[MOD] Imperator Invictus

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 21: Bharatvarsha, Spearmen and Anatolia
Salvete! Today we’ll be talking about Bharatvarsha, some more Anatolian heritages and a preview of the Unit Rework as voted on last time.
--Bharatvarsha--
Dementive here with more Indian content and missions. Bharatavarsha in Imperator represents a unified Indian state. It's name comes from the legendary King Bharata who, in the epic poem the Mahabharata, “subjugated the world with his unparalleled might”. This was the only time India was said to be united until modern times.

Many things have been changed to make uniting India a fun experience. To start off Bharatavarsha now has a new map color and flag:

Bharatavarsha now has a mission tree which is inspired by and similar to the Hellenistic empire missions.

The first few tasks will have you own and build a metropolis for each of the 3 major Indian culture groups: Aryan, Dravidian, and Pracyan. Once your rule over India has been solidified and you have gained enough power you will be able to change to a new unique government type. Political reform comes at a cost though and this task will plunge your nation into a deadly civil war.

There are many other tasks in the tree after establishing the new government. Some of these include: Patronizing the trade of exotic goods, gaining the blood of Bharata bloodline, building great wonders all over India, and gathering the many treasures of India (more on this in a bit).

Conquest Options:

As Alexander once did, Bharatavarsha will emulate his conquests of the known world. Conquer the regions that Alexander the Great once brought under his rule and as you do so each region you conquer you will be presented with an option. Establish Indian Client states or Indian Colonies. Indian Client states give/have the following unique bonuses:

Indian Colonies will be able to pick a specialization for each one established. They can specialize in either military, trade, religion or civic development. Each type of colony will fire different events that can be either good or bad.

Treasures:
Many Hindu and Buddhist treasures have been added all over India. There are currently 21 new treasures with more in the works. Two decisions have been made that are similar to the vanilla decision “Anthologia Philosophike” which has the player collect many different treasures from all over the Greek world. One of the decisions is only available to Hindu nations and will have them collect many great hindu works. The other decision is only available for Buddhists and works in a similar fashion.

Monsoons:
Monsoons have historically been very impactful for Indian civilizations. To represent this importance in game a system has been made to simulate the effects and unpredictable nature of monsoon season in India. Each year from June to September monsoon season will come in India and apply regional modifiers. These modifiers are applied to 5 different regions: Northwest India, Northeast India, Central India, South India, and the Himalayas. These modifiers can be one of 5 things: good, really good, bad, really bad, or catastrophic. Good modifiers will give bonuses to food production and population output. While bad modifiers will decrease food production, population output, and supply limit.


More Anatolian Heritages:
Eleran here with Diego I de Persia - Because we could not, due to length, show all the Anatolian heritages promised in the Scythia DD, here are some more just to show you that when we said all, we meant ALL.
(An important and sad note, however: 4 of the nations PDX created in the southern mess of Anatolia have no outstanding information beyond the acknowledgement of their existence, or not even that. Because we try our best to be historically accurate or, at most, historically plausible with the content we add to the game, we did not want to completely make up a narrative for these city-state nations (Lalasia, Oroandia, Ambladia, and Tymandia). Yet, there’s always the chance we missed something during our research process. If you have information/sources about these places, please let us know and we will look into it and may incorporate it into more unique heritages.
Anyway - some more heritages + a few secret notes regarding changes we’re considering with each nation:

Heritage of the Blind (tag: Calchedon)
Heritage:
Shrine Build Cost: -15.00%
Commerce Income: +10.00%
Diplo Slot: -1.00

Description:
A Megaran colony founded in 685BCE, the its founders must have been cursed by the gods to be so blind as to not found their colony on the far superior other side of the Bosporus Straight (where Byzantion was built). Both Greeks (Athenians) and Persian Megabuzus said as much of them. Yet the city experienced a wealth of trade and built many temples to the gods. Blind luck.

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Astakan Heritage
Heritage:
Found City Cost: -20.00%
Civic Tech Investment +7.50%
Army Morale -5.00

Description:
A Megaran colony established in the 8th century BCE, also supposedly founded by the legendary Astakos, son of Poseidon and the nymph Olbia, this city’s greatest legacy would be in its destruction by the Bithynian king Zipoetes I in 301 BCE and the founding of a new city in its place: Nicomedia, future Eastern Roman capital under Diocletian, named after Nicomedes I, Zipoetes’ son.

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Heritage of the Kyzikenus (tag: Kyzikos)
Heritage:
National Citizen Happiness: +6.00%
Tax Income: +15.00%
National Freemen Output: -5.00%

Description:
Known best for its kyzikenus (coin), the city’s gold stater worth 28 drachma, Kyzikos was a prospering colony city following the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War and the decline of both Miletus and Athens. This city is also where the philosopher Eudoxus of Knidos established his school in the 4th century BCE.

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Heritage of Kos
Heritage:
National Tech Investment: +5.00%
Slaves for Surplus: - 2.00
National Pop Capacity: -5.00%

Description:
Founded by the mythological autochthonous king Merops, Kos existed throughout ancient history as a place of wealth, learning, and luxury production. Freed from Persia’s grip following the Greco-Persian Wars (later only shortly ruled by the Carian satrapy for a while), the island remained largely independent around the great Aegean leagues, Alexander’s Empire, and the raging Diadochi, gaining a form of oligarchic self rule even while under the ‘ownership’ of the Ptolemies, who used it as a place for educating their dynasty. Kos also maintained a recognition for fine wine, a bevy of silk clothes, and the island’s famous Asclepion.

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Heritage of Commagene
Heritage:
Integrated Culture Group Happiness: +6.00%
Unintegrated Culture Happiness: +3.00%
Diplo Slot: -1.00

Description:
The region of Commagene, while its pre-Hellenistic age history is blurry, appears to have a long and continuous footnote in history stretching all the way back to its time as a Syro-Hittite kingdom referred to in the 15th century BCE as “Kummaha,” near identical with the later Archaic city of “Kummuh,” thought to be the same site/city as Hellenistic Samosata, where the Attic poet Lucian supposedly came from. Existing possibly as a satrap of the Armenian Kingdom before being a province under the Seleucids, the area boasts a multicultural demographic, being a melting pot for Hellenic and Iranian cultures, best seen in the royal sanctuary on Mount Nemrut.

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Heritage of the Aramean Priest-Kings (tag: Bambyce)
Heritage:
National Commerce: +10.00%
National Conversion Speed: +1.00
Governor Wages: +5.00%

Description:
Home to the famous temple for its patron deity: Atargatis, Bambyce’s history traces back to its annexation by the Assyrian Empire in the 9th century BCE. Coinage suggests that it was ruled by Aramean priest-kings near the end of Achaemenid domination and transitioned to Seleucid monarchical governance following the collapse of Alexander’s Empire. The city prospered under the yoke of Macedonian/Seleucid rule, becoming ‘the place’ to stop at between Antioch and Selucia on the Tigris, eventually becoming the richest city in Roman Syria.

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Olban Heritage
Heritage:
Mercenary Maintenance Cost: -20.00%
Ship Capture Chance: +10.00%
Threshold for Civil War: -2.50%

Description:
The only independent Cilician Kingdom, Olbe was supposedly founded by Ajax, son of Teucer. It became a pirate’s haven after the ruling dynastic priests of Cilicia Tracheia fell to chaotic, short-lived tyrants and fell further into disarray after those. These Cilician pirates would later reappear in notable records during the Servile Wars, offering Spartacus a chance to cross from mainland Italy into Sicily before taking his money and leaving him and his army stranded.

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Larandan Heritage
Heritage:
Combat Efficiency in Hills: +10.00%
Army Discipline: +5.00%
National Population Growth: -0.03%

Description:
The greatest marauders from eastern Anatolia, the Lycaonians of Laranda lost much of their glory following the invasions of the Makedonian empire and the following infighting between the diadochi rulers - notably, Perdiccas destroyed the settlement in 322 BCE, after which habitation gradually resumed.

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Isaurian Heritage
Heritage:
Hostile Attrition: +3.00
Combat Efficiency in Mountains: +10.00%
National Build Cost: +5.00%

Description:
Marauders and Raiders from the hills on the Arasus, these people were staunchly independent, surviving a siege by Perdiccas in 432 AVC by burning down their own capital of Isaura. The fierce mountain people would survive the Lydian, Achaemenid and Argead empires, earning the outside acknowledgement for being the fiercest raiders in Southwest Anatolia.

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Kotennian Heritage
Heritage:
**Note: Change main culture to Pamphylian**
National Commerce: +10.00%
Oratory Provincial Investment Cost: -15.00%
Ship Build Cost: +10.00%

Description:
Kotennia was the last holdout of the Pamphylians cities against outside rule, and maintained a long and proud history including an Aboriginal/Greek cultural mix stemming from the Bronze Age. But as the Antigonid Kingdom still occupies their old homeland, they have not been able to do much. The Pamphylians are a maritime culture, a fact which they hold in contention with the Antigonid fleet frequently patrolling their traditional coastline.

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Homonadian Heritage
Heritage:
Enslavement Efficiency: +8.00%
National Tribesman Output: +15.00%
National Citizen Happiness: -5.00%

Description:
Worst of the Pisidians, the Homonadiae were barbarous marauders, attacking anyone who so dared encroach on their lands. Their raiders seized many slaves from neighboring cities in the region, selling them to the Isaurians and Olbeans to bolster their markets.

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Selgian Heritage
**Note: should be the most populated city in pisidia**
Heritage:
National Population Growth: +0.05%
National Commerce Income: +10.00%
Diplo Slots: -1.0

Description:
Recorded by different sources as having been founded by colonists from Laconia, Selge became the most powerful and populous city of Pisidia, in which Alexander the Great himself passed through on his way to Cilicia. The region around the city was exceptionally fertile and their trade would blossom all the way through the time of Hadrian.

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Pednelissian Heritage
Heritage:
Diplomatic Relations: +2.00
Combat Efficiency in Hills: +10.00%
Opinion of Overlord: +30.00

Description:
A smaller city near the border between the regions of Pisidia and Pamphylia, Pednelissia was always hard-pressed to compete with larger neighbors such as the populous Selge. In order to combat its immediate threats, it had a history of submitting to and calling on larger allies such as the diadochi.

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Sagalassan Heritage
Heritage:
Integrated Culture Group Happiness: +6.00%
Road Building Cost: -30.00%
Fort Maintenance Cost: +10.00%

Description:
The oldest city in Pisidia, Sagalassos has maintained a key historical and geographical role since the time of the Hittites as a major center of the Arzawa. While they were the first city of Pisidia, they are no longer the most important one. In recent centuries Selge had overtaken them in power and population to the point where they were forced to submit under the yoke of the Antigonids.

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Heritage of the Lycians
Heritage:
Ship Recruitment Speed: +15.00%
Character Wages: -10.00%
Unintegrated Culture Group Happiness: -3.00%

Description:
A very old people, in ancient times known as the Lukka, the Lycians have almost always been united since the invasion of Cyrus the Great, having become an Achaemenid client kingdom. They joined the Delian League after Plataea, holding onto their independence for 40 years, after which they became clients again. Lycia managed to survive Alexander's invasion without a significant effect on the people, yet their league found itself submitting as an Antigonid vassal following the breakout of the diadochi wars.

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Heritage of the Solymians
Heritage:
Monthly Ruler Popularity: +0.03
Fort Garrison Size: +10.00%
National Population Capacity: -5.00%

Description:
With its fame stretching back as far as the Iliad, it was recently one of the few cities Alexander was unable to conquer during his war against the Persians. Termessos was a fortress city in a key pass to Pamphylia, both heavily fortified and easy to manage. Supposedly founded by the legendary Solymi people of Lycia, the city’s people have taken the same name for themselves, carrying on the legendary legacy.

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Arykandian Heritage
Heritage:
National Build Cost: -15.00%
Cybele Religion Population Happiness: +6.00%
Army Discipline: -8.00%

Description:
Arykandia, as one of the oldest Lycian cities. While it avoided joining any leagues, it boasted a cosmopolitan demographic and a degree of tolerance with many temples dedicated to various deities within the Hellenic, Zoroastrian, and native Anatolian faiths.

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Oinoandian Heritage
Heritage:
Diplo Slots: +1.00
Diplomatic Relations: +3.00
Loyalty of Subjects: -20.00

Description:
A colony of Termessos in Milyas, Oenoanda would later unite with Kibyratia and create the Kibyran Tetrapolis, which would last for a hundred years, joining with the Lycian league in 669 AVC.

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Kibyran Heritage
Heritage:
Found City Cost: -15.00%
Found Metropolis Cost: -20.00%
Threshold for Civil War: -5.00%

Description:
The most powerful city in Milyas, Kibyratia into a sprawling zone of political control, at one time extending from the Rhodian Peraea all the way to Pisidia. The city would later absorb its close neighbors and establish the Kybiran Tetrapolis, becoming a threat even to the Lycian League.

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Heritage of Arados
Heritage:
National Commerce Income: +15.00%
All Ship Damage Done: +20.00%
National Build Cost: +10.00%

Description:
Hegemon of northern Phoenicia, Arados, Phoenician “Arwad,” was a fortified trade island off the coast of provincial Syria which had been noted for its importance both in trade and in naval prowess since the time of the old Egyptian pharaohs. Founded sometime in the early 2nd millennium, Arados was also attested as one of the first republics in the Levant.

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Heritage of Sidon
Heritage:
Found City Cost: -15.00%
National Citizen Output: +12.00%
Fort Defense: -10.00%

Description:
Possibly the oldest of all the Phoenician cities, Sidon found itself caught up in the history of countless empires ranging from the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to Alexander the Great. As it sailed these dangerous political waters, it continued to produce countless luxury goods for sale to the whole Mediterranean and even sent its own people on a mission to found Tyre - its both its greatest achievement and also its greatest competition in the years to come.

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Heritage of Andros
Heritage:
Fort Defense: +15.00%
Found City Cost: -15.00%
Fort Maintenance Cost: +10.00%

Description:
A key naval connector between the Cycladic archipelago and the Helladic mainland, Andros’ history stretches back to the Bronze Age with the site of Palaeopolis. This ancient capital exhibited one of the earliest examples of fortifications in all of Greece. The Archaic/Classical Era replacement atop this old settlement, the city of Andros, became a wealthy and sprawling place, powerful enough to rebuke Athenian domination and to send out its own colonists to the region of Kalkidiki.

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Heritage of the Nesiotic League
Heritage:
Hellenic Religion Population Happiness: +6.00%
National Commerce: +15.00%
Character Wages: +10.00%

Description:
The brainchild of Antigonus I, the Nesiotic League was a strange and short-lived organization of islands forced to work together by dominating Makedonian powers - the diadochi. The league was most notably held under control by the Antigonids before being taken by the Ptolemies, and later disbanding and reforming under the jurisdiction of Rhodes. While it served a diadochi master, the League held annual ritual festival games, the Antigoneia (later the Soteria Ptolemaia) at the holy island of Delos in honor of their overlord.

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Heritage of Aeetes (tag: Colchis)
Heritage:
Monthly Ruler Popularity: +0.3%
National Tax Income: +15.00%
Diplomatic Reputation: -3.00

Description:
This land was known first as the realm of king Aeetes, home of the witch Medea, and the resting place of the Golden Fleece, home to riches and countless wealth as well which Jason and his argonauts all saw on their voyage to the Colchian shores. But some truth lies in this, as Colchis was a rapidly developing caucasian culture, mastering metal casting by the late Bronze Age and developing into the recognizable kingdom by the 13th century BCE. However, Assyrian and Persian invasion and intervention led to the kingdom’s decline, the recession of its borders and, at times, a total collapse of the governmental structures. By the time of the diadochi, Colchis had thrown off foreign rule and was again maintained by its native dynasty.

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Heritage of Phasis
Heritage:
Capital Import Route: +2.00
Import Value: +20.00%
Primary Culture Happiness: -6.00%

Description:
A Milesian colony founded in the Archaic period at the mouth of the river of the same name, Phasis was nestled inside the crook of the Colchian kingdom, bordered on all sides by the native ‘barbarians.’ However, the city seems to have got on peacefully enough with its neighbors and acted as a valuable trading port, or emporion, at the end of the loose trade network from India to the Pontos Euxinos.

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Legian Heritage
Heritage:
Army Discipline: +8.00%
Army Reinforcement Speed: +15.00%
Diplo Slots: -2.00

Description:
Little is known about the ancient Lezgi-speaking tribes from around the Caucasus mountains except that they were beset by enemy attacks at all times on all fronts, living in a most favorable and geographically important location for the purposes of trade and military affairs. And so, they developed a livelihood surrounded by war, fueled by it, born to it.

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Heniochian Heritage
Heritage:
Supply Limit: +10.00%
Army Movement Speed: +10.00%
Threshold for Civil War: -2.50%

Description:
The people of this tribe and country are at least as old as the 8th century BCE, with references to them coming from tablets found in the kingdom of Urartu. Little more is recorded about them, then that they are “ready enough to kill and eat men” - Aristotle.

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Zygian Heritage
Heritage:
Enslavement Efficiency: +15.00%
Ship Capture Chance: +15.00.00%
Ship Damage Taken: +5.00%

Description:
The Zygii tribe are recorded as having been ruthless pirates and brigands, nomadic shepherds afterwards. Their ships, it is said, were best adapted for this practice.

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Caucasian Albanian Heritage
Heritage:
Unintegrated Culture Happiness: +6.00%
Monthly Political Influence: +0.20
Fort Maintenance: +15.00%

Description:
The Caucasian tribes, including the Caspian peoples, have largely been at odds with the rest of the world, isolated by their largely mountainous homeland. The kingdom of Albania in the Caucasus has no attested foundation date, but based on historical references is considered to have been a border community between the Iranian communities of the Median/Achaemenid Empire and the nomads living beyond in the steppe. The tribe of the Caspians and others within the kingdom of Albania were considered part of a satrapy of the Achaemenids and were involved in the Persian Empire’s politics until it became an independent polity in the Hellensitic Age.

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--Unit Preview--
Greetings people, Parcipal here with a bit more content, regarding Units alongside a preview and more!
The currently ongoing vote is decently close (but still ongoing!). As I couldn’t idle all the time, I decided to take matters into my own hands and present you an early preview of chari… uhh I mean our “brand new” unit, the “Spearmen”.

A stunning icon, maintaining the “Vanilla”-esque feeling, while being visually distinctive from both Heavy Infantry and Light Infantry as well.
Now, you may see them labeled as “Hoplitai”, but worry not, most cultures will receive a name overhaul (which is currently part of my own mod already, I just never got around integrating the names.)

According to our Poll (and Lambert's video) the world is split into Chariotophiles and Chariotophobes, which means that we may either satisfy one part of the community, while neglecting another part. I’ll investigate potential possibilities of keeping Chariots intact, while also introducing spearmen. No real promises though, Unit modding is somewhat finicky.

But let’s get onto a very preliminary balance discussion.
Obviously, having a split unit will require another balance pass on every unit ( to summarize, Units need an efficiency against another unit and vice versa, aswell).
But to give you a basic rundown, I’ve tried to set up the Spearmen Efficiency vs other Units.

Spearmen vs Light Infantry: -10%
Spearmen vs Heavy Infantry: -25%
Spearmen vs Spearmen: +/- 0%
Spearmen vs Archers: -25%
Spearmen vs Light Cavalry: +40%
Spearmen vs Heavy Cavalry: +40%
Spearmen vs Horse Archers: +10%*
Spearmen vs Warelephants: -10%
Spearmen vs Camels: +40%

*Horse Archers vs Spearmen, however, might have increased efficiency, I envisioned it as “What if the Horse Archers touch the Spearmen” in this matchup.

These values should heavily favour Spearmen against any type of Cavalry, while making them suffer against most other types of Infantry/Ranged Units. Again, this little setup is missing the other end of the matchup (Unit X’s efficiency vs Spearmen).
Onto the next changed values: Heavy Infantry.

Heavy Infantry vs Light Infantry: +20%
Heavy Infantry vs Heavy Infantry: +/- 0%
Heavy Infantry vs Spearmen: +25%
Heavy Infantry vs Archers: +15%*
Heavy Infantry vs Light Cavalry: -20%
Heavy Infantry vs Heavy Cavalry: -25%
Heavy Infantry vs Horse Archers: -30%
Heavy Infantry vs Warelephants: -20%
Heavy Infantry vs Camels: -20%

Same with the Horse Archer matchup above, “what if Heavy Infantry collides with enemy Archers?”.

Anyways, that’s enough teasing from my Side, back into the testing labs I go!
I’ll hope to have an actual testable version ready within the coming week so I can present you with some battles and more stuff, ready to be shown off.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 22: Libyan map extension + Update release date
Salvete!
Today we’ll mostly be talking about a map extension Shocky27 made and the various new tribes that have been added to the North-African area, if you’re just here for the update’s release date announcement, that’ll be at the bottom of this DD.

Hello all, shocky27 again with several more map additions! This time we are adding an entire region to the map which received no love in vanilla: Libya. Libya was a land of many peoples during this time period, as described historically by authors such as Herodotus, Pliny, Ptolemy and more; but also from archaeology. This map will blend together historical sources and archaeological data to best recreate ancient Libya and southern Tunisia with gameplay in mind. With that being said, many more tribes could potentially be added (or subdivided, like the Makae), and they may be added at a later date, but for gameplay purposes new tags have been somewhat limited. The sources here mostly defer to Herotodus, Pseudo-Scylax (he wrote a periplus in 350 BC and is the closest in time) and Pliny. Archaeology by David J. Mattingly is used extensively. Here is a comparison before and after picture:

Now let’s begin talking about each area and tribe starting from east to west.

Nasamones:

The Nasamones were one of the most powerful tribal confederations in Libya, and held territory from the coast of the Greater Syrtis (where Cyrenes territory ends in the southwest) through the inland desert oases, particularly Aguila. Augila itself was an important secondary oracular center for the god Ammon, perhaps only second in importance to Ammonium itself, which lies just to the east (controlled by Egypt). This tribal confederation were quite the followers of the god Ammon and helped facilitate it’s spread throughout the Libyan Desert, hence the name Nasamones. Historically they were a problem for Cyrenaican and Carthaginian sailors at sea, and a menace along Cyrene’s southern border. However, for gameplay purposes, territories between Nasamones and Cyrene begin uncolonized to prevent automatic war at game start. A new passable, uncolonizeable terrain has been added to connect Aguila to Jaghbub/Ammonium to the east, and Jaghbub/Ammonium to the modern Tobruk area, to reflect the great ties the Ammonium area had to places further west.

Machyles:

Not to be confused with the Maklhues of Herodotus, this was a minor tribe listed by Pliny as being inland from the Nasamones, virtually nothing else is known about them. Their tribal name suggests they belong to the Macaean cultural group, and this tribe serves as a buffer between other greater powers in the region (Nasamones to the east, Garamantes to the south and Makae to the north). In game, they will be given an option to become a tribal vassal to another power, or go it alone… this would be a very difficult playthrough.

Makae:

The Makae are described as a numerous people, but it seems they were never a united tribal confederation. Pliny and others list several subtribes, which the Makae could be divided into. For gameplay purposes, the Makae are united as one entity (minus Machyles), located mostly inland from Tripolitania. Historically the Makae tribes kicked the Greeks out of Cinyps (on the coast near Lepcis/Lapki) with the help of the Carthaginians, served as mercenaries in the armies of Hannibal, and became mostly assimilated into Liby-phoenecian culture, and later, were Romanized. The Makae cover several areas in game as described by ancient authors: The Cinyps River, Wadi Zamzam, Wadi Soffegin, all the way to Waddan oasis as suggested by archaeology.

Psylli:

The enigmatic Psylli tribe were possibly a relic population of pre-Afro-Asiatic (Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, etc.) language expansion into this area of Africa, as attested by their unusual place names and tribal name, which appears to not be related to Afro-Asiatic or any known language family. They were described as renowned snake charmers by ancient sources, and appear to have been wiped out by the Nasamones during the time of Herodotus. However, later Roman sources describe the Psylli as living along the central coast of the Greater Syrtis as a minor tribe. In fact, the word Syrtis and the modern city of Sirte in this region owe their names to the Psylli tribe (notice the similarity between the words “Syrtis” and “Psylli”). They appear in-game as a tribal vassal to the Nasamones at start. (Pinkish colored nation with its capital at Euphranta on the map below).

Garamantes:

The exclusion of the famed Garamantes from vanilla I:R was what drove me to create this map to begin with. Not only are they cited throughout all the historical sources, archaeology in the past 20 years has proven they were an advanced and innovative civilization in their own right. Entire books can be written about the Garamantes, so I’ll try to keep it short.

They were oasis farmers in the deep interior of modern Libya along several “wadis” (dried river beds which may seasonally flow). Underneath these wadis the Garamantes dug “foggaras”, a type of underground irrigation system, using mass slave labor. This allowed them to produce all manner of grains, dates, vegetables, as well as support their livestock and horses. They were famed warriors, traders of exotic goods from the Mediterranean to Mali and Chad, produced phenomenal rock art, and more. Their most famous exploits involve their dealings with Rome: they were conquered by Cornelius Balbus in 19BC, but the Romans were unable to make Fezzan a new province due to persistent guerilla insurgency. Rome decided in the 1st century A.D. that they’d install a client king, and from that point both parties prospered. The Garamantes king would famously host a Roman expedition all the way to Lake Chad.

Phazanii:

One of the other great nations Balbus conquered appears to have been the Phazanii, west of the Makae, with their capital at the city of Cydamus (modern Ghadames, see the similarity?) The Phazanii occupied a number of oasis groups running along the modern border of Tunisia and Libya. While more minor tribes could have been added north of the Phazanii, for gameplay at this time, the Phazanii, Makae and Gindanes have split the lands of others. A passable area to the south of Cydamus connects their lands to the Garamantes.

Gindanes (Lotus-Eaters):

The Gindanes are a tribe listed by ancient sources such as Herodotus as laying inland from the coast of the Minor Syrtis. They inhabited the land which stuck out toward the modern day island of Djerba (Tipaza in game). After centuries of Punic peoples slowly colonizing the coast, the Ginandes appear to have been fully integrated into Liby-phoenician culture by Roman times as they are not listed by later sources. Modern scholars such as Mattingly and others speculate that the Gindanes were possibly a tribe/subtribe of the “Lotophagoi” or “Lotus-eaters”, described as inhabiting this stretch of coastline. The Gindanes begin in game as a tribal vassal of Carthage.

Gyzantes:

The Gyzantes are listed by both Herotodus and Pseudo-Scylax as inhabiting the shores of Lake Tritonis, the modern Chott el Djerib in Tunisia. Pseudo-Scylax lists only the Gyzantes around the year 350BC, while the older Herodotus listed a number of other tribes; here we will defer to Psuedo-Scylax. Later sources list a number of other tribes (Nybgenii, Eropaei, etc.) of Gaetulian background, and their affiliation with the earlier Gyzantes is unclear. At this time, the Lake Tritonis was slowly drying out and the River Triton would sometimes be cut from the Mediterranean. This bountiful land produced great quantities of honey, had African elephants, monkeys and more; a stark contrast to the deserts and oases of today. The Romans would make their presence known here after their conquest of Africa - a number of Romans sites have been identified in this region by modern archaeology. The Gyzantes start in game with control of the entirety of the shore around Lake Tritonis.

As you can see, the terrain doesn’t quite reflect how different the landscape was back then - we plan to add the lakes and proper terrain soon. Missions, events and more are being planned for the new nations, which aims to simulate some of their historic interactions with Carthage and Rome. I hope this Dev Diary helps others to appreciate the great cultures and numerous peoples of Libya that unfortunately were left out of vanilla despite historical sources and modern archaeology. Here is a final cultural map shot of the region.

But now, finally, the release date for this big update will be the 10th of November (2021 ofcourse). A full changelog will be made public on the 8th in the last DD.
Also the Deadline for the story contest is closing ending on the 5th of November: https://forms.gle/6S4iXJ8SjPyXmBjV7 Doesn’t matter whether your story is long, if it’s interesting and played in Imperator, feel free to send it.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 23: Arabian Rework + more flags
Salvete! Today we'll be talking about a rework to Southern Arabia and tons of new custom flags!

Arabia:
Many changes have been made to the political situation and geography of the Arabia Felix region. Represented as tribal in vanilla, these societies had kingdoms from the 9th century BC, led first by a ‘mukarrib’, a politico-religious leader considered ‘close’ to the gods, and then, from around our period (4th century BC), by a ‘malik’, which is the same as the Arabic word for king today.
Though treated as Arabs in Imperator, the peoples of South Arabia at this time were not Arabs as we know them today, but related Semitic peoples with their own writing system, also dating from the 9th century BC.

In Invictus, the tribes of Saba, Qataba and Hadhramaut will now be kingdoms. Having won its independence from Saba years before, Ma’in had a somewhat different political system heavily influenced by its prosperous merchant class. Ma’in seems to have had a non-hereditary and possible elective monarchy, and the malik ruled in a council representing all Minaean groups. Though it is not a perfect representation, we propose making Ma’in a plutocratic republic, distinguishing its political system from the proper monarchies to the south.

The tribe of Himjar is missing because it is anachronistic. The Himyarites would not overthrow their Qatabanian rulers until 110 BC. Therefore, Himjar’s former land is split between Saba and Qataba, based on the borders established after Qataba and Ma’in broke away from Saba’s domination years before our start date. However, the Himyarite pops still practice their culture, to represent the tribes subject to the independent Qatabanians.

The term ‘Araba Felix’ can mean ‘happy’, ‘blessed’ or ‘fertile’, due both to the highly lucrative incense trade and the natural fertility of the region, which was wetter and greener than it was today and benefited from a complex irrigation network and the Ma’rib Dam. Recognised as a marvel of ancient engineering, the Ma’rib Dam was built to catch monsoon rains no later than the 8th century BC, though other irrigation works may date much further back. The dam held an enormous reservoir of water that could support thousands and thousands of people. As such, the number of pops has been increased in Arabia Felix and three farmland tiles have been created in the vicinity of the Ma’rib Dam. Some of these new pops are citizens to demonstrate the hundreds of years of urbanised and literate tradition in the region. Around 10 proper cities have been built in their historic locations, including Yathill, Mariaba (Ma’rib), Sirwa, Shabwa (called a metropolis by Eratosthenes), Tamna, Karnu (Qarnawu) and Sapphar (Dhafar).

The Ma’rib Dam was of such singular importance to the societies of South Arabia at the time, and particularly Saba, that in the future we hope to create an interactive event chain to repair and maintain the dam so it can continue to provide future prosperity (or cause calamity, if it is allowed to degrade).

In the region of Punt, across the Red Sea, the ancient city of Wikru has been added, next to Axum. Some Minaean but especially Sabean pops can also be found in the Horn of Africa to represent their lingering influence after having played a larger role in the area previously. The cultural connections between the Axum area and South Arabia included the sharing of some of the same deities. To represent this, the Axumite deities Maher and Behar have been added to a greatly expanded Arabian pantheon that now includes Almaqah, ‘Amm, Sayin, Haukim and more. These are not weak gods. Behar, the Axumite god of the sea, has an apotheosis effect creating a large storm off the Bab El-Mandeb Strait.

To the north, the Arabia Petrea (‘rocky Arabia’) region has mostly been left alone, though Ta’if has been absorbed by Thamud and the Qedarite tribes have been made migratory to better reflect their transhumant lifestyles.

Specific cultural inventions have been made for Arabian and Nubian cultures, many of them focused on the rich trade in incense, ivory, cinnamon, black pepper and gum. These culture groups also have access to the Monsoon Navigation invention, which greatly expands naval range in the Indian Ocean and allows players to trade with India, in imitation of ancient practice. The island nation of Tylos also has access to these inventions, as well as a unique one focused on the cotton trade.

(Above, some Arabian commercial inventions)

(Above, some Arabian maritime inventions)

The region’s wealth is further demonstrated by four new modifiers that boost the local economy. The first of these is in Tylos, which was also a centre of the pearl trade. The extra production and trade routes will give players there an extra financial edge. Qana, in Hadramaut, also receives a modifier for incense production, as this was one of the most important sites in the production and distribution chain. The uncolonised island of Soqotra also has a special modifier increasing spice production by two units, for a total of three. This is in recognition of its role as the sole producer of dragon’s blood, a red sap from the Dracaena cinnabari tree that was coveted in the ancient world for its medicinal and dyeing properties. The fourth modifier is located in Gangaras, outside the city of Meroë, and boosts iron production. The Nubians had a highly developed iron industry, as attested by the large piles of slag still found in modern Sudan, and were in fact iron exporters, even though they tended not to wear heavy armour themselves.

Indeed, though previously treated somewhat as a rural extension of Egypt, this region had its own way of fighting that was different from the armies of the Mediterranean. As mentioned, the Nubians wore little armour and specialised in archery to the point that the Egyptians called their homeland Ta-Seti, the Land of the Bow. Ancient Arabians preferred the sword to the spear and tended to fight with light or leather armour, but nothing heavier than that. The Afro-Arabian traditions therefore focus on light units, like light infantry and expert archers, along with three mobile units: light cavalry, camels and horse archers. Nubian nobles were known to loose arrows from horseback and hundreds of ancient composite bows have been found in present-day Sudan alongside the longbows that a foot archer would have used. A few steppe horse tiles have been placed in Nubia and Arabia Felix to make it possible to maintain horse archers in local armies. Though the horses of the area were different from the breeds of the Pontic Steppe, the evidence points to a significant amount of mounted archery and the composite bow was arguably more important to its practice than the specific breed of horse.

The Afro-Arabian military traditions also have a strong naval aspect, as one might expect, and their punch comes in the form of the African elephant, which was used by Meroë’s Kandake Amanirenas to repel a Roman invasion at the end of our period and whose ivory was preferred in Indian markets, being considered tougher and whiter than Indian ivory. Some historians ask whether the large elephant-themed royal complex at Musawwir al-Sufra was used as an elephant training camp, particularly its Great Enclosure. Though war elephants were quite unlikely to have been used to the same extent as in India, they still deserve a place in the new Afro-Military traditions and are much more appropriate than heavy infantry, much less the phalanx, for example.

Flags:
Hello all, I'm RetconCrisis and I'm currently working on making unique flags for countries based on their coinage/art and other cultural aspects.
First off, the vanilla flag for Sparta (right) has been replaced with a more vibrant flag (left).

Several other flags have also been added in Italy, which include Nuceria, Lucania, Elea, Bruttia, Croton, Tarentum, and Sabinia.

Even more flags have been added in Greece. On the island of Crete, the countries of Ierapetra, Knossos and Gortyna have new flags, while the Nesiotic League in the Aegean Sea also has one based on coinage from Delos. Near mainland Greece, other countries with new flags include Megara, Aetolia, Delphi, Argos, Boeotia, Thebes, Messenia and Akarnania.

Some other countries with new flags include Colchis in the Caucasus, Dardania in Illyria, Ibasim in the western Mediterranean, and Iol and the Garamantes in north Africa.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 24: Character backgrounds + Spearmen
Salvete! Today we’ll be talking about character backgrounds and spearmen content.

Salvetes readers! I gmb360 will start today's DD with some changes we have made to performance improvements as well as some new juicy Artwork for Character Backgrounds (credit for the art here goes to Nerdman3000). You all might remember me from the first DD where I introduced you all to our “Background System” and now I would like to inform you readers on some of the changes we have made.

This part might get a bit technical but nevertheless I think it’s interesting so you all understand what problems we have to fight due to some strange Coding decisions by paradox. So we in the team are heavily advised to avoid using so called guiscripts when coding Gui features. Reason for this is clear: These Guiscripts are known in the modding community to destroy the performance by a lot! This means that when writing code for the character backgrounds I can’t use variables/checks and need to use the gui Syntax of Paradox. This leads to me having to find work arounds for many issues which can lead to long Code lines, something that heavily decreases the mods Performance.

So how to solve it? Well we in the team decided to simplify some of the Features of our so called Background System. What exactly has changed? Well firstly the code length has been heavily reduced which will result in a slight performance increase. This can mainly be explained due to reduction in the RAM usage. Our Testers have seen increases of around 15% at all times and additionally the character screen RAM spike is much better. Some of you might have noticed that when opening the character screen the game takes a few seconds to load all of the character backgrounds, this issue has now slightly improved though we still think that some slight improvements to the code can be made to fully fix this issue. For now you will have to live with the around 10% increase in Performance (Big thanks to Dementive, who tested around with the Performance and MattTheLegoman for advising us on which File type to use)

Now unfortunately for this performance fix we had to remove a feature of the Background System, for example characters will no longer receive the Background of a province when standing on top of said Province with an Army.

As you can see in the picture, Ptolamy is leading an army in Memphis, which previously would have given him the Memphis Background. This is no longer the case and now only the Wartentbackground will be shown.

The removal of this feature has heavily reduced the length of the code, which as mentioned before will bring a performance increase. Furthermore the Code has been reworked in a way that will facilitate the implementation of new Backgrounds! So as long as our Artist continues to do a great Job we will have plenty of character Backgrounds being implemented much quicker! Now We will take a look at some of the new Backgrounds that have been implemented
Carthage

Wartent Background for Carthage

Rhodes

The Temple of Artemis

The Mausoleum

Jerusalem

Stonehenge

Pataliputra (Capital of Maurya at game start)

Lastly we have the Wartentbackground for Maurya!

With this I conclude my Part of the DD Expect all of these new Backgrounds and the Performance increases to be part of the new Big update we have coming up! See you all next time my dearest Lectores!


It’s Parcipal coming back from the dead with some more fresh content on Spears.
First of all, the initial balancing is still not 100% done and we’re not even in a decent test phase. Once we hit our internal deadline, testers may reign free!

A handful of people raised concerns about the name “Spearmen”, which is a good sign that you really want this unit to work out. However, I find it easier to use, alongside giving the unit a more niche use, if you label (and handle) the unit as a “Spearman '' rather than “Medium Infantry”. If we are to label something along the lines of medium infantry, we’ve just made a 360° turn and still face the problem that “Infantry” is a too broad phrasing for ancient warfare.

Another handful of people raised concerns about the cultural names, especially the name “Hoplitai” from my previous post. Yet again, the internal name would be “Spearman”, while the cultural distinctive name refers to your unit in another way. This simply means that they’re all the same unit, just adding another layer of flavour ontop of them. A Roman cultural name will be distinctive from the Persian or even the Carthaginian name. So you get more bang for your buck (or flavour for your experience in this case.)

Anyways, that’s my 2 cents on the problems I could have seen, if you want a more elaborate answer on those, I’ll be sure to supply in another comment on my own Account.

To get back to the topic…. the last 2 weeks have been rather boring, especially in the field of testing units. Numerous times I have adjusted the Unit efficiencies, morale damage taken modifiers and more, just to bash units against one another. Still not satisfied with the results, there’s not much to show off.

However, there’s more exciting things to show off. I’ve successfully created a new trait, being handed out the same way as other military related traits.

‘Comradely’

• Just a quick’n’easy trait to give frequent spear users more Military Options. This trait mimics the Legates’ comradely attitude, by fighting alongside his battle-brethren.
• The icon for such a trait is still missing, but here we are!

Next on the list would be a corresponding Legion Distinction for Spear-users. The Game features many Distinctions for different matchups/terrain boni, so the Invictus team should capitalize on those aswell, with a new unit! (I’m open for any Name suggesstions, figuring the game already has a Silver Shield Distinction, the current Name is a mere placeholder!)

(Just as a quick note, I didn’t bother creating all the modifiers for Spearmen, so they’re recycled placeholder images for now)

Lastsly, I’d like to showcase some reworked Military traditions. There’s still much to be done with these, however, I’m fairly sure I can push most content within the next big patch!

(Yet again, No edited Spearmen-modifiers as of yet, but worry not, the good ole’ Chariots agreed to let their art be used in todays’ DD. Absolutely no Chariots were harmed in the process of writing this up!)

This concludes my part of the DD, showcasing more features surrounding the Spearmen and their Journey into Invictus!
Hope to have more for you next week, Parcipal signing off!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 25: Development problems + Unique wonders + Tweaks
Today we’ll be talking about some tweaks we have made, the wonder models Matt has made along with unique effects for wonders but first, we have an inside look of everything that’s gone slightly wrong during development.

Despite what you may see in public chats, we don’t always agree on what to do with the mod. Several interesting things have happened during development, and today I'll give you a bit of a look behind the curtains into the troubles of development. Things that have happened to us or we have to deal with:

• Devs suddenly disappearing due to things happening in real life, requiring us to quickly learn how the code works and fix it or cut the content from the update.
• Mistakes and errors when merging our git branches overriding people’s work and breaking stuff. (these don’t take long to fix, but are hard to find)
• First a slight clarification, in order for a proposal to pass and be implemented it requires 2/3rds +1 positive votes (this was designed by me so no controversial stuff could get added, splitting the community, I designed based upon how constitutional changes are made), this system in itself sparked a debate on Democracy and the conditions for a vote passing, as you had the 2/3rds wing on one side, and the majority wing on the other. The 2/3rds + 1 remained but not after me being accused of rigging the vote system to block certain proposals with this rule
• A 4-day debate on Iberia where we the devs, nor the historians could agree on cultural borders, ending up with a compromise but oh boy was it fun having to read over 600 passive aggressive debate messages when I woke up. (This became known as the Iberia-debate internally)
• An attempt at a region rework, which sparked a lot of debate, saw a lot of iterations and eventually the vote was split between each area of the world a separate vote because the Multiplayer/Balance wing, the Historical wing, and the Aesthetic borders wing couldn’t agree and this way perhaps we could get some changes in. We tried splitting Hibernia from Scotland for example (and some people wanted to merge Sicily with Sardinia/Corsica which ended up in a 50/50 vote, hence the accusations of rigging the vote system earlier as I opposed the change), despite some proposals technically hitting 2/3rds, I took an executive decision at the time and ended the debate leaving regions up to the respective devs of the region. In the end only Germania/Poland/Scandinavia were reworked to be more balanced and allow Rhine borders. (I take full responsibility for sparking this useless debate and wasting everyone's time)
• Another famous debate internally was the Mapmodding debate, now originally we didn’t plan on extending the map as this often meant Mac Users would crash and be unable to play (which is unacceptable in a mod like Invictus). And this decision remained for a while until Shocky appeared with his projects, we decided to hold a vote and with unanimous support and the largest votecount of any vote, mapmodding was approved but limited. Now after adding a few areas, we ran into the Mac Crash, meaning, Me(Snowlet), Shocky and Isaac spend hours upon hours finding the exact problem and fixing it (huge thanks to Isaac for testing for us). Now eventually we found it had to do with adding provinces beyond the 8257th province that caused the crash, we did some trickery and managed to go below the limit eliminating the crash.
  Then Shocky did some trickery and found a way to surpass the limit, but we’re now in the awkward spot of having to test on a Mac every single province we try to add, so map modding will be slowed down.
• Another aspect of development is dealing with suggestions. Suggestions can range from extensive ideas and mechanics, to requesting an icon or namechange. For each suggestion we get, we evaluate whether we can implement it, whether we want to implement it, whether we have the time to implement it, and whether it fits within the intended scope of the mod as Vanilla++. As you may imagine, this means a lot of suggestions are seemingly ignored when they don’t fit one of our criteria, it’s a tricky balance. The more suggestions we take, the less time we spend on our own ideas and projects, delaying updates further. But we hope you have appreciated the current balance of us developing suggestions.

We also have a small announcement: due to delays, real life, and ambition to provide only content of the highest quality, Cyrenaica will not be in the next update, we don’t want to release it while it is still so buggy and not finished, you’ll get to enjoy the mission tree at an unspecified time later.


Matt stuff:
G’day, Matt Alexi here to talk about the mapping work I’ve done for my mates at Invictus. With the great expansion into North Africa, adding the deep holdings of the forgotten yet paramount Garamantes, it came with a need to position their territories’ cities, roads, forts and army locations on the map. Shocky (project lead for North Africa expansion) and I worked on city positions based on historical locations and I unlocked how to position roads on the map.

Part of the North African expansion is the addition of Lake Tritonis, and painted terrain materials I blended seamlessly into the former desert sands. The Great Dam of Marib in southern Arabia is now a great wonder and appropriate terrain has been painted in, making an oasis in the desert.

Lake tritonis

Great Dam of Marib

In addition to the Great Dam of Marib, many more wonders have been added by MattAlexi, some already in the current workshop version. I (olivenkranz) did most of their unique modifiers, some of which I will present today. Vanilla Wonders have NOT (yet?) been touched. The numbers might still change, and if you have constructive criticism, please tell me.
First of all the aforementioned Great Dam of Marib, which currently only has local modifiers.

Abu Simbel, built by the divine Pharaoh Ramesses II.

The 2nd Temple of Jerusalem (freshly created by MattAlexi for this update)

The Cothon of Carthage has gotten its own unique modifier.

Of course, there are some more, but I don’t want to spoil everything...

Dementive here, with more content for India and Kush. Many new decisions have been made in India. To start countries with a Hindu ruler will now have the decision to choose a personal deity via an event:

Each personal deity gives unique modifiers to Hindu rulers by adding a status trait. It is possible to change your personal deity from events and even gain new personal deities from events and missions.

Two more decisions to gather the treasures of India for both Buddhists and Hindu’s have been made.

NOTE: Some of these treasures and numbers may be changed in the future.

To make this possible 20+ new treasures have been added all over India. 4 new treasure icons have been made for these new treasures by EricG:

Some other changes in India include: A decision for Tamil countries to send out a trade fleet.

And the blood of King Porus has been added to Porus’ son the ruler of Paurava:

5 new decisions have also been made for Kush and Kemetic Egypt. These decisions are only available once a new Egyptian dynasty has been formed.

And finally, don’t forget the story contest will run for another week roughly: https://forms.gle/6S4iXJ8SjPyXmBjV7 if you have any story/haiku/poem from when playing Imperator, we’d love to read it and if you win, we’ll add one of your special requests directly into the mod.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 26: Patch notes for 1.1 update
Today will be the last Dev Diary with content for a bit.
The update's been released now and can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532715348
Warning! This update will break all savegames, if you wish to continue playing an old save, you’ll have to stop steam from automatically updating the mod.

New mission trees:
- Added generic mission tree for going independent (3 paths)
- Added mission tree for Kush
- Added mission tree for Judea
- Added mission tree for Scythia
- Added mission trees to the Tamil Kings (Chola, Pandya, and Chera), several variations, 3 trees
- Added mission tree for Bharatavarsha (Indian formable)

Map changes: (all made to be more historical for the time period)
- Added Fezzan (Libya)
- Added lake Tritonis in Tunisia (changed the river setup here to be more historical too)
- Added the Marib Dam wonder and it’s lake
- Expanded the map around Kush
- Changed the Germanic nation setup
- Changed the Germanic region setup (as in governorships)
- Changed the Sardinian nation setup
- Changed the Scythian nation setup
- Changed the Arabian nation and population setup
- Reworked African culture(group)s
- Reworked Scythian culture(group)s
- Reworked Indian culture(group)s
- Renamed Palestine to Canaan
- Removed Spec chars from Province Names

New mechanics:
- Reworked the AI completely based upon Glavius' work
- Reworked all buildings (AI is now also better at building them)
- Added Spearmen unit
- Per neighbouring city, a Settlement gains 4 extra civilization capacity
- Added mechanic for gaining inventions as tribes by sacking
- Made obtaining military traditions count all pops from all integrated cultures (within the right groups) instead of just the largest one
(Meaning if a tradition requires Greek pops, it will count Macedonian+Athenian pops to hit the limit, you no longer need a single huge culture)
- Reworked Tribal Sacrifice

Flavour additions:
- Added flavour events/decisions to the Tamil Kings
- Added flavour events/decisions to Kush/Nubia
- Added flavour events/decisions to Scythian countries
- Added lots of flavour content to Judea (decisions, events, treasures, governments, etc)
- Added heritages to 50+ nations (Anatolia, India, Levant, Afric, Germania...)
- Added cultural inventions to Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Arabia and more
- Added Gallic Smith for Gallic Nations
- Added training camp decisions for Elephants/Camels
- Enabled very severe winters which previously would never trigger
- Gave Invictus wonders unique effects
- Added new military traditions/rebalanced which culture gets which traditions
- Added plenty of new flags around the world
- Added more variety to Female Egyptian names

Art additions/changes:
- Added new character backgrounds (the remaining Seven Wonders, India-related backgrounds, Carthage and Carthaginian tent backgrounds, Jerusalem, and Stonehenge)
- Added new loading screen backgrounds for the mod
- Created new event window art using the vanilla loading screen art and added them to a number of events (NOTE: As of right now, the amount of vanilla loading screen event window art used in events in the mod is low. This will change in future releases as we work out which events this art may be useful in, and even create new events where this art can be most appropriately used).

Balance changes:
- Totally reworked Unit and modifier balance (LI has use now, HI been nerfed, etc)
- Slave revolts cannot happen first 10 years of game
- Slave revolts now require less than 15% happiness
- Code rework to the Hellenistic Empire Tree
- Changed the conditions for the Israel formable
- Made Epirus tree more sensible with requirements
- Made Epirus tree give Satraps (meaning no diplo slot) instead of Client States
- Prevent Seleucids AI from declaring war manually for the first year to fix edge-cases with Diadochi war
- Made mission to become an Empire as Rome easier so you're more likely to see the unique flavour events and Roman Civil war
- Made AI Rome smarter, better and scarier
- Allows primary heirs to do Anabasis
- Made assaults do 25% more damage
- Made slaves distribute over 5 provinces instead of 3
- Made 4 missions appear instead of 3 in the mission screen
- Made it so you can't seize estates from very disloyal people
- Removed levy size modifiers from heritages
- Changed the price of certain trade goods to nerf commerce for non-commercial states

Various stuff:
- Improved performance with Food code
- Translated a lot more content to Spanish
- Translated missing important localization to German
- Finished French Translation
- Made it so you can't spy on people through player mapmode
- Improved the localization for Carthage
- Renamed Alexander (the Great) to Alexandros for consistency with other characters’ names

Bugfixes:
- Fixed various missing icons spamming the error log
- Fixed Punic puppet tree not making you independent
- Fixed Indian Empire mission tree requiring you to own a non-existent province
- Fixed the decision to embrace ways of war remaining visible and clickable after embracing the ways of war
- Fixed duplicating events like Alexander's grave
- Fixed wrong names for several characters
- Fixed infinite money glitch with Bankruptcy buttons
- Seleucids missions now check the right territory for the Mediterranean capital
- Fixed Irish Albion formable not always appearing
- Fixed a localization bug with techspread event
- Changed conditions for Mummification decision
- Fixed the Macedonian missions to be more consistent
- Fixed Slave Raiding not always being enabled due to Vanilla bug
- Fixed Hellenistic Empire Tree not giving correct primary culture
- Fixed Hellenstic Empire subjects deleting modifiers
- Fixed Antigonids collapsing when making Corinth a Subject
- Fixed Thracian mission tree Edge-cases and sensibilised requirements
(You no longer need to fight Athens to finish your first mission tree)
- Put Capua back in Capua
- Fixed bunch of small items causing problems
- Fixed missing regency code for Tanists
- Fixed broken Armenian capital modifier

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 27: A new main menu + art + patchnotes
Originally I (snowlet) hadn’t planend on any DD for today, but then Agamidae came and made something wonderful so I thought we might as well talk about it.
I present to you, the new main menu made by Agamidae (more on the background art later in the DD):

As you can see he has added a patch notes list in the main menu, shifted several elements (including a personal favorite where the PDX logo and login is integrated into the menu list on the left) and enabled one of our new background art pieces made by Aquizar.
Not a very technical explanation I know, but still this is more a DD for the eye than for the mind, if you know what I mean.

Next he has also changed the nation selection screen:

As you can see he has made it so that there are some new recommended nations. So here’s a list of them (some are new, some have been edited from vanilla):

Macedon:

Judea:

Kush:

Chersonesus:

Karmoia:

Hastaia:

Scythia:

Bactria:

Chola:

Each one has received changes to make them worth playing.

Next we also have a lot of new background art (which will be implemented over the coming week(s) into various places.
All of them are made by Aquizar who has graciously allowed us to use them, who I highly recommend you check out: https://www.artstation.com/macbeth_45

More art will be shown off next week.

But now an actual full hotfix list:
V1.1.1 (to be released a few hours after this DD is out)
- Added a brand new Main-menu thanks to Agamidae
- Revolts won't sack themselves
- Added new recommended nations
- Enabled assaulting with Spearmen
- Nerfed Judean modifiers
- Nerfed the Second Temple
- Further work on German translation
- Slightly reduced techspread to tribes
- Fixed Judean typos
- Fixed Sarmatian formable being repeatable
- Fix mercs taking control of capital in Scythian tree
- Clarified various tooltips and fixed several bugs in Scythia
- Fixed various double-spaces and apostrophes in the loc

v1.1c
- Fixed Spartan missions being uncompletable due to their new spearmen
- Nerfed Invictus wonders
- Translated a lot of the mod into German (not missions)
- Added a start-up event for Scythia
- Fixed naval raiding for Arabians not working
- Balanced some heritages
- Added 3 flags to North Africa
- A lot of fixes to Scythian tree
- A lot of fixes to Judean tree
Both have received better tooltips, better requirements etc
- Fixed Sarmatian formable
- Fixed vanilla fall of the family event being broken and making a prestigious family fall

V1.1b - "Herodotus" (save-compatible)
- Added some more Spanish translations
- Removed accidental Bactrian content
- Further fixes to Scythia
- Fix to pandyan bug
- More spearmen fixes

V1.1a - "Herodotus" (save-compatible)
- Added missing spearmen content (levy templates etc)
- Fixed some broken Scythian localization
- Fixed Maurya getting Bharat missions

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 28: Mauryan (collapse) Rework

Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about a rework to Maurya and its collapse.

Hello all, Dementive here with a look into the future of Maurya and India in Invictus. In Vanilla, Maurya is an unstoppable monstrosity and regularly dominates India nearly every game with very little meaningful opposition. This is pretty boring and makes playing in and around India a nightmare, as you’ll have the hulking Mauryan mass to worry about at all times. As a player, Maurya is debatably the most boring tag in the whole game because of how easy it is. It’s like playing Ming in EU4, which is about as fun as watching paint dry.

To make Maurya more fun and gameplay more historically accurate, an event chain called “Mauryan Collapse” and multiple other Mauryan flavor events have been added. The events will essentially ensure that Ashoka eventually becomes the ruler of Maurya in roughly the way he did historically. Once Ashoka dies the Mauryan collapse event chain will begin:

The vanilla Mauryan decline heritage is now given through this event and can be removed later on. About 2 years after this event fires. Maurya will get an event called “Deccan Disunity” and the Satavahana dynasty and the Kalinga kingdom will declare independence.

This event can occur in a few ways: Kalinga and Satavahana might declare war on Maurya as soon as it fires, or Maurya might get an option to declare a truce or try to reconquest immediately.

Additionally, they may not declare independence at the same time but other times they will, giving the event a lot of variation from game to game.

The next event in the chain is the “Indo-Greek coalition” which will fire approximately 2-4 years after the Deccan Disunity event.

Up to five Indo-Greek Kings will declare themselves independent from Mauryan rule in the Punjab region and may temporarily ally with each other to fight off Maurya. The Mauryan player will have the option to declare war and retake the lands immediately or establish a 10 year truce. Everytime the event fires, the strength of the Indo-Greek coalition will vary from the last time, so this event can result in a variety of map states.

The final event in the chain is the “Shunga rebellion”. Historically, when the Shunga dynasty rebelled against Mauryan rule, they put an end to the Mauryan empire and established their own dynasty that ruled in their place. If the Shunga rebellion occurs, it is likely over for Maurya.

Mauryan Collapse Wargoal: A new wargoal has been made that is available to all countries that border Maurya after the death of Ashoka. The AI and the player can and will declare war on Maurya with this wargoal if they see them as weak.

We do realize that this event chain is more “historically railroaded” than most events in the game. However, we felt it was necessary to have a big scripted disaster for Maurya to make gameplay as and around them interesting as possible. A lot of testing is still needed to get the event chain just right so this may not be the final version you see in release.

Now you might ask yourself, “what if I'm playing Maurya and I don’t want to collapse?” Well too bad, you’re gonna collapse...just joking; a new mission tree has been made that becomes available when Ashoka is the ruler of Maurya that will allow you to prevent the collapse event chain. However, this mission tree will be failed if it is not completed before the death of Ashoka and then collapse will become inevitable.
Here is a quick look at the tree and some of the tasks:

***Keep in mind these modifiers, triggers, and effects may be changed***

This mission tree will be pretty hard to complete before Ashoka dies, so it’s a race against the clock to finish up the mission tasks in order to prevent looming collapse. With these changes, our hope is that Maurya will no longer be an overwhelming easy and stale tag to play and will actually be a bit of a challenge now.

Other things in India:
The Hindu caste laws and accompanying decisions made by Dustin for HMO have been integrated into Invictus and slightly adapted. These are available for all countries that are Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain religions. Each religion has a unique set of laws which give unique bonuses.

Here is a look at the Hindu laws:

To unlock these laws 3 new decisions were made for each progression of the laws, here is one of them:

Trade Good:
A new trade good has also been created that is present in very small amounts in India: Sugar.
Sugar is only present in 3 provinces at game start, but it will play a big role in some Indian mission trees and events moving forward.

---Now back to Snowlet:
We promised more beautiful backgrounds for this DD but we’ll keep them for next DD instead along with a new mechanic as our planning has been slightly altered. Anyway, hope you enjoyed the DD as I know many of you have been waiting for Maurya.

Also for those who may have missed, the new Age of Iron mod is out and worth checking out, it’s made by a lone dev on a vanilla map but an iron age setting: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2660002180

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 29: Custom Achievement system & Pax Romana & More Art
Today we’ll be presenting to you an achievement system that will be used in Invictus, it adds in-game achievements alongside the vanilla achievement system and doesn’t require ironman. We’ll also be presenting a lot of great art made by Aquizar. But first we’ll be talking about the Pax Romana, a new project meant to streamline mechanic development between major mods.

The Pax Romana, a union between Imperator: Invictus, Imperatrix: Victoria, Lord of the Rings, Bronze Age Reborn and Age of Iron (with options for further expansion) is a project meant for us to share code and resources to an extent that cannot be achieved in the Mod Coop. In essence it is a private discord for us devs to be able to work together, but the benefits will also be felt by the players. All participating mods share a testing team and mechanics like the Achievement system, which can be made by us in a modular way allowing each mod to use it. (The Pax Romana does more than just this, but as it is in essence a private union, we won’t be revealing everything.) This greatly speeds up mechanic development and ensures only content of the highest quality gets in. We can also handle permissions and credits more easily, especially for art, by using a private forum.

In essence, you’ll start seeing shared mechanics and, in-general, content and art of higher quality in all participating mods.

Note: The forum seems to be buggy and at times doesn't display the Art/Gifs correctly, instead just providing strings.
So onto achievements, sadly when using almost any mod in Imperator, it disables the achievement system, you’re also required to use Ironman mode. Luckily for us, Agamidae developed a system that allows us to create custom achievements. Now the big downside to this system is that achievements don’t get saved in between new saves. So if you start a new game, it won’t keep track of which achievements you have finished. Anyway, here’s how it looks like:

The button to open this screen will be found in the menu screen as shown here:

For performance reasons, some achievements require a manual check:

Otherwise, once you have completed an achievement, a minor_event (the events you see in the queued events section) will pop up as shown here (only for events without a manual check):

Unlocked achivements will have a subtle shimmer effect:

Our intention is to highlight new content added to the mod and to encourage you to try different things.
If you have concrete suggestions for achievements that we should add, send them to us HERE: https://forms.gle/zdRHjp1xfLu6mgnt5 if you suggest them ANYWHERE ELSE, we will IGNORE them. This is done for the sake of organisation.

Now finally onto more art by the amazing Aquizar, who you should definitely go check out at: https://www.artstation.com/macbeth_45:

Here is a look at a couple of new mission headers made for Kush and Scythia:

Finally I wish to thank the whole community on behalf of the Invictus team. We greatly appreciate all the support, but I still wish to remind people that we’re modders working in our spare-time and we have no obligation to add anything.
The reason I say this is because there have been an increasing number of people who straight up demand whole features/mechanics which takes hours upon hours to make.
Thank you all for your understanding, we work for free for all the community, but we only work on what we enjoy ourselves.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 30: Open-Source announcement, Panionian League and Scythia updates.
Today we’ll be talking about some changes to the Scythian tree, a new upcoming formable but first and foremost, we have a special announcement.

As the mod is now at a point we can consider it to be polished and of a quality we deem sufficient. I have decided to make the mod Open-Source, aka everyone gets access to the github link here: https://github.com/SnowletTV/Invictus. You can experiment with mod features long before they come out but we DON’T provide ANY support for the Dev version. If you’re a bit tech-savvy you can learn how to set up a github and play it for yourself. (The dev-branch is the most important branch we work on as it is basically the running build.) Some small advice, you can’t have both the dev version and the workshop mod at the same time. Also the Discord includes a working .mod file for everyone.
For a lot of people this decision won’t change much, but for those of you who don’t like waiting for official updates can now just set up the dev-build.

We hope this provides some more transparency as to our development process and status.


Now onto Scythia:
---Scythia Mission Fixes---
Salvete! OmegaCorps, Olivenkranz, and I (Hannibal_theCannibal) have spent time developing the final missing components of the first Scythia Mission. When Invictus 1.1 dropped, there simply wasn't enough time left to finish scripting the event chains for two of the Mission tasks. Rather than holding the entire mission back, we released the mission with some dummy placeholder events with the understanding that we'd quickly patch them in when we had the time. I'm happy to say that we have accomplished that goal and the event chains for the Scythian Games are up and running. Let's dive into the mission to talk a little bit about the specifics.

Nestled within the "Our Stance on the Greeks" mission available to Scythia are two mission tasks that I'll be discussing today.

On the "Hellenizing" branch of the Mission, the task "Euxinus Games" refers to the desire for our Greek-loving Scythians to earn the respect of the Greek world by hosting an Olympics-style series of games. This mission task will invite athletes from the wider Greek world to compete in games to determine a champion. In order to complete this task, the player will be required to build up the infrastructure in a randomly selected territory necessary to host competitors. As we steeped ourselves in the alt-history of this mission, earning admission to the actual Olympics seemed too far-fetched for our aspiring Scythians without an in-between step. It made sense to us then that the Scythians hosting their own set of games would earn legitimacy for themselves while offering an exotic experience to the established Greeks, potentially warming relations between the two worlds.

Requirements:

Events:

On the opposite branch following the traditional path, the task "the Targitaoan Games" refers to a uniquely scythian/Steppe style series of games. Like the Euxinus games, the player will be prompted to develop the infrastructure of a random territory in order to host the athletes, selected from a pool of countries with the scythian culture group (e.g. Saka, Iazyges, Aorsia, etc.). While we do not have direct evidence that the Royal Scythians of the Black Sea held games like this nor is there evidence these games were directly dedicated to the Heptadic God Targitaos, there is scattered references to friendly competition between Scythian tribes which involved people from all over the Eurasian steppe. These games would have included wrestling bouts, drinking contests, hare Hunts, Archery, and horseback races. It is highly likely games like "Kok Boru" were played by the steppe peoples at this time as they still do today.

Kok boru, traditional horse game - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage

Kok boru, a traditional horse game, is a synthesis of traditional practices, performances and the game itself. It is a traditional game played by two teams on horseback, where players try to manoeuvre with a goat’s carcass (replaced with a mould in modern-day games), or ‘ulak’, and score by...

ich.unesco.org

In Invictus, this mission task will send invitations to other scythian culture tags, have their athletes compete in games, and crown a champion (similar to the Olympics), earning their nation great renown and prestige. As a fun sidenote, since scythian culture tags all/nearly all have gender equality enacted, this task will have a very good chance of producing female athletes and even champions!

Requirements:

Events:

---Scythia Roadmap---
Before moving onto newer, more concrete content, we want to quickly share our overall plans for Scythia. We have alluded to this in previous DDs but we are comfortable teasing some additional information.

If all goes well, we plan on creating another 4 missions for Scythia. The missions will be grouped based on the two 'paths' established by the first mission (Our Stance…). Two future missions will follow a historical retelling of scythian history. Although IRL, the Royal Scythians continued to lose Prominence and Territory to their neighboring steppe tribes over time, they were able to still engage in a number of adventures that we hope to emulate in our missions. This will include dealing with other steppe tribes, traveling through the Caucasus mountains, and engaging in a bit of diplomacy with Pontus and Armenia. The missions will culminate in recreating an earlier scythian achievement by fighting their way through the Levant and holding some Ptolemaic Egyptian land hostage (as they did prior to the game’s start date). It's a very ambitious path that will conclude with Scythia playing a major role on the world stage rather than being tucked away on the northern bank of the Black Sea.

The other two missions will be aimed at furthering the alt-history path of hellenization. This will include 'heading west', establishing a legitimized bloodline for the new monarchy, prying away the Greek colonies from the Diadochi, and ultimately confronting one (or possibly two) Diadochi in order to establish a capital in Greece to solidify their newly established identity.

All of these future plans are in very early stages of development. Many plans are still in flux and we are keen on any feedback or ideas from the community.

---The Pan-Ionian League---
Additionally, I've also been working on a new formable tag that can be created by National Decision, “Forming The Panionian League”. Eligible to any country who has Ionian, Aeolian, or Aegean primary culture, this decision will require the player to unify several important coastal Asian cities, either through conquest or vassalage. The required cities largely refer to the historical Ionian League that rebelled against the Achaemenid Persian Empire back in the 500s BCE. One of my favourite parts of PDX games are the 'in-between' steps, the goals and achievements made along the way to performing a higher, more ultimate function. Tier two formables offer a nice early goal that players can work towards while working to achieve a higher goal. I also felt that there was a lack of content for the Greek states on the coast of Asia, so creating a goal for those tags (e.g. Ionia, Kos, Miletus, etc) seemed like an obvious inclusion.

Once formed, the decision generates some pops in your capital, grants some free province investments, and gives claims on every province (state) that has a coastline in the ‘Asia’ region. This will hopefully serve either as a springboard to bigger and better tags, such as the Hellenic League or give some nice, logical borders for those aiming to play a tall style naval game. Once formed, the players will still be able to complete the generic Greek mission tree available to Greek tags in the Aegean. As most of the eligible tags that can take this decision begin the game as a vassal or tributary of one of the Diadochi, success is by no means guaranteed. We don’t imagine the AI may ever successfully take this decision but players who are looking for a bit of a challenge sandwiched between nearly all of the Diadochi will enjoy creating this formable. Special shoutout to our artist RetconCrisis who helped put the flag together based on some obscure Ionian coinage I was able to look up.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 31: MacOS change and Balancing
Salvete! Apologies for being late btw but this will be the second the last Dev Diary this year as we’ll be taking a christmas break lasting until the 10th of January and starting with a final DD and update on the 20th of December.
First off we have a reminder about the threadmark system, then an announcement about map-and MacOS development, then we have some tweaking to Religious conversion and Culture assimilation. Finally we have further work on the spearmen.

Note: I wish to remind people that the forum provides easy navigation through all DD's using the threadmark system on the top-right:

that's it, it's easy to use and indexes all Dev Diaries for us. Now onto the map.

Shocky27 here with an update on how we will proceed with map extensions moving forward:

We have run into a problem with MacOS crashing after adding a certain number of provinces (after number 8258 to be exact). While this can be pushed a little over in rare cases, we will not be able to add any more provinces for people playing on MacOS. Exceptions files show the error to be possibly memory related and inherent to Mac hardware and how it reads game files, and can’t be avoided unless we use a completely different map like some other overhauls do. For now, this means that from the next major update, MacOS will need to subscribe to a separate mod which we will list when the next major update becomes available.

That being said, as a small teaser for the next expansion area (Windows only)…

Now onto the perpetual Balancing task that is a Grand Strategy game as presented by yours truly, Snowlet.
We all agreed in the Invictus team that conversion and assimilation was too quick. Now we have taken steps to remedy this before but the recent AI rework worsened the problems as it made the AI smarter at converting areas leading to huge Hellenic blobs. An easy way to come closer to making it realistic is by adjusting the base pop type percentages to assimilation and conversion. You see each pop type has a percentage modifier being applied to conversion and assimilation and we've been experimenting with changing them. Here is our current iteration pending more testing (these numbers aren't final and not as harsh as they might initially seem).

Pop Type:	Nobles	Citizens	Freemen	Slaves	Tribesmen
Cultural Assimilation
Invictus:	0.4	0.3	0.2	0.1	0.05
Vanilla:	0.4	0.6	0.6	0.6	0.4
Religious Conversion
Invictus:	0.5	0.4	0.2	0.15	0.1
Vanilla:	0.4	0.6	0.6	0.6	0.4

After initial testing, it slows down conversion a lot to roughly the levels we want it to be but for the Cultural assimilation we'll certainly look further into adjusting them. It is worth noting that we are basing the ratio upon what happened historically and who would convert first, aka mainly the Nobles and Citizens, but the numbers will be based upon what is best for balancing. These changes will come in the Christmas update next monday.

Hello there, Parcipal here with some news regarding Unit Balancing.

First of all, Spearmen had a rather poor launch, due to personal reasons, but for now they’re in a playable state, due to Snowlets’ effort to drop fast Hotfixes for crucial things.
Furthermore, tweaking has not stopped. We’re currently in the process to streamline and especially refine levy templates to accommodate for historical immersion, as well as gameplay fun. While many cultures already enjoy the benefits of spearmen in their roster, their viability is not where I’d like it to be. (This is partially due to the lack of Spearmen-modifier propagation, which, right now, is lackluster.) (*).
You may totally expect more changes to the initial efficiencies of spearmen (or vice versa, other units’ efficiencies against spearmen.)
Yet another unit, which still under performs according to my latest tests (and with the current workshop version), are camels. Their supply-boost proved to be decent, but could still be notched up. However, the AI is having less supply problems with a camel focused levy/legion.
Another part, which was totally out of my brain-scope were tactics. The next hotfix should include a proper integration of spearmen into the different Tactics. (**)
As a last, on the To-Do-List of spearmen is their UI appearance and localization. Spearmen, currently, do not benefit from our culturally distinct naming convention, regarding units, in edge case they share the same Name as culturally-localized infantry. (i.e Rome- Hastati)
I’m looking to alleviate this.(***) Slight visual bugs may have been seen (Misplaced Spearmen-modifier Icons, alongside a weird battle-view of Spearmen (Their Icon is not the Black/Whiter Silhouette), they have been reported and investigated.(****)

Developer Insights:
(*): We’ll most likely utilize the preferred 3-Unit system which favours tactics and the available battle-spots. Furthermore we’d like to turn spearmen into the core of certain cultures, but that’s just a first glance.
(**): Some Parts were toying around with the idea to create completely new Tactics, to make certain cultures more distinct, warfare-related (or at least push a certain “preferred” unit composition.
(***):If you would like to contribute to a list of names, I’d be grateful for any input to receive.
(****): We’ve also looked into a possible recolour of their associated colour. Expect some Icon updates in the near future.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 32: Ceylon + Mauryan trees + Saturnalia update
Salvete! This will be the last DD this year, but it’s a large one so we hope you enjoy.
We’ll be talking about Ceylon, Mauryan mission trees and at the end the patch notes for the Saturnalia update launching within an hour of this post.

In about 500 BCE Prince Vijaya and his followers were expelled from the Vanga kingdom. Vijaya then sailed to Sri Lanka and established the Tambapanni kingdom. Tambapanni at game start is now known as the Kingdom of Anuradhapura which finds itself in a very interesting point in Sri Lankan history in 304 BCE. Devanampiya Tissa Vijaya is the ruler at the beginning of the game, historically he would play a crucial role in the rise of Buddhism on the island of Sri Lanka.

Many changes have been made to the Kingdom of Anuradhapura. These include a new heritage, Vijaya bloodline, and 23 new characters based on the Vijaya family tree.

Anuradhapura now has 2 new mission trees, here is a look at the first tree:

The first tree has tasks that will guide you through taking control over all of Sri Lanka and then go on to dominate the encroaching Tamil kings. There are many tasks to develop the Island and many interesting events to convert to Buddhism that closely follows the legend of Mahinda Thera’s conversion of Devanampiya Tissa and all of Sri Lanka. Here is a look at a few of the tasks:

Once all territories of Tamil, Pandyan, Cholan, and Cheran culture are owned you will gain access to the second mission tree, titled Vijayan Reclamation. Take back the homelands of the Vijaya dynasty, currently occupied by Maurya. Here is a look at the tree:

I won’t say much about this tree other than the fact that it’s my favourite tree that I’ve made so far and each task is of supreme quality.
Here are some of the tasks:

Masters of India is the final task and the tree is meant to bring the player right up to the formation of Bharatavarsha. Speaking of Bharatavarsha, I’ve added 5 new tasks to the Indian Empire tree, here’s a couple:

Maurya will have another mission tree as well (alongside the previously revealed tree preparing for the Mauryan collapse), scripted by Typhion! This tree will become available immediately after the Maurya collapse event chain. It will have tasks to reconquer the territories lost during the collapse, and re-assert dominance over all of India. Also there are many tasks to develop Indian lands and ensure the loyalty of rebellious factions. Here is a look at the tree: (will be expanded with more sidetasks carrying over into the Indian Empire tree)

Here are a couple of tasks:

I plan to add a lot more tasks to this tree and it will be comparable in size to the Kush missions when finished.

Lastly, a new character interaction and 5 new traits have been made for Buddhist rulers!

Every couple of years Buddhist rulers will be able to take the steps to reaching Nirvana through this interaction. Every Inward Journey will not be the same, many different events can fire each time based upon the noble eightfold path and where the character is along this path. Each time the interaction is taken there is a possibility that the ruler will gain either a significant amount of progress or a small amount of progress towards obtaining a new trait. There are 5 new traits for aspiring Buddhas that represent each stage of the character's journey towards Nirvana. These traits are Sotapanna(stream-enterer), Sakadagami(once-returner), Anagami(non-returning), Arhat(enlightened), and Samyaksambodhi(complete awakening). Samyaksambodhi will be very difficult to attain but will offer some of the most powerful modifiers available…
***Don’t take any of the modifiers shown seriously everything needs balanced still***

And finally onto the patch notes for the Saturnalia update:
V1.2 - "Saturnalia"
- Reworked assimilation/conversion based upon historical standards
(Nobles/Citizens assimilate/convert a lot quicker than slaves and a general nerf)
- New custom Achievement system
- Added Christmas stuff
- Added Celtic Forts models
- More Scythian content (implemented the games)
- Spearmen added to Tactics
- New Pan-Ionian formable
- Added Phoenician/Sicilian flags
- Fixed Pink Units
- Fixed duplicate succession events
- Fixed various Judean bugs
- More Spanish translation
- Finished French Translation again
- Fixed rise of Family bug
- New Carthaginian placeholder bloodlines
- Fixed Spearmen icons
- Cleared more of the error log
- Fixed vanilla migration tooltip bug

 

[Snowlet]

To make sure everyone sees it, i'll just be listing the changelog of the various minor updates to the Saturnalia update here:
V1.2a - "Saturnalia"
- Fixed a crash related to achievements
- Fixed broken compatibility with Better UI

V1.2b - "Saturnalia" (save-compatible)
- Heavily increased performance in Character screens (Aka the huge lag spike is finally gone)
- Removed Christmas icons due to increasing complaints
- Changed Iberian heritages
- Integration of Improved Spanish translation mod
- More Spanish Translation
- More fixes to Scythian missions
- Fixed tons of typos

V1.2.1 - A Balancing Update
- Rebalanced Wonders completely
- Rebalanced Monarchy military laws
- Actually implemented Characters performance improvements this time
- Removed redundant Imperial code from Macedonian tree
- Fixed Corinthian League not properly annexing small subjects
- Fixed a lot of spelling errors
- More Spanish translation
- Fixed minor GUI errors - Fixed Hellenic Deities

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 33: Carthage Laws, Punic Republic Government Type, New Formables for Achaean League and Aetolian League

Salvete! It’s Hannibal_theCannibal again to talk to you about a few more of my side projects that I’ve been working on. This time, I’ve finally got around to working on content for the nation that I reference in my user name, namely Carthage.

It’s always struck me that for all the content and focus given to Rome and Carthage, as the namesake for the game we all enjoy and it’s primary opponent, the attempt to create complementary content for both tags is lopsided. Both nations have plenty of tag-specific content, including flavour events and 9 missions each. That said, when examined closely, I noticed that one of the biggest divergences in the apparent symmetry of the two nations is the unique laws for Rome versus the generic Republican laws for Carthage. It may seem on the surface to be a small point, but Rome’s unique laws, particularly its military reform laws, are some of the strongest in the game and play an important role in creating the steamrolling late-game monster we all know and love. My goal was to develop a set of custom laws for Carthage to simultaneously add some flavour to one of the most influential nations in the game’s timeline as well as adding specific bonuses that better model the strengths and weaknesses of the Carthaginian republic.

Just as with the Roman unique laws, 2 of the laws categories feature mechanical changes that actually deviate from the generic republican laws while the remainder are solely flavour-focused. Specifically, Military Reform Laws and Maritime Laws will receive some pretty substantial changes that will better enable Carthage to present a stronger military and naval danger to Rome (and the other tags of the western Mediterranean). Instead of the generic Republican military reform laws, Carthage will have the following:

(Default option) “Magonid Levy”
+5% Levy Size Multiplier
+5% Manpower Recovery Speed

“Bureaucratic Command”
+2.5% Levy Size Multiplier
-10% Mercenary Maintenance Cost
-25% Mercenary Hire Cost

“Xanthippan Reforms”
+2.5% Levy Size Multiplier
+5% Discipline
+5% Cohort Starting Experience
Can form Legion in Capital Regions

“Barcid Reforms”
+5% National Manpower
-15% Unit Attrition
Can form Legions in all Regions

The default military law has been buffed to match the Roman equivalent and references the Army used by King Mago to expand Carthage’s wealth and prestige. The second military law, originally focused on the nobility (war exhaustion reduction), has been replaced with a law emphasising Carthage’s penchant for utilising mercenary armies to great effect. The traditional military legion law has been replaced with a law that gives increased discipline, a reference to the military reforms by the Spartan general Xanthippus, who trained the Carthaginian army in the art of Greek Hoplite warfare. The final military law has been replaced with a law that gives increased manpower and reduced unit attrition, referencing the large armies fielded by General Hannibal in the Second Punic War that were able to time and time again surprise Roman legions by taking dangerous and rarely taken paths through hostile territory. I wanted to create some small bonuses in keeping with the Carthaginian military tradition without wildly changing the natural military progression. With these new laws, both players and AIs will have an easier time fielding larger armies that are better equipped to stay in the field. In addition to the military laws, new maritime laws have been introduced that generally match the bonuses enjoyed by the Romans.

(Default Option) “Citizen Navies”
+5% Manpower Recovery Speed

“Strategic Monopolies”
+10% Export Value

“Merchant Captains”
+25% Import Value
-5% Naval Maintenance Cost

“Trade Escort Policy”
+5% Integrated Culture Happiness


The 1st and 4th maritime laws match the Roman and Generic laws, while the 2nd and 3rd have been changed to match the Roman equivalents. Additionally, “Merchant Captains” law has been slightly buffed with the naval maintenance reduction to reflect the relative ease Carthage had fielding numerically larger navies in the first and second Punic wars.

In addition to new Carthaginian laws, Tudhaliya has been working on a new government type to better reflect the oligarchic/plutocratic hybrid republic practised in Carthage and Gadir. The working title for this government type is “Punic Republic” and will be the default government to Carthage and Gadir, but will also be available for all Punic puppets (like Utica, Thapsus, etc.) and releasable tags (like Carthago Nova). Placing great emphasis on the mercantile strength of the republics, the Punic Republic will feature the following:


1 Civic Idea Slot
1 Oratory Idea Slot
1 Religious Idea Slot

Idea Bonus:
+3 Capital Trade Routes
+4% National Citizen Happiness

The starting setup for Carthage:

The starting setup for Gadir:

The decisions for the Punic puppet tags:

Additionally, the Punic Republic will have two co-rulers or Suffetes, like the Aristocratic Republic. On top of this work, I’ve added some minor party objectives and faction impacts based on your interactions with the new government. I’ve also made some modifications to some of Carthage’s missions to reflect the new government options. Lastly, I wish to offer you a small teaser. Tudhalyia has some more announcements for other punic tags but those aren’t ready to be shared just yet. Know that there is more in the works though!

New formables - Achaean and Aetolian Leagues!

When reading about the history of Greece after the Successor Kings secured their respective realms, it’s clear that the various city leagues formed in order to prevent Macedonian and Egyptian encroachment. Used by the other Diadochi to fight proxy wars with one another, the Achaean and Aetolian Leagues were dangerous enemies that at times threw off the shackles of Macedonian overlordship and won military victories against greater foes. The leagues were, at different times, courted, bribed, or fought by the Hellenistic Kingdoms and ultimately, played pivotal roles in the wars between Macedon and the Romans as well as the Seleucids and the Romans. I hope to enable the possibility of this exciting part of history by introducing new Tier 2 tags, created by national decision, along with their own series of flavour events.

For the Achaean League, settled on the north shore of the Peloponnese, the great catalyst was the overthrow of the Egyptian garrison at Sicyon, which acted as a call to arms to resist the Macedonian kings in the name of Greek freedom. Many cities banded together, pooling manpower and gold, in order to present a united military front that would be costly to challenge directly. As such, I found it fitting to make the requirements to form the Achaean League very simple but also mildly challenging. Any Achaean or Arcadian tag may form the Achaean League at the cost of political influence provided the territory of Sicyon is not owned by any of the Diadochi. For any of these smaller city states, the thought of directly challenging the Ptolemaic Kingdom is a terrifying thought and so patience and careful planning will be required.

Upon successfully creating the Achaean League, players (or AI) will receive the standard rewards as well as free claims on every territory in the provinces of Achaea and Arcadia. All tags with 1 territory in the provinces of Achaea and Arcadia will receive an invitation to join the league, and if they do, they may become integrated or become vassals. Additionally, if the Achaean League is formed when they are a fledgling nation with fewer than 30 territories under their control, they will receive a massive boost to their levy size and fort defence to help them resist their intimidating neighbours (to simulate the scrappy-ness of the league fighting against larger opponents rather than buffing a player who went out conquering all of greece and crete before taking the decision). Lastly, I’ve put in an easter egg focused on Aratus of Sicyon, an Achaean politician and general who was a famous instigator in his time. I’ll leave it to you to figure out where and how to find this historical easter egg.

The Aetolian League, sandwiched between Macedon, Epirus, and the rest of Greece, proved time and time again to be a thorn in King Antigonus Gonatus’s side as ruler of Macedon. Their brazen military actions didn’t go unpunished yet Macedon frequently lacked the strength or political desire to conquer the Aetolians, preferring diplomacy to keep them at bay. The Aetolian tag in the game is a good starting point but I felt that to really get a feel for the strength of this league, a new formable was required.

To form the Aetolian League tag, you’ll need to control several important cities in Aetolia and Boeotia, have Aetolian as a primary culture, and a large amount of political influence. In many ways, the Aetolian league formable will resemble the Achaean League formable, granting extra pops, claims on the surrounding areas, sending an invitation for smaller tags to join the league, and offering a levy and fort defence bonus if the league is formed while the tag has fewer than 30 territories. And like the Achaean League, there will be a series of flavour events regarding the history of the Aetolian League as well as an easter egg focused on a famous Aetolian politician.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 34: Rhodes, Central-Asia and Invasions rework
Salvete!
Today we’ll be talking about the result of the mission poll, a rework to the Central-Asian steppes and finally reworked (Steppe/Parthian) invasions with a formable to go with it, all of which will be presented to you by the India/Kush dev, Dementive:

A few weeks back I (Dementive) held a poll to help decide what mission tree people would want to play next. The results of the poll were as follows:

Rhodes won the vote by a pretty big margin initially, so Rhodes now has two new mission trees.
Rhodes in 304 BCE is in a very interesting position, still recovering from the nearly year long Antigonid siege of the Island, Rhodes finds themselves politically isolated and very weak. Their close ties with the Ptolemies was what led the Antigonids to invade the island in the first place, although these ties are not formal they may blossom into something more. Here is a look at the first mission tree:

This tree will take the player through the restoration of the island of Rhodes after the deadly Antigonid siege had left Rhodes in a perilous state. They will also expand the Rhodian borders to encompass much of the Aegean sea. Consolidating their homeland of the Sporades, dominating and developing Crete, and finally asserting Rhodian dominance over the Aegean Islands as a whole. Here is a look at a few tasks:

The second mission tree is a little bit larger, designed to have tasks to take the player into the end game. About halfway through the tree, after consolidating all of the Aegean islands and coastline, you will be able to form the Aegean League:

There are also many other interesting tasks that will keep the player busy until the end game, developing their lands, conquering new ones, and other fun tasks. Here is a look at some of them in the second tree:

That’s all for the glorious nation of Rhodes, now let's take a look at a brand new feature which will add a lot of flavour to many mission tasks.
Mission Pictures: I’ve found a way to display the pictures from military traditions and huge portrait pictures in mission tasks!!! So now each mission task will have nice visuals to give them even more flavour! Here is a look at a few of them in action:

It’s hard to see it here but these are really cool in game and make mission trees much more fun to look at and playthrough.

Steppe Rework:
The last content for today is a big change to the central Asian steppe regions of Sogdiana, Scythia, and the Himalaya. To start out minor changes have been made to the setup of countries shown here:

Massagetae, a Sakan tribe, has been added in previously uninhabitable territories, Sogdia and Tayuan have grown, Sakia has been renamed Tigraxaudia, and finally Wusun has been renamed to Amygria. A more interesting change is the new culture of Tayuan. Based on both Chinese and Persian sources the people of Tayuan were largely Greek, specifically “Ionian” Greeks (mostly deported to Tayuan from Asia minor by the Achaemenid empire hundreds of years before game start). By this time Ionian culture was largely mixed with the local customs though, to reflect this a few provinces now have Ionian culture and Tayuan’s primary culture is now Ionian.
Additionally, the Scythian culture group has been split into two, with the “Saka” group being in the west and the “Scythian” group being in the eastern pontic steppe.

Thanks to Shocky27 for helping research all of this and helping greatly with the setup changes.

Lastly, I've fixed/developed the steppe invasions into Bactria and Persia by numerous steppe tribes. To start off, the Parthian invasion has been reworked/fixed, it will now happen 100% of the time:

However, they won’t always win the war against the Seleucids but I’m looking for other ways to emulate the historic Seleucid collapse without railroading it too much, more on that in the future.
Next events to simulate the historic steppe “domino effect” of large scale tribal migrations westward which was kicked off in about 170 BCE when a tribe called Xiongnu created the largest steppe empire the world had seen up until that point. This happened off of the game map but the consequences of these events had huge ramifications on the territories of central Asia. Firstly, a tribe known as the “Wusun” was pushed west by Yuezhi migrations caused by Xiongnu expansion:

This happens about 100 years after game start, the location that they attack is very dynamic and can happen in a number of territories in the Tarim Basin. I’ve also made a new wargoal for up and coming steppe tribes: Horde Conquest, which uses civil war conquest mechanics and makes the AI very aggressive.
The second wave of steppe invasions will happen 5-50 years later and it will be much more impactful than the Wusun. The entire Yuezhi event chain and decision from vanilla has been removed and replaced with a more historically accurate and fun event chain. Similarly to vanilla, first a few Yuezhi pops will appear on the map in various territories in the Tarim Basin. Then if a player is in the area, and their primary culture is the Sakan or Bactrian culture group they will gain the option to embrace Yuezhi culture, changing their country and culture to Yuezhi. However, if a player is not in the area the Yuezhi will arrive somewhere in the Tarim with a large invasion force:

Very soon after the Yuezhi arrived in the Tarim Basin large numbers of Sakan people were forced off of their lands and decided that Bactria would be a good place to settle. Historically, this Sakan invasion of Bactria would be the end of Hellenistic presence in Bactria.

That’s all for invasions…for now.

Finally, there is a new formable nation in India for any country with Sakan primary culture which can be formed after conquering the regions of Maru and Gandhara: The Indo-Scythian Kingdom which historically ruled parts of the region.

Note by Snowlet: I wish to remind everyone that we do read every suggestion but as much as we would like to implement them. We are extremely limited in our abilities to code new things. Especially new mechanics and tying things together which aren't tied in Vanilla, as most players won't realize there is a new mechanic and/or the mechanic itself is impossible to intuitively display to a player. So while we do appreciate all the suggestions, know that we can only really implement content in-line with vanilla in 95% of cases.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 35: Fezzan, Wonders rebalance + Spanish update
Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about a mission tree for the Fezzani tribes, rebalancing of al the Wonder effects and custom modifiers for historical wonders and finally we'll have a little update about the Spanish translation (which as you may understand takes a long time as it is a lot of work.)

Fezzan Mission Tree presented by Aerozona:

The Fezzan Mission Tree focuses on the tribes located within the newly created region of Fezzan, namely Garamantia, Nasamonia, Machylia, Psyllia, Makae, and Phazania. Of course if you start off as Psyllia, you will need to break free since you do start off as a tributary to the Nasamonians. This mission tree will help guide you towards uniting the whole region and forming the united tribe of Fezzan. While the mission tree is common to all of the Fezzani tribes, it is slightly different for each tag.
Here is a quick look at the mission tree in its entirety (from the perspective of the Garamantes):

The tree provides the player two different options in uniting the region. (Note: Once selecting one path, the other path will become unavailable). The first is through conquest and annexation of the neighbouring tribes. This path will provide multiple tasks, that each provide unique bonuses to your army, allowing your tribal armies to dominate the opposing armies with such bonuses as increased morale, manpower recovery speed, and increased starting experience.

The second path allows you to go through and unite the Fezzan region through vassalizing the other tribes rather than annexation. This path will provide bonuses to improve your subject's opinion, loyalty, income, and provide the option to upgrade any tributary subjects, to feudatories, giving you the ability to integrate them into your nation at a time of your choosing. This path of the mission tree also provides a huge unique bonus to desert combat ability, manpower and aggressive expansion impact, allowing for the domination of other armies within the region of Fezzan and other desert provinces.

Both paths of the tree guide you towards the same end goal, a united region of Fezzan, however it is up to the player to decide which unique bonuses will suit their playstyle best, both in the short and long term, since a lot of these bonuses will be permanent.


Once the player begins to expand into their neighbours, there will be optional mission tasks that have you develop and improve the infrastructure of the newly conquered land, providing certain bonuses to that province.

Once the region of Fezzan has been united under a single tribe, the mission tree gives you the ability to expand in multiple directions. You have the option to go east into Cyrenaica and Egypt, west into Carthage and eventually towards the Pillars of Hercules, and finally you will have the opportunity to expand northward into the region of Magna Graecia.
This expansion into Magna Graecia and beyond will set up an eventual conflict with the major power in the area (whether it be Rome, Tuscia, etc), which at this stage of the late game, will be quite powerful. However, the final task of the mission will guide you towards adding the prestigious Metropolis of Rome to the great nation of Fezzan.

Wonders presented by Olivenkranz

Recently, we also rebalanced (read: nerfed) the wonders and their effects. We deemed that the amount and strengths of certain modifiers were not very fairly distributed and while some modifiers didn’t get touched (education f.ex.), here below are a couple of the worst offenders after we trimmed them down - and this is entirely Snowlet’s merit.

As you can see, the beloved commerce income modifier has been halved - a significant reduction. And the very strong modifier of ship repair at sea has been reduced to a fourth of it’s vanilla strength. That one may surprise you, as it had already been nerfed once after the first release.

In addition to that, we have also given every vanilla wonder a unique modifier so as to set it further apart from what you, as the player, may build. Hopefully they will be more interesting and desirable than they were previously. We now present to you a handful of the revamped tourist traps of antiquity.

No descriptions have been written for them yet, but this may come in the future. As always, the numbers are subject to change. The modifiers are still Work in Progress and if you have a balanced suggestion, you can provide it below, we do read everything that is suggested to us. For most of them you’re gonna have to wait until the next update droops, soon +2 weeks.


Status of the Spanish Translation:

Hello everyone. My name is Juanen and I’m the one working on the Spanish translation of the mod. Today I’ll talk a bit about the difficulties of translating a mod for a PDX game, the progress of the Spanish translation, and what I’m working on right now.

So, first of all, translating is not easy. Or fast. And PDX games don’t make it easier. Their code is made to work in English, and when we translate we have to work around the limits of the engine. This creates some limitations for localizing languages like Spanish. Mainly with articles and adjectives, but the code, in general, is not made to work with words that don’t have genres in English.

So, if you find a female character being called “El Griego”, the main reason is this one. I know is not the end of the world, and it’s not impossible to fix this kind of issue. But it makes translating a pain in the ***.

If I had the time or more people to work with on the translation, I’d try to make the tools so we can have a perfect Spanish translation, but most of the time don’t have the time or the people to translate the mod and make the translation tools work better…. Even so, I’m trying my best.

Now, to the important stuff. What’s the state of the Spanish translation?

The people who play using the “DEV” versión of the mod will know already. But for the rest, I’ll tell you that the Spanish translation is perfectly playable. I try always to at least have the English locs put in place for the new stuff my colleagues are implementing all the time. But I can confirm that most of the mod is localized in Spanish. The missions for the Greco-Indian, Bactrian, Bharat, Punic, and Tamil are done. And I’ll continue to work on the rest until the next updates. Half of the Deity’s religions are also localized. And the rest of the mod is (like 90%) in Spanish.

I have also incorporated the “Improved Spanish Translation” from Vityviktor (who I thank a lot for letting us use it). And I’ve also tried to improve the vanilla translation of the game (quite easy to improve as it was not so good) as much as time lets me.

Right now, I’m working on localizing the new content for the next update, and localizing the many (many) countries of the game and its adjectives to Spanish. I’m also in need of feedback, so I’d really appreciate any suggestions from the Spanish community for ways to improve the localization of the mod and the vanilla. As my end goal is to not only localize the mod, but also improve the main game.

In case anyone wants to join the team and help with the Spanish translation, or any other translation of the mod, feel free to join our discord and contact us in the recruitment channel.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 36: Moroccan/Algerian extension, Punic content and update announcement.

Salvete! Today we'll be talking about extensions to the North-African map, the Maldives and various pieces of Punic content but first i'd like to happily announce that the next update will release most likely on the 9th of February, next Dev Diary will contain the patch notes but i'll give you a little teaser, Cyrenaica and Germania are included.

Hello, shocky27 here with the next map extensions (for Windows only) in Northwest Africa, specifically the Atlas Mountain region. A number of tribes are listed in this region from sources such as Hanno's Periplus, Pliny, Ptolemy and more, as well as a few other Punic settlements on the Atlantic coast, notably Arambys (later Roman Mogador). Let's get started!

Starting in the north on the coast of the Rif region, we find the Mauretanian subtribe of the Socosians. The new Rif area has been added to the Mauretania region, and Socosia starts as a tribal vassal to Mauretania. Large archaeological sites such as Sidi Driss, dating as far back as the early first millenium BC, have been added to the coast here. Just to the south and east of the Rif coastal areas is the Wadi Moulouya, a seasonal river running hundreds of kilometers from the Atlas Mountains in the south to the Mediterranean coast near Russadir. The Lower Moulouya and Upper Moulouya areas have been added, with the lower areas controlled by the Mauretanians and the Upper Moulouya controlled by the Cetiani, a tribe listed by Pliny and Ptolemy as being in this general region of the Atlas.

Additionally, previously colonizeable lands have been given new tags, such as the Nectiberi (cited by Pliny and Ptolemy) and the powerful Autolales confederation listed by several sources, which takes in previously unoccupied areas around Rutubis and extends southward to the areas around Arambys in the new Marrakech region.

Moving south beyond the Anti-Atlas Range, we come to the Lixitae of Hanno, who appear to have been a Berber-speaking tribe around the modern Draa River that aided Hanno as translators as they sailed further south toward Senegal. Inland from this tribe, near Mt. Atlas itself (probably modern Mount Toubkal), were the Perorsi tribe and the Canarii tribe, listed by Ptolemy and Pliny.

Further east are more tribes listed by Ptolemy, Pliny and Tacitus; the Daphnitae, the Capariensi of the Saharan Atlas and the Abannae southwest of modern Chott el Hodna (a seasonal salt lake which was larger in this time period). These latter two tribes were personally confronted and defeated by the late Roman Emperor Theodosius as he attempted to defend the African Limes from incursion of Saharan tribes. Settlements added include the oasis of Figuig and the later Roman era fort of Castellum Dimmidi (known as Maassad in the present).

Finally, we also have added the Maldives as a playable tag and created new terrain and sea tiles for it, as well as added a few more provinces to Sri Lanka. The Maldives were settled by 500BC, according to legend, by relatives of the same founders of the kingdom of Anuradhapura, King Vijaya. Buddhist influence increased through the 2nd century BC, and later the Romans would trade with a people known as the Dheyvis from these islands. 7 total provinces have been created ranging from Amindivi and the Laccadives in the north all the way to Huvadhu Atoll in the south.

Hi! I’m Tudhaliya the Hittite and I’m here to show you some things Olivenkranz and I have been working on. First of all, we wanted to show you small changes to the Decision ‘Embrace Punic Republicanism’ Hannibal_theCannibal showed you some past DDs:

We changed the Criteria to imitate the style of Vanilla:

So, if you want to embrace this special Government, you need to:

• Have at least 40.00 Stability
• Be at least a Local Power
• Be Independent
• Your capital territory has a Civilization Level of at least 60.00
• If you are playing as a Punic cultured nation, you need to enact the new Punic law ‘Merchant Captains’. If you are not Punic, then you need to enact the Maritime Law ‘Lower Import Tariffs’.

Wait, did I hear well? Indeed, the Punic Government is made for Punics, but there will be special cases. Phoenician tags from the Homeland that established a Republican government will be able to become a Punic Republic, as well as Turdetanians, the heirs of Tartessos, if they are a Republic and embrace Canaanite faith. An interesting note is that if you are transitioning from a Plutocratic Republic, the Stability penalty will be lower!

We want to show you the new Heritage for Gadir too. Gadir is a small Punic tag near the Pillars of Herakles and the only other tag, besides Carthage, that starts with the special Punic Republic Government.

We will talk about Gadir more in the future, but for now, here you have its Heritage:

As well as this fantastic flag made by RetconCrisis based on Gadiran coins:

We want to talk about the Canaanite faith too. We restored all Canaanite gods to vanilla status, although we maintained Ba’alat as an exclusive deity for Byblos (or the country that controls her Holy Site). We noticed too there were very few Economy gods. In vanilla, the only Economy gods are Melqart and Ba’alat, and Ba’alat is now an Exclusive so… We created two new Economy gods and slightly modified the Culture god Gad to make him fit as an Economy god too! Here you can see the new Gods:

Dagon has a passive effect of +10% National Tax and an Omen effect of +10% National Freeman Output. The Apotheosis effect will give 1 Freeman in the capital, 2 if the deity’s Finesse is at least 6 or 4 if the deity’s Finesse is at least 9.

Taautus has a passive effect of -5% Build Cost and an Omen effect of +12% Civic Tech Investment. The Apotheosis effect will give 15 Gold multiplied by the deity’s Finesse, with a minimum of 50 Gold and an additional 75 Gold if the deity has more than 10 Finesse.

As we said, we only slightly modified Gad to make him more fitting in the Economy category (because the Canaanite faith has too many Culture gods). We changed his passive effect from +4% Integrated Culture Happiness to +0.02 Monthly Stability Change. The Omen effect is -0.04 Monthly Corruption and for the Apotheosis, Gad gives +2.50 Civic Advances progress multiplied by the deity’s Finesse, with a minimum of +5 and a maximum of +25 Civic Advance.

And that’s all!

 

[Snowlet]

Salvete!
Today we have as much new content to show off as Varus had legions after Teutoburg. What I do have is the patch notes for the update releasing in 2 days on the 9th of February (you'll have to give us some leeway on exact timing). And an announcement that we'll be holding another dev clash on the 15th of February, 6-9PM CET every Wednesday. The dev clash will be streamed by one of the gamemasters, DaFoogle.
DaFoogle (gamemaster):

Enjoy!

V1.3 - "Ashoka"

Map changes:
- Expanded map into Morocco
- Expanded map into Algeria
- Added Maldives
- Improved map quality in newly expanded areas, thanks to MattTheLegoMan
- Changed Central-Asian nation setup
- Changed Moroccan nation setup
- Added Oasis, Desert Hills and Floodplain terrain types around the map

Added content:
- Added full content to Cyrenaica:
Includes 6 full mission trees and plenty of events
- Added missions for Germanics:
Istvaeonics - 1 Tree (form Francia)
Francia - 1 Tree
-------------
Ingvaeonics - 1 Tree (form Saxonia)
Saxonia - 1 Tree
-------------
Marcomannia, Quadia, Suebia - 1 Tree
Semnonia, Suebia - 1 Tree
-------------
Gothonics - 1 Tree
-------------
Vandals - 1 Tree
-------------
Bastarnae and Sciria - 1 Tree
- Added full content for Rhodes:
Including 2 mission trees, flavour events and more
- Added full content to Maurya:
Includes scripted collapse, spread of Buddhism, 2 mission trees and plenty of events.
Scripted collapse includes rebellions, Indo-Greek invasion and more.
First mission tree becomes available once Ashoka becomes ruler
- Custom scripted Central-Asian invasions
- Added Persis to the map as a Satrap
- Added Gedrosia to the map as a Satrap
- Added full content to Anuradhapura
Includes 2 mission trees and flavour events.
- Added large mission tree for Kalinga
- Added large mission tree for Lanka
- Added content to Buddhism including decisions, events and more
- Added large mission tree to Fezzani tribes
- Added Hindu Caste laws
- Added sugar as a tradegood
- Added various new artwork to missions
- New formable: Achaean League, Indo-Scythian Kingdom
- Decisions for Steppe tribes bringing along Steppe horses
- Added custom wonder effects to all historical wonders

Reworked content:
- Rebalanced all wonder effects
To compensate for historical wonders receiving custom effects and thus preventing stacking.
- Extended Kush content
- Reworked progression into Dictatorship
Tech should now appear properly once you appoint a dictator and sensibilised requirements
- Reworked Spearmen movement 2 to 2.5
- Rebalanced Diadochia AI to make them more competitive
- Internally reworked Bloodlines to make them easier to change

Translations:
- Translated over 250 events/missions into Spanish.

Bugfixes:
- Fixed broken Meshes
- Fixed Antigonid mission with broken Bloodline triggers
- Fixed broken cultural province names
- Fixed broken Bactrian mission in the final tree
- Restored Vanilla Punic Deities
- Removed broken Deities
- Fixed some Anatolian technology not appearing
- Fixed various vanilla bugs with GUI thanks to Agamidae
- Fixed not needing Pella to develop it
- Fixed bug where Kush lost its military traditions

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 38: Galatian Rework.

Salvete! As is normal after a big update, we took a break to focus on bugfixing. Today however Jphilophonus will present a project which has been slowly worked on since release, the Galatian rework. But first i’d like to inform people that a dedicated Mac version will be released along with a hotfix later this week, most likely on Wednesday. And don't forget the Dev clashes that same day which can be watched here:

and here

starting 7pm CET.


Perhaps you stopped keeping a watchful eye on our dev diaries after a week’s pause. However if you were an ancient person in Asia Minor, you would be chided for snoozing lest your Gallic neighbors catch you slumbering in the night while they prepared to pillage and plunder their goods. Indeed, this week’s dev diary will return to the Celtic invaders of Anatolia we know today as the Galatians.

Previously, we developed an event sequence which the AI will utilize so that the Celtic tribes will properly invade Hellas and Anatolia, hopefully forming that hideous cyan-colored nation on the map for those of you that play in the eastern Mediterranean. (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-imperator-invictus.1473328/post-27598434) Most of these features were developed for the AI with future flexibility done for player utilization. (Some of you may have noticed that some player decisions had snuck into our game -as I’ve seen some reported bugs for features which you perhaps should not have seen yet.) After working through these features, it was decided that the best form of play for these nations would be through a traditional mission tree. And this is the item that we present to you today.

The mission tree can be thought to contain four aspects of play with certain Celtic nations (currently Tectosagia, Trocmeria, and Tolistobogia): migrate, invade, raid, and settle. In the first, there are some pre-invasion tasks so that the player is not caught waiting for certain events to trigger in the wider world. These tasks largely are built around changing laws to decentralize the tribe and ally with other Celtic nations which will be used in the invasion proper. These tasks should give further decentralization instability so that the player can quickly transform into a migratory horde. Indeed, where the AI was given effective event troops due to our coding constraints, the player will use the migration feature. I personally think this is one of the most unique functionalities in a Paradox game and one which is underused here. We are working to augment the size of the migratory horde throughout the invasion sequence so that they will still be an appropriately scary amount of Gauls sweeping down into the European and Asian planes.

When the player has decentralized and their horde begins movement, the invasion can begin. That’s right: no need to wait on Antigonos’ realm to be carved up (as if pillaging had restrictions on who ruled a region). The player may choose there any time to trigger the invasion. This can create a dynamic experience about who will be fighting and what the map will look like once the dust settled. We are currently working on flavorful event sequences as the player moves their unit from the Balkans down into Anatolia. This march takes roughly a year to a year and a half of game time and we hope that it will be a packed journey. Once the army has arrived, they can siege down a designated target as highlighted in the mission tasks. Doing so will allow the completion of the task and will triggered a scripted peace deal which will grant the player a portion of land which historically corresponds to the boundaries of these various tribes.

We also hope to give dynamic options about whether the player may choose to participate in both sides of the Aegean during the salvation secrets. We know that historically the Gauls ended up in Anatolia may have been part of the same group that initially attacked Pella and Delphi. While we are keeping the same strictures on which nations may attack for gameplay reasons, our long-term goal is to make this fun and chaotic experience to be as dynamic as possible.

The third phase in this mission tree comes after the initial settlement. The Galatians were feared in antiquity not just because of the initial conquest, but because of their perpetual raiding of the rich coast lines of Asia. See more details in Palando’s write-up on the topic: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...e-celts-in-pannonia-and-transylvania.1147295/ .

(Source: Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts)

So this next phase will utilize another interesting game feature: pillaging and razing of various cities in the region. The ‘Raiders’ and ‘Marauders’ tasks require a player to attack a certain number of cities in the acidity. This will also likely lead to some busy wars, so it may benefit the player to raze in the post-Ipsos world rather than try to attack the Diadochi. There are also some events which are in development related to the Galatians tendency to hire out their manpower as mercenaries. We are currently investigating the game features related to character adventuring and the mercenary client state creation. Out of these raids should come a rivalry or two with the local states. Historically, the Galatians were enemies with the kingdom of Pergamon and also the Mithridatic kingdom of Pontos. For our purposes, we currently require the player to attack the states which hold capitals of these particular regions. (Although we seek dynamism in gameplay, we will probably fall short of creating fully flexible rivalries for those of you who enjoy the EU4 feature.)

The settling down into these rivalries lead us to the fourth and final section of the mission tree which is about the long-term kingdom development. Currently, the tasks require centralization into a kingdom and there will be some engagement with an ethnogensis feature, yet to be determined. This task will be related to culture switching of the kingdom and its unique feature of having a Celtic language far removed from the Celtic homelands; it may even integrate aspects of the future Hellenization seen in the period (sadly we cannot cross cultural groups in this game). There is also the opportunity to gain a new heritage to this future. Finally, the player may form the kingdom of Galatia after uniting their neighboring tribes possibly through a dynamic tournament event or through conquest. We are open to creating more long-term goals depending on player feedback as those of you may want to paint the entire peninsula Celtic blue.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 39: Thebes and Argos missions
Salvete! Today we'll be presenting to you a full set of missions for the mighty city of Thebes and a mission tree for Argos.
But first, the mac version is out; it will be updated parallel to the normal mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2765744228
We tried very hard to get the main mod working on Mac but due to an engine bug it is simply not possible, so for you Mac users, we instead have a version which lacks some map changes but shouldn't crash.

Also for those of you seeking to play in an mp, make sure to go check out the Paradox Roleplay Server, they'll be starting a campaign this Wednesday: https://discord.gg/4hWCwPDAZQ

Dementive here with more Greek missions. Thebes is a city in Boeotia that has ruled over the surrounding area for many years. 30 years before game start Alexander the Great destroyed the city leaving only ruins. However, Thebes was rebuilt by Kassander with the help of other Greek cities. At game start Thebes has been reduced to 1 province and is surrounded by powerful Diadochi. 4 new mission trees have been made for Thebes to restore the former glory of the city and much more.

The first mission tree starts with tasks to rebuild the city back to greatness and to prepare for war against Boeotia, who completely surrounds Thebes.
(new missions icons are made by Pureon)

After the war with Boeotia Thebes will have to consolidate its hold over the whole province of Boeotia and decide how to deal with old rivals, and new friends along the way.

The second mission tree deals with the two ancient rivals of Thebes: Athens and Sparta. Conquer the rivals of Thebes and decide their fate with this action packed mission tree!

The 3rd mission tree for Thebes is focused around developing the newly conquered lands of Greece to ensure the prosperity of Thebes moving forward.

The 4th mission tree will go through the conquest of most of the neighbouring Greek world and should keep you busy until the end game.

With 70+ new mission tasks Thebes is now the single most flavorful city state in the game!

Argos is also getting a single mission tree that will take them through asserting dominance over the Argolid, destroying their Spartan rivals, and developing the Peloponnese.

After conquering the Peloponnese and completing this mission tree the vanilla Hellenic League mission tree will become available.

That’s all I've got today in a future dev diary I will be going into some changes that have been made to character interactions.