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CK3 Dev Diary #67 - A View to a Map

Greetings!

The team is slowly coming back together after a well deserved summer vacation. Today, let’s have a look at what we’ve been doing to the culture setup and some small scale map tweaks. Most of the work we’ve spent on cultures has naturally gone into the cultural overhaul itself, but we have made some general improvements as well, most notably over in India.

Starting with a small culture addition in southern Europe, and that some of you keen eyed readers noticed back in a previous dev diary, we’ve added back a fan favorite from CK2; Carantanian. The culture is quite extensive on game start and covers most of south-eastern Bavaria. From a historical point of view, the culture is of a west slavic origin, but as they got cut off from their ancestral brethren in the Carpathian Basin, they became gradually closer to the south slavic peoples. We represent this by Carantanian having a West Slavic Heritage, but speaking a South Slavic Language.

01_carantanian.jpg

[Image of Carantanian culture]

Next, I’ll hand it over to our local India expert, @Trin Tragula, to talk about (you guessed it) India!

Indian Culture Changes
The culture rework has been a good opportunity to rework the cultures in India a bit. The current setup here is one we inherited from Crusader Kings 2 and it was in some ways not entirely appropriate for our era. To better reflect the diversity of the subcontinent we have added two new cultures, changed the old ones a bit and also added a great number of potential culture names for when the large starting cultures diverge.

First of all we have gotten rid of Hindustani culture, and two new cultures have been broken away from what it used to cover in the south. The core part of the culture covers the Gangetic plain, and is now known as Kannauji after the Imperial city of Kannauj (Kanyakubja) which was the main prize of the region and often gave its name to it.

Hindustani itself is still around in a way, as a possible name for a cultural hybrid between an Iranian or Turkic culture with one of the north indian cultures.

02_cultures_in_india.jpg

[Image of the cultures in northern India]

Starting in the central parts of India the newly added Gond culture has been carved out of areas that were previously Hindustani, Marathi or Oriya. In 1066 most Gond counties are under the control of the Cedi kingdom and many of these counties are now also tribal at start. This culture covers a region that was in an odd place in the old setup, at the border of several cultures but not quite belonging to either of them.

03_gond.jpg

[Image of the Gond culture]

Covering the Malwa plateau as well as some of the adjacent regions that were previously considered Hindustani. This new culture shares a language with the Rajasthani and Gujarati cultures, Gurjar Apabhramsa. The existing Rajput culture has been renamed to Rajasthani (since Rajput as a cultural distinction does not really fit our start date) and Assamese is now known as Kamrupi.

04_malvi.jpg

[Image of the Malvi culture]

Indian History and Title Improvements
While looking over the subcontinent it was also clear that in some areas the title setup was also better suited for the early modern era, rather than the medieval era around Crusader Kings III start dates. A number of baronies have been renamed and reorganized into new counties, and a number of new vassals have been scripted in, especially for the 1066 start.
The starting presumptions about who controlled what in 1066 have also been revisited to bring things better in line with history and create a more interesting start. There are now more starting characters, both independent and vassals, and most kings will no longer start above their domain limit.

Some things like the crisis of the Chola empire should also be a bit better represented in the initial setup, with strong and somewhat unruly Pandya vassals, a much stronger Lankan revolt and the Chera Raja now independent (with his historical vassals to support him). You can now also play as the future king, Kulottunga.
There are also other, minor changes, such as revisiting the extent of cultures like Kashmiri, and Telugu, and assigning a number of tribal counties in the eastern-central part of the subcontinent.

05_sinhalese_rebellion.jpg

[Image of the Sinhalese rebellion in 1066]

That concludes today’s dev diary. Until next time!
 
Ayy, happy to see the anachronistic Assamese renamed to Kamrupi.

Am not going to get my hopes up for the next release, but hopefully this means we will get an Ahom invasion event and/or melting pot event whenever an India DLC eventually releases.
 
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Italian cultures should be renamed.
There's no such thing as "Cisalpine culture"
I reccomend this, with Italian being the name of the culture group and not of any specific culture.

1628022822275.png


Note:
Lombard would be in the italian group
A different culture, Longobard (Germanic group) would represent the Longobards

Note on the confusion between those two terms:
The Lombards (also known as Langobard/Longobards) were a germanic people who invaded Italy and ruled from 568 to 774. They later asssimilated into Italian culture and left little cutlrual trace, like the Normans in Sicily. Currently the game has this culture, but it is in the Latin group, weirdly.
The name Lombard was then applied to northern Italians (of Italian culture) during the Middle Ages, and the term Lombardi would refer to all inorthern talians when abroad. Indeed, it remains today as in Lombardia, the name of the Italian region with Milan.

Hence I propose two cultures:
Lombard (Italian group) - would the culture of the provinces in northern Italy, as in the map
Langobard (Germanic group) - would be the culture of several rulers in a pre-800 star (and even some in southern Italy until the 1000s), but no provinces would be Langobard since the ultrue never spread to the peoples.


This scheme only add 3 cultures, and renames the rest

Latin group is renamed to Italian group

Cisapline (Italian group)-> Lombard (Italian group) with Venetian (Italian group) splitting off of it
Italian (Italian group) -> Roman (Italian group)* and Tuscan (Italian group)
new Langobard (Germanic group)

*Alternatively, ancient Roman culture could be renamed to Latin to avoid confusion

I posted this as a suggestion: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/fix-italian-culture-s.1484809/
 
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Finally Carantanians are in the game again, after, well not a very long time compared to CK2 but still I am really looking forward to the next expansion. Artifacts are back, the royal court gives something more to do in peace time and you can do more useful things with the culture (which in CK2 was more than lacking).

I only hope that religion gets more depth too, in the future.
 
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Italian cultures should be renamed.
There's no such thing as "Cisalpine culture"
I reccomend this, with Italian being the name of the culture group and not of any specific culture.

View attachment 745431

Note:
Lombard would be in the italian group
A different culture, Longobard (Germanic group) would represent the Longobards
Yes, perfect cultures right there!
 
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Some things like the crisis of the Chola empire should also be a bit better represented in the initial setup, with strong and somewhat unruly Pandya vassals, a much stronger Lankan revolt and the Chera Raja now independent (with his historical vassals to support him). You can now also play as the future king, Kulottunga.​
There are also other, minor changes, such as revisiting the extent of cultures like Kashmiri, and Telugu, and assigning a number of tribal counties in the eastern-central part of the subcontinent.
I like this a lot. It eases a lot of my worries about historicity for you to focus and fix things like this. Question: is this an event like the invasion(s) of England or is this all through the game mechanics (and therefore easily messed up by the AI)
 
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Are you guys gonna expand a little more than the southern slavic area?

I got very interested on it because of a girl I met and then start learning Albanian, which I found a very beautiful language and a interesting history period.

The Kingdom of Albania, (1272), so should be able to create and the Principality of Arbanon, too

They have a very interesting history down there, greeks, turks, serbians, croatians, etc
 
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Italian cultures should be renamed.
There's no such thing as "Cisalpine culture"
I reccomend this, with Italian being the name of the culture group and not of any specific culture.

View attachment 745431

Note:
Lombard would be in the italian group
A different culture, Longobard (Germanic group) would represent the Longobards

Note on the confusion between those two terms:
The Lombards (also known as Langobard/Longobards) were a germanic people who invaded Italy and ruled from 568 to 774. They later asssimilated into Italian culture and left little cutlrual trace, like the Normans in Sicily. Currently the game has this culture, but it is in the Latin group, weirdly.
The name Lombard was then applied to northern Italians (of Italian culture) during the Middle Ages, and the term Lombardi would refer to all inorthern talians when abroad. Indeed, it remains today as in Lombardia, the name of the Italian region with Milan.

Hence I propose two cultures:
Lombard (Italian group) - would the culture of the provinces in northern Italy, as in the map
Langobard (Germanic group) - would be the culture of several rulers in a pre-800 star (and even some in southern Italy until the 1000s), but no provinces would be Langobard since the ultrue never spread to the peoples.


This scheme only add 3 cultures, and renames the rest

Latin group is renamed to Italian group

Cisapline (Italian group)-> Lombard (Italian group) with Venetian (Italian group) splitting off of it
Italian (Italian group) -> Roman (Italian group)* and Tuscan (Italian group)
new Langobard (Germanic group)

*Alternatively, ancient Roman culture could be renamed to Latin to avoid confusion

I posted this as a suggestion: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/fix-italian-culture-s.1484809/

One minor addition though:

It should be Italic not Italian.

Italian refers to Italy, the country. Italic refers to the region.

Same as german refers to Germany and germanic refers to something looser.
 
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That said, and also considering there are no degrees of mutual intelligibility (full, partial, etc) between different languages in the game, I'd prefer the later alternative.
Yes, they went that route, that's normal - what's not normal is that this is followed by having three Slavic languages which were closer to each other than many things they do unite.
I havent played game since release, as i decided to postpone my playthrough till game has a bit more meat on its bones.
The game is more meaty than CK2-without-DLCs ever was. People have just raised their expectations unreasonably.
- i understand what he meant by making proposition like that thou.
...I fail to understand this sentence. To reiterate The point you were supposedly answering to, the fact that Old Russian Cyrillics wrote Роусь does not allow to transcribe it as Rous, because this оу is a digraph letter that reflects [U] and is not reflected as ou in, say, names.
- did you read previous dev diaries in which devs explained in detail mechanics of new cultural unification/emergencies?
I did. When you create a new hybrid culture, it's a split: you had Greek and Italian, now you have Greek, Italian, AND Greco-Italian.
One minor addition though:

It should be Italic not Italian.

Italian refers to Italy, the country. Italic refers to the region.

Same as german refers to Germany and germanic refers to something looser.
Wrong. Both "Italic" and "Germanic" are technical terms for language groups. In the former case, the language group called Italic includes all Romance languages as well as dead languages of Faliscan, Siculian, Oscan, and Umbrian. Calling only a small subpart of this group remaining in Italy "Italic" would be akin to calling the current "Central Germanic" just "Germanic", ignoring all the other Germanic languages.
 
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Seems the new update is shaping up quite nicely. I'd like to learn about any changes being done to the cultural landscape of Hungary.

As I pointed out in one thread refering to an ethnic study of Medieval Hungary (link with the source and maps is below), it was much more of a multicultural kingdom (as it remained until its very end a hundred years ago). You got Slavs throughout the Pannonian Basin, The Magyar confederacy consisting of Magyar and Turkic elements, and later on various migrations from east, west and south (Germans Slavs, Vlachs, Turkic tribes).

 
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Anybody have recommendations for a book to learn more about the history of the region at this time period? I've always been hesitant to play in India because I know very little of its history, and I'd love to change that.
Just play the game, buddy. Because there isn't a handy guide to the time period of a sub-continent. In comparison, each region within the grand region has enough history to make the entire European history a prelude - and a short one in comparison. (It's enormous, huge and complicated and spans not just across global events, but each ruler head at the time - that in all truth is history on itself)

And frankly, CK3 can never really give the authentic simulation but it's the best one trying too (in general all PD games try some way or another on high-level overview.
 
You are kidding right? People expect things to get better in the tech world with time, not to stay the same or regress.
"People" also often fail to realize that with with improvements in tech, the complexity of development also tends to increase. I've seen it said that modern game development is more complicated than rocket science, and I don't doubt that a bit. And complexity is a very real limit to how much can be done in a given time frame.
 
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Just play the game, buddy. Because there isn't a handy guide to the time period of a sub-continent. In comparison, each region within the grand region has enough history to make the entire European history a prelude - and a short one in comparison. (It's enormous, huge and complicated and spans not just across global events, but each ruler head at the time - that in all truth is history on itself)

And frankly, CK3 can never really give the authentic simulation but it's the best one trying too (in general all PD games try some way or another on high-level overview.
Yeah, I'll counter that. I'm not looking to understand every aspect of Indian society, but I like to roleplay when I play. Because purely gameplay based challenges kinda get boring after 1k hours. And I like to know a little bit about the people I play as.

Also what if I just want to learn, and read a book?
 
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That's all well and good... But can we please get some royal court info? Why you gotta hold out on us???
Because they have to eke out the info all the way to Expansion Day.
 
Glad to see the culture setup is being improved upon! Are you planning on reworking the culture setup of the low countries as well? Currently it's quite a mess, having a 'Dutch' culture north of the Rhine while having Franconian below it makes no sense at all. They should either be merged or the border between the two should be moved east of the modern-day Netherlands, Flanders and Brabant were the heartland of medieval Dutch culture and language. Seeing more Saxon counties and a separate Frisian culture along the coast would be great as well, perhaps using the Caranthanian trick by having the latter share a language with the Anglo-Saxons but a heritage with the Germans? Wikipedia has quite a good map of the situation at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_German#/media/File:AlthochdeutscheSprachräume962_Box.jpg
 
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I love this. Glad to see India region is finally getting detailed work. Kamarupi culture is a good change as well, since it evolved into Assamese only much later. :)

Was Bengali culture and influence ever present this far west though? Influence of eastern Indian culture (which itself isn't very different from anywhere else in northern India, but I understand gameplay reason for splitting them) didn't go much far from Bihar/Magadh region.
 
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