Yeah currently I don't think there's much room for the formation of new languages.
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That's true. Nevertheless, I'm guessing we'll get an extended timeline mod similar to the one we have in EU4 if not better
I'll reiterate I'd makes sure to include the early permanent settlements of the Fertile Crescent since there is a large swath of time during which permanent settlements formed in the prehistory stone-age.
Main issue I think would be how to differentiate different tags for different playstyles otherwise. I don't quite remember the history of horse domestication if we could feasibly also include horse-nomads.
Project Caesar should be able to simulate civilization from the late stone age to industrialization, as that's the technological spread in settled states in the base game.
I suppose the question is if you delete the Old world, what does the New world look like 500, 1000, or 2000 years after you unpause? Testing that seems like a good first step before making a bronze age mod.
I suppose the question is if you delete the Old world, what does the New world look like 500, 1000, or 2000 years after you unpause? Testing that seems like a good first step before making a bronze age mod.
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The main thing would be coming up with good reasons you don't see stagnation of cultural/technological advancement.
One of the issues is it's hard to predict what new civilizations might appear or fall in the America's. The Toltecs vanished to be replaced by the Mayans who collapsed and reformed a few times, while the Aztecs were invaders who came from the north, and the Incan Empire was only recently formed.
We could reasonably theorize that the Mississippian civilization could have consolidated into a singular nation at some point, or maybe they would have been conquered by Apache nomads like the Assyrians in Mesopotamia? Likewise I think the Huron and Iroquois had discovered bronzeworking prior to colonial contact, I'd imagine that the Great Lakes would have been a major center of civilization. And then we have groups like the Navajo in the American Southwest.
We could also reasonably predict that as tribes became more organized that trade links across the America's would strengthen, we already have evidence that aztec goods were making their way into North America. And a favorite alt-history scenario of mine is the Incans discovering trade routes with the Polynesians that could have feasibly happened OTL.
There is an 'America's only' mod for EUIV, but it mostly just makes it so institutions can spawn in the America's feasibly, without much change to the mission trees, or new content added.
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I like the exploration and world spanning empire building parts of EU4 (and that's the draw for the time period in general) and having to wait 150 years before that can start is unappealing. To be honest, even 1444 is earlier than I'd prefer. 1492 would be better.
Additionally, having to deal with the black death sounds like a totally unfun mechanic, but disabling it would probably totally unbalance the game. If PDX doesn't have the resources to create an alternate start date then I can't imagine they'll bother balancing the "no black death" game rule.
To be sure, the character mechanics in PC are definitely better than EU4 (probably). But I still can't see myself caring who my king is, just that he's got a personal union. As the bard said, "a rose by any other name would be able to inherit Spain"
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1. Extended Timeline
Both in the past and future compared to PC's current timeline, especially if the shift from land control/crown power to political power works a la vic2/vic3 can be modeled well using the systems in PC. Another issue I could see with an extended timeline is dealing with RGOs in different locations changing, how that could be modeled (if at all) and how much strain that could potentially put on the game
2. Anbennar
As a dwarf enjoyer I am both looking forward to and dreading what the devs have in store for the dwarves. With development being changed pretty radically (being a percentage rather than a number you can push to the moon if i've understood correctly) I wonder how the dwarven holds will work, as well as the serpentspine as a whole. I have a deep seated fear of how bad the volcanoes and earthquakes will be, as I am fully expecting the serpentspine to be particularly vulnerable to their effects, not to mention the horrors that I believe the serpentsrot will bring upon the poor ol' dwarves. I am super interested in seeing how they integrate the magic system into PC, and how many more nations they will add with an additional 100 years to play with and a map that is MUCH bigger for locations.
3. Frostpunk but make it Late Post-Classical / Early Modern
Similar to other hopes, have an ice age come but be MUCH worse than the little ice age. A scenario that I find interesting, but unrealistic, would be the eruption of Krakatoa or other large volcano setting off the super volcano in yellowstone and then "chain reacting" across the world, initiating a volcanic winter across the planet that pushes the world firmly into survival mode. Interested to see what happens if a province/location is fully depopulated. Would it be colonizable, or would just remain under the control of the country it started as with zero people living there
Both in the past and future compared to PC's current timeline, especially if the shift from land control/crown power to political power works a la vic2/vic3 can be modeled well using the systems in PC. Another issue I could see with an extended timeline is dealing with RGOs in different locations changing, how that could be modeled (if at all) and how much strain that could potentially put on the game
2. Anbennar
As a dwarf enjoyer I am both looking forward to and dreading what the devs have in store for the dwarves. With development being changed pretty radically (being a percentage rather than a number you can push to the moon if i've understood correctly) I wonder how the dwarven holds will work, as well as the serpentspine as a whole. I have a deep seated fear of how bad the volcanoes and earthquakes will be, as I am fully expecting the serpentspine to be particularly vulnerable to their effects, not to mention the horrors that I believe the serpentsrot will bring upon the poor ol' dwarves. I am super interested in seeing how they integrate the magic system into PC, and how many more nations they will add with an additional 100 years to play with and a map that is MUCH bigger for locations.
3. Frostpunk but make it Late Post-Classical / Early Modern
Similar to other hopes, have an ice age come but be MUCH worse than the little ice age. A scenario that I find interesting, but unrealistic, would be the eruption of Krakatoa or other large volcano setting off the super volcano in yellowstone and then "chain reacting" across the world, initiating a volcanic winter across the planet that pushes the world firmly into survival mode. Interested to see what happens if a province/location is fully depopulated. Would it be colonizable, or would just remain under the control of the country it started as with zero people living there
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Yeah, but personally I like a bit of breathing room to establish your state before you set off to explore. I also hope that with an earlier start date we better 'explore' Portugal's explorations around Africa, which EUIV didn't dedicate much if any content to.
Anyway we'll have to see if Paradox can make societal collapse fun. I know people enjoyed dealing with the Mali collapse they added in EUIV, so there's some hope.
To paraphrase Shaggy- 'Whoever said I can only use 100% of my development?'
Anyway logically I would imagine dwarven tunnels to be more susceptible to diseases. I think the 'passage' mechanic will be taken advantage of to better play with the caves and tunnel terrains. And I also think they can take advantage of the higher location density to portray the much more urban aspects of the Serpentspine. The question I think will be more how they balance food production needs, since food is only a theoretical concept in EUIV with no starvation mechanics. This'll be important not just for Dwarves, but for Orcs and Goblins too. With that in mind restoring the Serpentvale might be the key to a successful campaign.
I think the adjusted timeframe is something Anbennar will feel obligated to follow up, and I do think they could have a lot of fun modeling the Greentide, the question would just be how they portray Cannor, and if they can properly emulate Corin's ascension every game. That said, I think Anbennar is gonna LOVE the micro-nation mechanics, which I honestly think will reflect their desire to do adventuring companies (one of my favorite aspects of the mod, and what I consider to be its most unique) much better with the smaller scale and the ability to move around in cored territory.
And I think they'll have lots of fun with minority populations, something they were trying to do, but couldn't quite model with EUIV's engine.
Anyway they are going to simulate the Little Ice Age that happened in the middle ages, so maybe Paradox will handle the right tools for a modder to do a frostpunk setting proper.
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Yes i am fine with that and I agree as long as the end date is also pushed back accordingly. I was refering the ones that just push back the start date for hundreds of years but the end date remains the same
I disagree, a proper alternate start date in PC is an INSANE amount of work, not because of location ownership, but because of pops distribution.
Having to assign an amount of pop, and a religion distribution, and a culture distribution, and a language distribution to every location is already massive, but having to make research for it all and ensure it's coherent and historical? oof
.How long are you willing to spend on a single location? 5min? Well then, you need 25 000*5 = 125 000min = 2083 hours = 260 workdays = 13 work months (with 8h per workday, 20 workdays per month). That's also ~36 000$ of average unskilled laborer salary in the US, but people doing that are not unskilled laborers.
Let's say you don't do any research at all (purists will not be happy^^) or you already know beforehand, well you still need 30sec or so per location and you're still looking at around 1.3 month of a full-time job.
Also factor in that this job in UNFUN and really no one should do that for 8h straight or they'll go insane.
Scripting it to auto-generate values (like, auto-assign 80% this culture and 20% that culture in this entire area/region) is definitely possible for alt history and fantasy (and that's what I did), but not really for historical start dates where every location will have it's local or history buff that will go "hey, that's inaccurate".
Luckily it can be heavily parallelized if many people get into it... With the risk of different regions being treated differently if there is no team lead to ensure everyone works the same.
I don't know what 'balancing the "no black death" game rule' would mean, but whether you mean giving debuffs to the Europeans to compensate or buffs to everyone else or whatever, I can't see that taking more than a week or two of launching games overnight and seeing how it evolved in the morning and tweaking the numbers until it works.
Several computers/servers or a tool that allows to start another game once the previous one reaches the end date would help
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To put that into perspective, EU4 has 3272 land provinces, and only a single culture, a single religion, 3 dev values per province
So I'd say it's 10-60s per province, which means 9-54 hours of work for making an alternate startdate (pops only, not land ownership, which is also what I was computing in my previous message)
So I'd say it's 10-60s per province, which means 9-54 hours of work for making an alternate startdate (pops only, not land ownership, which is also what I was computing in my previous message)
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Stuff I expect:
- Flavor mods for various regions (that probably make the countries overpowered)
- Extended timeline mods
- Romaboo "what if Byzantium never was defeated by any muslim powers" Alt timeline mod
- "everything is an SOP", no tagless locations
- """realistic""" resources mod that tries to put hard values on how much one unit of goods represents based on how much lumber you need to build a caravel or whatever, that takes at face value the resulting crazy calculations
- About a hundred "advances and institutions rebalanced/reimagined/rejiggified" mods that all have different ideas for fixing Paradox's unclear vision on where the boundaries between Institutions and normal technologies is.
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@Billybobbill I may very well be fooling myself, but my high level plans on how I'd tackle earlier dates is to focus on mechanics appropriate to the era, use CK3 database to decide on starting rulers and rollback population numbers so that the normal growth of pops through game mechanics would put population numbers around the starting values of the 1337 start date.
Whether such setup is even remotely historically accurate to what the world looked in 1066 (for example) is not as important to me, I'd be far more focused on trying to nail the feeling of playing in high middle ages. In a game like EU5, to me, nailing exactly the county borders and who ruled minor plots of land is just added flavour and too much to expect from a mod.
Whether such setup is even remotely historically accurate to what the world looked in 1066 (for example) is not as important to me, I'd be far more focused on trying to nail the feeling of playing in high middle ages. In a game like EU5, to me, nailing exactly the county borders and who ruled minor plots of land is just added flavour and too much to expect from a mod.
If that's true then total conversion and alternate start date mods will be basically impossible. If it's too much work for a team of paid devs then it would be totally impossible for a solo (or small) team of volunteer mod developer.
I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but we'd all better hope that the difficulty is exaggerated.
I also suspect that most of the population numbers are totally made up such that they vaguely "feel right", especially the minorites, and that the real reason they aren't doing an alternate start date is mostly to do with mechanics and flavor content.
In a game centered around pops, not having 30% (or more) of them die will totally bork the game balance. And they won't be making additional mechanics for this non-default game rule that most people probably won't use.I don't know what 'balancing the "no black death" game rule' would mean, but whether you mean giving debuffs to the Europeans to compensate or buffs to everyone else or whatever, I can't see that taking more than a week or two of launching games overnight and seeing how it evolved in the morning and tweaking the numbers until it works.
Several computers/servers or a tool that allows to start another game once the previous one reaches the end date would help
It's like CK3, you can play the game with total gender equality, homosexual marriages, and adoption turned on. But the devs don't balance the game around that. In fact, turning on those rules disables achievements because it basically trivializes a lot of the game. I suspect that PC will do something similar. Sure, we can disable the black death, but doing so will probably just disable achievements because the game will just end up being that much easier.
It depends. If I'm playing Holland or something the extra time is nice to actually unify the region. But if I'm playing Portugal or England I just want to get straight to exploring and colonizing.
Holup, I'm only saying that it's basically impossible to make it historically accurate to the degree that PDX is doing with 1337. If you're fine with very rough estimates, then it's doable. If it's fantasy/alt history where no one will check because there is no truth, then it's doable. Still a loooot of work, but doable.
Speaking of rough estimates,
That is a very easy and quick way to have an estimate, that will work well for dates close to 1337, both forward and backward. But the further you go, the weirder it gets.
Notably, with what you're suggesting and 1066 as a target date, you'd have muslim turks all over Anatolia within Byzantium while Manzikert hasn't happened yet, you'd lack Normans in southern Italy and Sicily, Iberia would be all weird from the Reconquista being at a different degree of completion, the entire Eurasian steppe would have mongols everywhere before the mongol empire even happened, etc.
Now if that's less important in your book and that of your audience than mechanics, it's fine
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Returning to ABCs: the devs chose to make conquistadores army countries (which sounds fun!) but they start blobbing land as soon as they spawn (which is uninspired!).
Similarly to the Hansa, a country that doesn't own land directly but has access to normal gameplay through its subjects, I think it would be nice if a mod made conquistadores vassalize Natives who have bad relations with the Aztecs or Inca or are rebellious subjects of them, and play the divide and conquer game until they manage to annex the local empire's territory and only then start blobbing.
A more experimental and modern mod could use extraterritorial countries to represent political parties (Estates are more interest groups).
Similarly to the Hansa, a country that doesn't own land directly but has access to normal gameplay through its subjects, I think it would be nice if a mod made conquistadores vassalize Natives who have bad relations with the Aztecs or Inca or are rebellious subjects of them, and play the divide and conquer game until they manage to annex the local empire's territory and only then start blobbing.
A more experimental and modern mod could use extraterritorial countries to represent political parties (Estates are more interest groups).
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I feel like the issue with an Avatar mod would be twofold; first would be a need to spin a lot of the mod out of whole cloth, just due to the ironically heavy lack of world building. And the second would be how to make the game outside of the hundred year war interesting, because a game like PC would need a fairly large time frame for gameplay purposes.
It definitely has interesting possibilities, but it is a daunting task.
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I think you could go as far back with Avatar Yangchen as the sort of 'classic medieval' period, and Avatar Kuruk being a party boy leading to instability.
I don't know if you could sort of simulate a 'crisis' like in Stellaris, but having a big 'once an age problem' could be a way of helping things stay dynamic, starting with Avatar Kyoshi and Emperor Chen's conquests. Though, her formation of Kyoshi island then would become hard to do, I wonder if it's possible you start with a straight crossing that she can destroy or something like that. Like a reverse canal.
Similarly the Earth Kingdom could be given dynamism by simulating it's rise and fall, where perhaps early game you try centralization, mid-game it decentralizes after the Chen incident, then of course you have to manage the Dai Li, and then that turns into something where the Earth Kingdom operates more as a loose alliance network. With paradox trying to simulate national collapse better this could be better emulated. I also figure that you probably have a 'Four Nations' IO, or rather four IO's for each of the nations. These could help split the nations into smaller tags, but also keep a sort of power bloc situation where they unite in response to invasion. Or fail to if their diplomacy isn't great. And it could also offer paths to diplomatic unification as a way to engage players without needing to blob out entirely.
Another situation you could play with is the Fire-Lord strengthening an autocratic rule in the Fire Nation and their early industrialization (one of their supposed aims for conquest was to spread this revolution outwards). I think logically you could also do something with the discover of Coal in the North and South Pole, canonically they are also home to large oil fields.
You could also keep going into Korra's time period, the question would just be if you could properly simulate some of the steampunk elements as different units. Also hopefully roads could be upgraded into railroads, which canonically exist in the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom.
I think one of the trickier elements could be properly distinguishing between the earth, fire, water, air, and non-bender military's, some sort of 'Doctrine' mechanic would be very useful for that.
What might be trickier is the advent of air-power that factors into Avatar. I think people would lose their minds if tools for that are somehow included by Paradox. I know in the HOI4 mod they create a sort of early 'radar' with watchtowers and trained hawks, with how line of sight is now a larger mechanic I think you could actually simulate that in Project Caesar. A building, or perhaps an upgrade of some kind, that reveals units from tiles further and further away. Air-Nomad Sky-Bison and Gliders weren't exactly used for warfare though, so maybe you could skimp out on that, but hot-air balloons and zeppelins were a huge part of the plot. IRL war-balloons were innovated on in the late 1700's, but purely for reconnaissance (so there's hope maybe Project Caesar includes some war balloon mechanic), but after that is when you start getting into the real steampunk stuff.