Hi Spruce, thanks for your interest in CK Low Countries set up. I was one of the betas first involved in naming Low Countries provinces and allocating them under the right titles. The current situation is that province names are fixed, their allocation however of course can change and is still under development in the beta.
First I must say you are right about Gent belonging to Flanders in the 1066 scenario. The fact that it isn’t at the moment is because Flanders was a very difficult case during the CK development. First of all Flanders as you know historically was a county, but still had vassals. In CK this isn’t possible a count cannot have vassals. Therefore Flanders is made a duchy to enable it to have its vassals and thus to reflect its historic power and importance in CK.
Second Flanders is one of the VERY few areas where provinces are allowed to be named after cities. The reason for this is that Flanders was one single county, but the provinces on the map in the region we betas were confronted with were smaller, furthermore the WHOLE map was already named after cities. For Flanders we could not found suitable names except those of the cities. So all three provinces kept their name as city, while in other regions province names were changed.
During extensive character research I came to learn a bit more about the region. Then the idea came up to let the “province” Gent resemble the county of Aalst
(Alost). Although indeed the city Gent lied a few kilometres outside Aalst, we thought that considering it Aalst, which belonged to the HRE in 1066, would better resemble the geographic make up of the region in 1066.
I realize that this is not an ideal situation, but since we couldn’t change the name from Gent to Aalst we had to make a choice. It was either allocating Gent historically correct to Flanders and messing up the geographic make up of the region in 1066 or making sure that the geographic make up of the region in 1066 was correct, but falsely place Gent in the HRE. We chose for the latter, meaning that Gent, representing Aalst, will belong to the HRE in the 1066 scenario and to Flanders in the 1167 and 1337 scenarios (like the city Gent). I can very well understand if you and/or others will choose differently by means of a mod.
So what can you mean to the beta? Well you can give your view on what I just described. Furthermore additional low countries characters may be needed for the 1167 and 1337 scenario (think 1066 is reasonably complete in our working beta draft) and as already pointed out by MrT, the scenario set up is still under development and some reorganization of the whole feudal allocation of provinces may yet be made.
All this makes it rather complicated. You can start proposing stuff and perhaps have an influence on decisions made in the beta. On the other hand you don’t have the game yet and you might be doing stuff we already have done or are planning to do. I guess it is up to you to decide. Well thanks again for your interest and we will see if we can use your links for our development.
P.S. You can view this as a thank you from the betas for your very helpful and constructive approach. Of course the above info is provided by a beta and thus can not be regarded as official Paradox info or be certain to appear in the DEM1.01.
Cheers.
