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Tinto Flavour #17 - 13th of May 2025 - Vijayanagar & Indian regional content

Hello, and welcome one more week to Tinto Flavour, the happy Fridays Tuesdays & Fridays in which we take a look at the content of Europa Universalis V!

Today we will talk about three topics: the generic content available for most of the countries in India; the unique content of Vijyanagar; and other regional content available for other Indian countries. A meaty TF, so let’s start without further ado!

Let’s start by talking about the generic content available for Indian countries. There are some reforms, policies, and units that are available to most countries, like these:

Nayankara System.jpg


Poligar.jpg


Paik System.jpg

The Paik System unlocks three types of levies, depending on the age:

Early Paik.jpg

Paik.jpg

Late Paik.jpg

There are also Elephant units:
Elephant Cavalry.jpg

Elephant Auxiliary.jpg

And a building that produces Ivory from Elephants - For those of you not so tuned into the Tinto Maps series, we’re representing African elephants with the Ivory resource, and the Indian elephants with the Elephants resource, so it can be used for units (as Elephants), or for other economic purposes, by transforming it first into Ivory with this building:
Elephant Hunting Grounds.jpg

Advances like:
Saqiyah.jpg

And a unique type of vassalage - The Samanta System, with 3 different subject types:
Samanta Feudalism.jpg

Samanta.jpg

Maha-Samanta.jpg

Pradana-Maha-Samanta.jpg

Finally, let’s take a look at the flavour naming of the states in the Hindu Indian countries:
Indian Estates.jpg



Let’s now take a look at the unique flavour content of Vijayanagar, a country that in 1337 was leading the resistance against the Sultanate of Delhi in Southern India:

The newly founded Mahārājya of Vijayanagar stands strong after the momentous defeat of Delhian troops in the Deccan, with Mahārājā Harihara Sangama and his brother Crown Prince Bukka Raya Sangama leading the fight against the Muslim rulers of India.

Although the Vijayanagari rule has only recently been established, the current situation in the Deccan promises us a rapid rise to power if we can utilize our momentum correctly, as we can secure control over important trade routes between China and Europe, and profit from exporting valuable goods from our resource-rich lands.


Vij Country Selection.jpg

Vijayanagar1.jpg

Vijayanagar2.jpg


Vijayanagar has a unique policy for the Administrative System law:
Vij Rajya.jpg

It also has unique advances, as usual:
Vij City of Victory.jpg

Vij Bunds.jpg

Vij Bund.jpg

Vij Carnatic Music.jpg

And it also has several flavour events, such as:
Vij Prophecy of.jpg

Arirayavibhada.jpg


Administration of the Realm.jpg

Multilingual Court.jpg


Vij Astadiggajas.png

Astadiggajas.jpg

Another country with unique content is Orissa, which has a very interesting setup, with some countries as Samanta subjects:
Ori Country Selection.jpg

Orissa1.jpg


Ori Anka Year.jpg

Ori Elephants.jpg

Ori Elephants 2.jpg

Ori Odia.jpg

We also have unique content for countries such as Bengal, Bahmani, and Pandua. For example, in the first case, it starts as three independent countries, which in the case of unifying the region and forming the Sultanate of Bengal:
Bengal.jpg

Would get contents and events such as:
Pandua.jpg

Finally, we also have a bunch of content for other formable countries, that will work as ‘regional powers’ with unique content such as advances, etc. This is a list of these formables:
  • Deccan
  • Gujarat
  • Hindustan
  • Marathas
  • Mughals
  • Nepal
  • Punjab
  • Rajputana

…But since this Tinto Flavour is already long enough, you’ll have to find out about it when playing our game, as that’s all for today!

Remember that tomorrow there will be a Tinto Talks about Hinduism, Jainism & Sikhism; on Friday a Tinto Flavour about Delhi; and next Monday we will have the Tinto Maps Feedback for India. Cheers!
 
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It's available to countries with capital in Iberia, North Africa, Middle East, Western and Eastern Khorasan, and India.
would it be possible to add it to sicily too (they were called saia or saja)? it was a subregion which also used them historically due to the muslim invasion of sicily (the diffusion in sicily and iberia happened during the same time). while at the game start date muslim in sicily wasn't present anymore their technologies were still used (in some places in sicily they are used to this day).
 
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We discussed about how to handle the caste system when creating the Indian content, and taking into account that Medieval India is extremely complex, we decided to just keep it simple, and attach them to the flavour estate naming. But we're open to tweaks, because we want to favor immersion with that feature, so feel free to make suggestion about which the most immersive names per country religion/area would be. This is how it looks like in an Indian Islamic country as Delhi, BTW:
View attachment 1297765

PS: This is not only unique to India, we have similar problems in other regions with those societal groups that do not fit entirely into one of our pop or estate categories. But, again, we need to try to make as gameplay-consistent and flavour-immersive as possible, at the same time, which is not always easy.
What are the commoners? Peasants or burghers in the cities? It looks like yeomen.
 
If the branches of hinduism can be split without splitting the religion as a whole, the same system should be applied to the western schism, led the papacy be an international organization instead of the religion, this also could lead to Rome and Avignon being permanently split without splitting Catholicism
 
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Good Tinto Flavour on Vijayanagar and the Indian region.
 
Vijayanagar was the 'historical winner' of the region, until it fell to the Bahmani Sultanate. Therefore, we prioritized its content over Hoysala. Nonetheless, you can access new flavour content starting as Hoysala by forming one of the formables, it's how we organized the flavour content of the region.

Formables with content; we have not yet closed the final list of formables, although it will be soon, as we already have a solid list from the TT, so I can't really say how many formables will be available in India.
Off the top of my head what southern India formable is there with content that Hoysala would be eligible to form?

  • Deccan: Doesn’t make sense as that’s well Deccan not the area south of it or coastal
  • Gujarat: Obvious why
  • Hindustan: shouldn’t need to unify India to get a tag
  • Marathas: Uhh maybe but that’s pretty seperate from the SW coast
  • Mughals: Pretty obvious
  • Nepal: Duh
  • Punjab: NE not SE
  • Rajputana: if I remember correctly this is a Ganges centric area for the ancestors of eu4 Janpur
Can I please suggest some sort of unified Tamil tag as it seems to be a really logical geographic grouping and would make sense as unique region with seperate cultures
 
Whether or not the caste system is a good tool to map onto estates, why are there no Dalits? The Jatis they belong to existed at the time, as did the practice of untouchability. Iirc we haven't seen Cagots or any similar outcast classes in any of the other tts as well and I'd expect to see those

I don't think they're best portrayed as slaves either and they're over 15% of the current population of India it's a little strange that they don't have an estate or some similar structure to represent them
 
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Whether or not the caste system is a good tool to map onto estates, why are there no Dalits? The Jatis they belong to existed at the time, as did the practice of untouchability. Iirc we haven't seen Cagots or any similar outcast classes in any of the other tts as well and I'd expect to see those

I don't think they're best portrayed as slaves either and they're over 15% of the current population of India it's a little strange that they don't have an estate or some similar structure to represent them
I think for all functionality purposes, they’d function identically to shudras. For most state affairs, they didn’t deal with Dalits any differently than other subjects. So it would be adding another estate/pop to manage without much reason. Most discrimination was local, by local upper castes who rarely held much power beyond their villages, since those in positions of power would rarely interact with them anyways, and couldn’t distinguish between the different castes for mass administration.
 
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Does Vijayanagara have any unique content in relation to the changing of dynasties that historically happened?
Vijayanagar was the 'historical winner' of the region, until it fell to the Bahmani Sultanate. Therefore, we prioritized its content over Hoysala. Nonetheless, you can access new flavour content starting as Hoysala by forming one of the formables, it's how we organized the flavour content of the region.

Just a heads up, Vijayanagara fell to a coalition to the Bahmani successor states, not the Bahmanis. Is there unique event to simulate this or is it represented by the standard coalition mechanics?
 
Also I think some version of Kakatiya Kingdom/Andhra should be a formable for Telugu nations. The major Telugu nations such as the Musunuri Nayaks and Reddy Kingdom derived much of their legitimacy as successor states of the Kakatiya Kingdom resisting invasion. They explicitly used Kakatiya cultural and administrative practices to maintain legitimacy.

The Kakatiyas themselves fell not too long before the start of EU5, and would be reasonable to reform.
 
Also I think some version of Kakatiya Kingdom/Andhra should be a formable for Telugu nations. The major Telugu nations such as the Musunuri Nayaks and Reddy Kingdom derived much of their legitimacy as successor states of the Kakatiya Kingdom resisting invasion. They explicitly used Kakatiya cultural and administrative practices to maintain legitimacy.

The Kakatiyas themselves fell not too long before the start of EU5, and would be reasonable to reform.
Andhradesha could be a formable for the Telugu states, but the Kakatiyas shouldn’t be given that they’re a dynasty. You shouldn’t be able to reform them unless you’re playing as Bastar (since they were ruled by a Kakatiya king).
 
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