis", "Serapis", "Osiris", "Priapus" (Min/Khnum), and "Mandulis" (Horus), or when the Berbers just happen to practice many of the same rituals we typically associate with Egyptian paganism even when they don't mesh with a nomadic lifestyle very well. When Justinian closed the Egyptian temple at Philae, the Beja rallied in arms attempting to capture and reopen it. They were only stopped by the Nubians, newcomers to the region - more specifically the Christian kingdom of Nobatia. That was in the 6th century. By all means, the death throes of paganism in Egypt were felt by the Beja, the Egyptian temples as if their own, and when paganism died in Egypt it was the Beja who returned the attack. They are as much the same as Widukind's Danish allies. They are as much a holdout of Kemetic paganism as the Zhangzhung, the Zunbils, or the Lithuanians. The Berbers are in much the same boat, with the distinction that most are Muslim in the game's timeframe.

It really is because while we may associate that with them today that was long forgotten in the time of ck2. The difference is we can read the hieroglyphs. To the people of the ck2 period they are just fancy pictures. And there is nothing linking the gods of the beja to these fancy pictures because kemetic cults as known by the romans and perhaps remembered by the people in the ck2 period are nothing like what the beja and berber worship.

The cult of isis in rome and the ptolmaic kingdom is a semi-montheistic religion much like hinduism. With each individual god being an aspect of Isis, the universal god.

An interesting aspect is also Herur who upon becoming pharao in the older versions became Heru-er, Horus the great. But in Ptolmaic egypt the son becomes the father when ascending the throne, Horus (as they called him) became Serapis (as they called Osiris) and the consort of the universal goddess Isis.

Oh and Justinian has been dead for 200 years when the game starts.

 

[Karlingid]

It really is because while we may associate that with them today that was long forgotten in the time of ck2. The difference is we can read the hieroglyphs. To the people of the ck2 period they are just fancy pictures. And there is nothing linking the gods of the beja to these fancy pictures because kemetic cults as known by the romans and perhaps remembered by the people in the ck2 period are nothing like what the beja and berber worship.

The cult of isis in rome and the ptolmaic kingdom is a semi-montheistic religion much like hinduism. With each individual god being an aspect of Isis, the universal god.

An interesting aspect is also Herur who upon becoming pharao in the older versions became Heru-er, Horus the great. But in Ptolmaic egypt the son becomes the father when ascending the throne, Horus (as they called him) became Serapis (as they called Osiris) and the consort of the universal goddess Isis.

Oh and Justinian has been dead for 200 years when the game starts.

So, religions change over time is your point? Continental Germanic paganism as practiced by characters in the history files and the Saxons is quite different from the sort of paganism practiced by Erik the Heathen, nor is the Chalcedonian Catholicism of Charlemagne all that comparable in many ways to the heresy of the Borgias. The ridiculous argument for chronological separation has been made too often for other reasons as well - for example, denying Byzantine connections to Rome simply because they're not just like the Late Republic with segmented armor and gladiators. Would you use this argument for, per example, the Germans? While in the Charlemagne start they use a Suebian Knot and run around with shortswords, by the end date they're dressing in silly hats and some are even dressing like Arabs, they have a firm hold on Christianity and the Latin language, and tell the world that they are Romans. Yet, you would not say that one is less 'German' than the other, no?

You could say Ptolemaic religion isn't Egyptian at all, because gods like Serapis didn't exist before, and the cult of Amun was far more prevalent in Late Egyptian history than before. In fact, many deities of the Old Kingdom would probably confound most people, because a great many of them got new names, new functions, merged with other gods, or disappeared entirely. It is ironic that you bring up Isis as a universal goddess, which itself only really kicks into gear around the time of Roman Egypt, because one of the most prominent hymns to Isis as a universal goddess comes from the temple at Philae - the same temple where the last hieroglyphs were written, the same temple which was still active despite not having those hieroglyphs anymore two centuries later when Justinian shut it down, and the same temple that the Beja waged holy war for. Even though they don't seem to hold to that, neither was a "Universal Isis" itself a universal feature of Late Egyptian religion.

By all means, tell me why the Beja are Kemetic then, praying at Egyptian temples to Egyptian gods, but with an unbroken practice and nothing changing in their homeland are suddenly disqualified once Charlemagne rolls around a continent away? Is Judaism not Jewish, because of the loss of the Temple? Are Parsis not Zoroastrian, because they're Indian and because Iran is Muslim?

EDIT: Bonus points, the last known hieroglyphic inscription was dedicated to Mandulis, the chief god worshiped by the Beja

 

[Snow Crystal]

Keep in mind this thread is about Wonders, not Kemeticism.

 

[C1 Ariete]

Oh man! Please add this feature to Vic 3, I can't wait to build the tallest building in the World and overtake the French Eiffel Tower. Prestige +50

 

[Some Git]

Could it be possible (Through decision/event) to shift gears during construction and attempt to convert whatever you were building (Say, a massive palace) into a different kind of comparable structure (A cathedral or fortress, for example) in exchange for some kind of penalty, possibly with unique upgrades for doing so? (A project that started as a fortress but wound up a cathedral might be more resilient to attack, for example, and vice versa a cathedral turned fortress might have more detailed and elaborate stonework than a fortification of its type would otherwise have.)

 

[Phantomiux]

Do we get rapid discount if we will try build Wonder on Holy Site of our faith? You know, it should be easier to persuade peasants when they would participate on "something bigger than our king/emperor".

 

[Metz]

What about historic universities that are built via event and allow for greater tech speed?

What about the Trajan and Hadrian Walls? Can they give defensive bonuses?

 

[Thure]

The House of Wisdom HAS to be in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom