Tinto Flavour #3 - 24th of January 2025 - Novgorod

[Kotyk-durkotyk]

and all will be works of art present in the game?

I hope that the St. Sophia of Kyiv will be a WoA too due to it's beauty and cultural importance.
And the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra could be a unique building (like it is a monumnet in EU4).

 

[Friedrich von Deutschland]

Will there be any special mechanics/events to make a swift ant total annexation of Novgorod feasible for Muscovy, or are standard mechanics capable of representing the historical fate of the republic? Assuming the EU4 situation where multiple wars are required to achieve what historically was done in one is avoided of course.

 

[Kotyk-durkotyk]

Boyars are quite powerful in Velikiy Novgorod at start, yes:
View attachment 1246821

Please, no Patriarchs estate in Orthodoxy.
Imagine you would have Kings estate instead of Nobility... This is the same.
Clergy would be OK.

• Ideal flavourful suggestion (for East Slavic Orthodoxy at least) could be Klir or Clir (from the Greek κλήρος). It literally means Clergy in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian.
• Another funny flavourful option could be Pops (or Popy), because Pop is a colloquial synonym for priest. Not sure it should be taken seriously, though

 

[H.A.S.E.V.I.R.]

Patriarchate tho, they do walk, talk and everything else too in unison. Anything else would be heresy.

 

[Gem_Hound]

Thanks for an interesting TF!

1. I think Posadnik office would sound much better:
View attachment 1246805
Posadnichestvo Office feels a bit weird to me.
Feel the difference: general’s office vs. generalty office.

OR it could be just Expanded Posadnichestvo, it feels ok to me.

2. You use Kyiv name in the game, so it would make sense to write Kyivan Rus for consistensy:
View attachment 1246804

3. Also, if you use British English standard, it should be Centre, I think :
View attachment 1246819

4. Your transliteration is a bit inconsistent.

• Kormlenije
• Velikiy
• Tysiatskii
• Tysyatsky

All 4 have different rules to represent ий, я, е letters. Should be unified.

For #2 I would actually recommend scrapping Kiev from the country name entirely, because it had not been referred to as such until the 19th century. That was when Russia decided to denote when the principalities were ruled out of Kiev/Kyiv rather than out of Moscow/Moskva. It should be Rus' Land or Land of the Rus'. Potentially Ruthenia because game start is after Ruthenia started being used as well.

 

[1RepMax]

Sovet gospod - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Isn't it the same word though, meaning "council?" It's just a fluke of transliteration whether you spell it Soviet or Sovet. I actually think y'all should consistently use a translation system that makes the difference between hard and soft consonants visible; for non Slavic speakers, we'll get closer in pronunciation if we see Soviet or Sovyet than with Sovet.

 

[Idle America]

Republic? Prince?

*Confused American noises*

 

[h_adik]

1. Is there will be some bonuses of controlling and rivalary between Great Principalities (Vladimir, Novgorod, Kyev)? For example for forming Russia there must be no other principalities, or you can form and revive another Great Principality that represents Polotsk (belarusian later and lithuanian), or make own Great Principality from small principalities with enough development.

Polotsk was unique, as Novgorod, from other parts of Rus principalities, and was in rivarly with Novgorod, rulled by unique branch of Rurikids.

2. Is there any option for Novgorod to call ruler from lesser/branch houses from neighbour countries, to prevent their influence?

 

[Mrkew]

Sorry but I really preferred when estate privileges showed the actual influence they give. You have three boyar privileges in the OP that each give 20/50/50% influence respectively, but then you show a screenshot where their total influence is 55%. If the privilege gives 50% increase from their base influence, where is that influence shown? How does it change?

 

[Danskjävel]

I think the reason Russia is the only formable in the region is because, like the devs said, they're focusing on historically accurate content at least until release. That's why you don't have formables like "Severia" or "Champagne". It doesn't have anything to do with essentialism (to be honest, I had no idea what that was either), just simplification to have kingdom/empire sized powerblocks appearing as the game progresses. If Novgorod becomes the dominant power in Eastern Europe it will still form Russia, sure, but it will be a alternative version of it (like being a republic or having Novgorodian culture for example) with hopefully a different flag (and not the Muscovite one like in eu4). But hey, on the bright side, at least the devs confirmed you can form the Kingdom of Ruthenia.

I don't oppose the Russia tag; that would be replacing one ahistorical narrative with another. Of course Russia should be a formable in the region. It should even appear often given there's no player intervention.

But I'm firmly opposed to the EU4 model of actively punishing the player for not forming Russia. That's both poor game design and a poor concept of history that tells the player that at game start, there's basically only one outcome for the principalities: forming Russia, as that's the only option for getting rid of the duchy title. That's basically a magic concept pulled out of some place, which is definitely not academic work on the philosophy of history.

I think you should be able to become a Severian empire (or similar), without eventually being forced into becoming Russia (or Russian culture!). In which case my argument would be that the game design essentially is conforming to the modern Russian narrative, elevating Russian culture to some essence devoid of repression and nationbuilding.

I understand the contemporary reasons this would upset you but the reason that the gameplay of a history game privileges the narrative of the modern regional hegemon is because that state is the successor of the historic regional hegemon. It would be like an Irish person being upset that the main formable in the British isles is called Great Britain because that's the name of the other island

The reason nobody argues with you is because the issue isn't that your position is disagreeable it's that the argument is pointless. Very few people on this forum think Russia should be in the game so that nationalists can live out their fantasies of storming Kyiv but even fewer people think Russia as a tag shouldn't be in the game to prevent that possibility

I'm not upset, but I'm firm in my belief that the game will benefit from a critical approach to any and all national myths. And by that I don't mean to suggest that the developers are not capable in this regard, I just want to iterate the point, while also addressing the community on the forum as a whole.

I don't think the idea that Great Britain is a formable in the British Isles is the right analogy. A more fitting example would be Ireland not existing as a formable, and as an Irish minor being forced to either remain a duchy or form GB. Surely this would be a strange teleological and essentialistic approach to an alternate history game. Even if historicity is an even more defining factor in PC (which I applaud by the way).

My fear is that if the posts in the Tinto Talks/Maps/Flavour addressing national myths, despite having solid basis, are met with a lot of dislikes, it might suggest some direction to the devs by virtue of being (un)popular.
Hence why I'm pointing out that while these, warranted, posts addressing national myths are prone to dislikes, we're yet to see a proper counter argument that justifies what I have summarized as (Russian) essentialism. The argument could be made in other cases too of course.

I do agree that my initial posts in this thread was more suggestive than informative, though, and that might not have benefited my argument.

 

[NDIS]

The devil take me! Paradox, is it really you? After the city of Pushkin in CK3... Now we're talking about posadniks and ushkuyniks before even reaching the DLC! It is necessary to understand that 95% of present-day population of Novgorod do not know the word "ushkuynik"!)) What's next? Marfa Boretskaya?

 

[Fulbert]

Isn't it the same word though, meaning "council?" It's just a fluke of transliteration whether you spell it Soviet or Sovet. I actually think y'all should consistently use a translation system that makes the difference between hard and soft consonants visible; for non Slavic speakers, we'll get closer in pronunciation if we see Soviet or Sovyet than with Sovet.

I would argue Sovet better represents the original pronunciation than Soviet since the latter introduces the unnecessary [j] phoneme that is not present in the Russian word. Platalization is a feature that is absent in English so there is no ideal way to convey it in transliteration. With the letter 'е', it doesn't even really matter if you don't, I'm struggling to think of a situation where mispronouncing consonant+е as consonant+э would change the word's meaning. Совэт looks and sounds much less confusing than совьет.

That said, I'd go with the established terminology anyway. As great and historically deep as Project Caesar is shaping up to be, it is still ultimately a derivative entertainment product and not an academic research paper. It is expected to be based on some actual research and not introduce brand new historic terminology at the developers' whim. As unfortunate as this transliteration discrepancy might be, these are established terms and we have got to use them — or challenge them, but in an academic paper of our own and not in a videogame.

 

[Kotyk-durkotyk]

For #2 I would actually recommend scrapping Kiev from the country name entirely, because it had not been referred to as such until the 19th century. That was when Russia decided to denote when the principalities were ruled out of Kiev/Kyiv rather than out of Moscow/Moskva. It should be Rus' Land or Land of the Rus'. Potentially Ruthenia because game start is after Ruthenia started being used as well.

Funnily enough, the person who firstly added Kyivan to Rus and started to use it in the 1830s was a prominent Ukrainian scientist Mykhaylo Maksymovych, who dedicated most of his career to learning, describing and structurising of the Ukrainian language, folklore and ethnography. Later he also shifted to history and archaeology.
Then Russian historians, philosophers adopted the term in their own way and obviously the adjective was later ‘exported’ to other languages via the Russian form.
So originally the term appeared as Kyivan Rus
But like a ton of other things in the game, this could be just localised to the respective cultures, dialects. And if the devs decide to avoid using Kyivan/Kievan, a good neutral alternative would be the Old Rus. How it was actually used before the 1830s.

 

[eddin2]

This looks amazing, few already mentioned "mistakes", but, all in all, great job.

 

[Avlakim]

Funnily enough, the person who firstly added Kyivan to Rus and started to use it in the 1830s was a prominent Ukrainian scientist Mykhaylo Maksymovych, who dedicated most of his career to learning, describing and structurising of the Ukrainian language, folklore and ethnography. Later he also shifted to history and archaeology.
Then Russian historians, philosophers adopted the term in their own way and obviously the adjective was later ‘exported’ to other languages via the Russian form.
So originally the term appeared as Kyivan Rus
But like a ton of other things in the game, this could be just localised to the respective cultures, dialects. And if the devs decide to avoid using Kyivan/Kievan, a good neutral alternative would be the Old Rus. How it was actually used before the 1830s.

I really like the term "Old Rus'" as a compromise, but I can't seem to find any information about Mykhailo Maksymovych being the first one to use the term "Kyivan Rus".
Could you provide any sources? All I could find was him legitimising the term "Malorussia" and "Little Russia" when talking about Ukraine, which, well, didn't age well to say the least...

 

[Cuke]

So, Novgorod runs out of flavour by 1500s, doesn't it?

 

[I_have_no_ideas_for_name]

Why is the word "Kormlenije" written with the scientific transliteration but all the other Russian words like "Ushkuyniks" aren't?
For consistency's sake it should be spelled "Kormlenie".

 

[I_have_no_ideas_for_name]

We already discussed it with our flag artist , who is really good and skilled, some time ago, and the current flag is the most accurate one.

Can someone elaborate on this? This proposed white castle on red field banner appears in the Book of Knowledge of all Kingdoms which was compiled around the game's start date. On the other hand the current coat of arms used in the screenshots, to my knowledge, only appears in Paradox games.

 

[MelogoleM]

I think, in the end, what we call Kyivan Rus' or Old Rus' are just historiographic designations. The reality we had was Rus' of Yaroslav the Wise, with Kyiv as its capital.

When feudal fragmentation began in Rus', and the unified Rus' ceased to exist, each of the emerging states dreamed of asserting its right to the legacy of Rus'. This applies to the Principality of Moscow, the Galicia-Volhynia Principality, and even the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was extremely advantageous for all of them to claim that they were the new center of Rus', the true heirs of Rus' of Yaroslav the Wise, and that all the Rus' principalities should rally around them. The Novgorod Republic itself began to call itself the "Lord Novgorod the Great" as a result of the intensified rivalry with Moscow under Dmitry Donskoy, in an attempt to equalize itself with the title of Grand Prince. And not to cede the right of primacy to Moscow.

Therefore, it seems to me that the most correct thing would be if, as in reality, all the Rus' principalities (plus Lithuania) could have competed with each other for the right to create Rus' as the successor to Rus' of Yaroslav the Wise and as a new center in Rus' lands. And this Rus' could have been vastly different, with its own distinct features, depending on which entity became the new center - Lithuania, Kyiv, Halych, Moscow, Novgorod, and so on.

History unfolded in such a way that Moscow became this center. But it could have easily turned out differently. In an alternative reality, any of the mentioned states could have become the center, but they all would have seized the moment and called themselves Rus' to claim the legacy of Yaroslav the Wise. And we certainly would not have ended up with a state that somehow called itself Severiya, for no reason.

 

[Krix333]

Sovet gospod - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

well the russians pronounce the E as Ye so techinacally it should be Soviet