Dev diary 9: Generic Independence missions + Judea missions + Patch notes
Salvete readers!
Today we will be talking about a generic tree for subjects, new content for Judea/Samaria and the latest patch notes.
But first, the Dev Clash will be held on the 18th of July on Sunday from 9PM CEST till 1AM.
I mislabeled the exact time last DD, my apologies. The Dev Clashes will be streamed every Sunday on the host, Vespasian’s twitch:
and the content creators participating will most likely also stream their POV.
Hi there, my name is sealionforever. This week I’ll be unveiling a new generic mission tree available for all subject nations. The tree gives players tasks that help to increase their autonomy and ultimately, cast off their overlord. It should make starting out as a subject a lot more interesting and our hope is even when getting vassalized in multiplayer, wouldn’t be the end of the world. Only players will be able to use it, the AI should never take it.
There are 3 paths of gaining your freedom within the mission tree: an aggressive approach, a diplomatic approach and a subterfuge approach (which will not be available initially).
The aggressive approach will focus on preparing for war and ending with sending your overlord an ultimatum. Either grant you independence, or fight to keep you.
The diplomatic approach will focus on improving relations with your overlord and gaining the favour of their ruler himself. You will request them for independence in a friendly manner and create a peaceful state of relations if granted.
The 'sneaky' approach will only become available if the overlord refuses the request from the diplomatic path. You can then focus on disrupting normal operations in the overlord’s country, infiltrating their government, and undermining it from within.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Initial Task
The first task involves a lot of internal discussion to which approach should be taken. Each argument will be a main proponent in the form of a character in your nation. While this is progressing you can influence the outcome via events that will pop up periodically. When the task is done (no matter which side won the debate), you can still pick either approach but be warned; if you choose the path opposite of the consensus reached in the first task, that will cost you a hefty stab hit. Also the character whose approach you didn’t choose, might come back later to cause some problems…
The Aggressive Approach: optionals
When you have selected the Attempt Revolt task, there’s no more turning back. Your overlord will also be notified that you are going down this path.
There are a bunch of optional events available to you when you start down this path. In order to advance, you must complete at least 3 before you can select the Making Final Preparations task and proceed to the end of the Mission tree. I won’t go into detail for every single one of them, but there are a couple I want to highlight.
Securing Support will have you contact the heads of family in your nation and try to guarantee their support for the foreseeable future. Greedy and entitled as they tend to be, they might ask for something in return… If you don’t give them what they want, that character might come back to mess up your plans.
Asking For Favours focuses on gaining extra resources for your nation by asking favours from certain characters in your nation. The characters you demand something from, will not forget this slight and could pose a problem in the future.
Seeking Allies is relatively simple. It looks for nations of the same rank as your overlord and you can ask them for their support in case of a war.
The Aggressive Approach: final tasks
When you start the Making Final Preparations task, the optionals will no longer be available. This is the time when those characters I’ve been hinting at could come in and potentially sabotage your efforts. As a general rule, the fewer characters you slight, the less complications you will have here. In these events, you can spend some PI to avoid having your chances of bloodless independence decreased.
Sending An Ultimatum does what it says. It sends an ultimatum to your overlord: grant independence to the subject player or declare war. The AI will base their decision on how many preparation tasks you’ve completed against their relative strength. The more prepared you are, the more likely it is they will grant you your independence.
- If they accept, you will become independent and gain a truce with your overlord. The overlord will also gain claims on all of your territories.
- If they decline, you will start an independence war with them. Nations that pledged their support will be called in on your side.
The Diplomatic Approach: optionals
Moving to the other side of the tree, here when you have selected the Attempt Diplomacy task, there’s similarly no going back and your overlord will be notified that you are going down this path.
As in the other path, you’ll need to finish at least 3 optional tasks before you can initiate the Drafting The Deal task and move on. Here are a few of the tasks I want to shed a little light on:
Character Exchange will let you choose a character from a pool of 4 volunteers to send over to your overlord as advisors/hostages. That character will move to the overlord’s country and be granted citizenship. Once this has happened, they might decide to send someone back as well. There are some good opinion boosts attached to this exchange. There is one case where if your overlord is a monarchy and certain conditions are met, instead of a character exchange you can initiate a political marriage with even better opinion boosts.
Political Gifts works very similarly to Asking For Favours from the other path, only here you will demand from characters in your government to send resources to your overlord. Each resource you send over will increase their opinion of you by a lot. However, again each character you force into this position could hold it against you later.
The Diplomatic Approach: final tasks
Drafting The Deal works very similarly to the mirrored task in the other path. Slighted characters will pop up in complication events and cause some issues and potential setbacks. You can also pay some PI to avoid decreasing your chances of gaining your independence.
Sending A Proposal sends the deal to your overlord to gain your freedom.
- If they accept, you will gain independence and start an alliance with your former overlord. If they are a great power, they will guarantee you instead.
- If they deny, you will remain their subject, however the third path to independence becomes available...
The 'Sneaky' Approach
This path focuses on undermining your overlord and causing major issues in their nation. I won’t go into too much detail here, since this part is still very much in development. Some of my ideas (that are not implemented yet and are subject to possible change) include mapping out the overlord’s capital and giving it a massive defensiveness debuff, convincing/bribing good characters and have them move to your own nation, and sending out bands of brigands to terrorize the overlord’s countryside (and sporadically bring home some spoils).
I hope this tree will provide some flavour and story while playing as a subject nation. While this tree focuses on gaining your independence, I will hint at a possible future DD where a different sort of tree for subjects might be looked at…
That’s all from me.
Hello there, I'm Stephan, today I am going to present to you the mission tree for Judea and Samaria (it is the same one). Please bear in mind that this mission tree is still WIP and that some tasks may change and more can be added or removed.
The mission tree is based on the holy sites of Judaism that are scattered throughout the middle east. Your task will be to reconquer them and build them up, reaching new heights. On the way there you will be able to take revenge against specific nations for deeds (like being enslaved) from ages past, most notably on the Babylonians and the Egyptians. Before moving into detail about the mission, I want to quickly discuss the 'Form Israel' national decision. The form Israel decision has been slightly reworked, with the most notable change being the addition of a few more territories required to form it…
The mission tree consists of two different branches; one is the larger main branch and one is much smaller and is entirely optional. The optional branch is geared towards the early game and focuses on reuniting with your neighbour, be it playing as Samaria or as Judea. It also allows you to join the diadochi wars on either Ptolemy’s or Antigonos’ side. Every aide comes with a price, no? After the war between the two has ended, you will be able to demand the land around you which has your culture as dominant (with a few more territories for better borders). That should kickstart you already
The last task in the small tree will allow you to search for an ally - what you do afterwards is up to you.
The other, bigger tree, is the main tree. It has multiple branches, which converge after a few tasks. On one side, you will be tasked to build up a settlement and then consecrate it to one of the Jewish prophets. After that, you will have to build up your capital city, so that it can keep up with the splendor of your nation. The next branch guides through the conquests of Syria, Assyria,Mesopotamia and ultimately culminates in the conquest of Ekbatana and Sousa, where the holy sites to Esther and Daniel are located, respectively. Obviously, you have to ruin Babylon to show these pesky Babylonians who can be forced from their homelands…
The last branch requires you to conquer the Sinai peninsula, where the holy site to Moses lies. After these conquests you can expand into Arabia and meet the Queen of Saba again, although this is entirely up to you…
The last few tasks concentrate on the holy sites themselves.
The final rewards includes, but is not limited to, a new unique government type - yes, tier 4 - after restoring and reforging the Kingdom of David.
One last thing is that we added a unique heritage for Samaria, so that there is an incentive to not only play as Judea for a Jewish playthrough. The conversion speed reduction they share with Judea, as we consider it to be the “common denominator”. Keep in mind that the -25% conversion speed is in the vanilla Judean Heritage as well. But Samarians will get a reduction to aggressive expansion and a boost to manpower recovery speed to reflect their martial inclination.
Screenshots for the new heritages for Rome and Carthage post the latest hotfix.
We also have patch notes for the hotfix "Just the beginning" which was released at the same time as this DD.
- Added new technologies to certain bloodlines
- Fixed the Macedonian mission trees
- Fixed the Galatian invasion triggers
- Fixed slave revolts in the first 8 years of the game
- Fixed the Irish content not appearing, Hibernia playthrough now has content
- Some more things have been translated to Spanish
- Added a button to Give up claims, mainly useful for making your puppets happy.
- Fixed the health bar on Characters appearing and displaying the exact health percentage.
- Consolidated military traditions code and added better tooltips
- Fixed unit abilities not being unlocked from new Military traditions
- Removed some levy_size modifiers from heritages (mainly Roman and Carthaginian heritages)
- Removed invisible scroll areas from console
- Fixed AI_plans potentially causing tribes not to expand
- Changed Byzantine heritage (-5% morale changed to -3% slave output)
- Changed some if’s to trigger_if’s to make the error log stop complaining
- Fixed prisoners giving you stab hits, as a temporary workaround for invisible prisoners
- Changed Mauryan heritage so it collapses more (added -10 loyalty of characters)
- Satraps no longer take diplo slots, same as feudatories
Finally we have a teaser for next DD:
