Once more Tuesday is upon us and it is time to unleash some more facts about
Rajas of Indiaupon your unsuspecting minds. This time, I thought I'd go through some of the major features we're adding in the free part of the expansion, i.e. patch 2.1.
First up, I think you might be interested in the parts of the new map that are actually outside India; the regions of Afghanistan, Transoxiana and Siberia. Part of my reason for wanting to extend the map to the east was to get these areas into the game. If you consider the old edge of the map, you might have noticed that many counties are truncated, or in the wrong place. Places like Balkh and Samarkand were deemed important enough to be on the old map even though they are in reality located off the eastern edge. This is perhaps most obvious around the Urals, where we even have an "Omsk" province. With the new map, these provinces could finally be put in the right place. Of course, we still needed to add a lot of new counties as well, which meant we also needed some more cultures. Thus, we now have this situation:
- The Cumans are intrinsically more powerful
- There is a Kirghiz state to their east, with its own culture
- There is Karluk (new culture) state south of Lake Balkhash
- There is a Khanty (new culture) realm north of the Cumans
- The whole region of Afghanistan, with new Afghan and Baluch cultures
- More counties in Khorasan / Greater Persia
Tibet, the Tarim basin and the Altai mountains are visible on the map, but we decided not to add any provinces to those regions.
There are changes to the
oldparts of the map as well. We had to trim the western edge slightly to get the map dimensions right, and there are many changes to province borders and positions in the Middle East, the steppes and the far North East. We have even added some new counties, like Lori in Armenia. The most dramatic change is, however, in East Africa. We decided to take this opportunity to make East Africa more interesting, so we added Nubian culture and completely revised all the provinces south of Egypt and added about a dozen more. This allowed us to add the fascinating Jewish state of Semien (a.k.a. Beta Israel) to Abyssinia.
Right, that's enough about the map I think, I'll just let the screenies speak for themselves. A related thing we've done is to allow ports and ship movement in completely separate oceans; a feature that has been much requested. The AI now understands how to handle this, which was always the biggest hurdle. So you can now have a Buddhist merchant republic in the Maldives and build trade posts all the way to the Suez, etc.
As usual, we've also spent a lot of effort improving the base game. I'll cover a couple of the changes today, and the rest next Tuesday. Now, one of the most drastic improvements we have made is to faction revolts. No more will the revolters be mere allies in a war against their liege; they will now be temporary vassals of the faction leader in a proper civil war. In other words, you will be fighting these wars against a more unified and powerful enemy (or fight as them, of course.) Naturally, these rebel lieges will be very limited in their diplomacy and plotting until the war is over.
The AI has received another round of improvements, most notably in how it moves, raises and dismisses armies, but also when and why it revokes titles off vassals (it tended to create a lot of unnecessary internal strife while still failing to maintain reasonable internal de jure borders.)
One little thing that's always annoyed me is that you can't easily go to a dead character's killer, so we now show a red skull on characters who have a known killer. You can simply click the skull to go to the killer.
Lastly for today, we decided to add a new tab to the character view, called "Relations". The main reason was to add Rivals and Friends (a very underused concept in the game), but it also allows us to show Lovers, etc.
That's all for today! If you can't wait for the upcoming dev diaries, tune in to my livestream at 20:00 CET.
