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Well, it's Friday and high time to spill the beans on the new expansion for Crusader Kings II; the Sword of Islam. Judging by the forum, playable Muslims is the most requested feature for CKII, and who are we to disagree? We always wanted to do it, provided we could do the Muslim world justice. That time is now (or, well, soon :) ). As with the Ruler Designer DLC, the Sword of Islam will be released together with a major content patch. What you get with the Sword of Islam is simply the ability to play as the Muslim rulers, but all the new mechanics will be there and running for the AI (or other players in multiplayer) even if you don't have the expansion.

I'll be doing three dev diaries on the Sword of Islam, each one dealing with some unique features for the Muslims as well as some free features that everyone will have access to simply by patching to 1.06.

THE SWORD OF ISLAM

One of the major hassles with making Muslims playable was the prevalence of text with obviously Christian or Western terminology. Therefore, we had to go through all text to make it fit the setting if you are playing a Muslim. Often, this required writing whole new events and decisions. For example, Muslims don't hold tournaments, they have the Furusiyya instead, which is an exhibition of martial arts and horsemanship. They don't hold Grand Feasts, they observe the Ramadan, etc. We also added some completely new decisions, like going on the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), which will initiate a cool little event driven story of what happens on the way to and from the holy city. Of course, there is also a whole slew of events dealing with various new gameplay features (more on that in later dev diaries.)

Another issue we needed to solve was the Gothic looking graphical interface of Crusader Kings II, which we felt did not really work when playing as a Muslim ruler. So we did a complete reskin with sand tones and green symbols and patterns instead of the church window graphics of Christian rulers. Yet another problem was that many event pictures looked distinctly Western/Christian, so we've added about 25 new ones to serve as Muslim equivalents. Then there are all the little things, like trait icons with crosses, the Crusade banner, etc. All of that has been changed to provide the right atmosphere. We've even changed the five councillor models for Muslims when they're out in the provinces performing jobs. It's all been a lot of work, but I think it turned out really well.

Muslims get a slightly different set of character traits; they don't get the Kinslayer, Crusader, Celibate and Chaste Traits. Instead, they get the Mujahid, Hajjaj, Faqih (Islamic law expert), Hafiz (has memorized the Koran), Sayyid (agnatic descendent of Fatima or one of Muhammad's uncles) and Mirza (child of a Sayyida mother) traits.

Lastly, Muslims get another set of honorary titles to hand out to their vassals. They all get a few special flavour events - especially the Chief Qadi - a position requiring an ecclesiastical education.

SoI_04.jpg

That's it for the Sword of Islam in this dev diary; next time I will go into the core dynamics of playing as a Muslim ruler.

THE 1.06 PATCH

Now then, here's some of the free stuff we're giving ya'll in the 1.06 patch...

First off, we thought the southwest corner of the map looked a bit dull, so we added a bunch of new provinces down there, representing the flourishing civilizations of the Manden people; Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The area comes with historical rulers (of course) and a new West African culture group. The region is rich but hard to reach.

SoI_05.jpg

For flavour, we have also made it so that duchy tier and above titles held by rulers of Iranian, Arabic and Turkish cultures are named after the ruling dynasty. For example, the Kingdom of Egypt automatically becomes the Fatimid Sultanate while the Fatimids are in power (though the original name is also used where appropriate.) In case the same dynasty holds several high rank titles, only the highest is named after the dynasty. Thus, we can have both a Seljuk Sultanate and a Sultanate of Rum, both ruled by the Seljuk dynasty. Randomly generated characters of these cultures automatically get a dynasty name suitable to name states after (ending with -id or -n, etc).

SoI_01.jpg

Lastly (for this dev diary), there are seven new creatable empires (the Arabian Empire, the Empire of Persia, Britannia, Scandinavia, Francia, Spain and Russia) and a whole slew of new de jure kingdoms, mostly to break up the old kingdom of Khazaria. Now, I know the addition of the new empires is controversial, but the creation conditions are designed to be fairly difficult to achieve, so the AI will very rarely do it. We want players to have the imperial option to strive for if they so desire - the Unions turned out to be a popular feature in Europa Universalis III.

SoI_02.jpg

Oh, and before anyone asks, patch 1.06 will be semi-compatible with old save games: you will be able to keep playing, but we're making no guarantees that the balance will not be completely upset, or that any added new provinces will be active and working.

That's it for now. Next week I'll talk about polygamy, decadence, and strong and weak claims!
 
would break multiplayer and bug fixing to do that

Uhm, no, it wouldn't? At least not necessarily.

Just split the mechanics in two: Low-level game mechanics needed to synchronise the gameplay between machines in MP go into the executable directly; additional program parts which are only needed for the UI changes ("How do I deal with multiple wives?" or "Muslim-specific ledger pages" as an example) as well as mechanics which don't need to be synchronised (triggers for events which can only apply to Muslim player characters, for example) go into a separate (potentially cryptographically signed by Paradox) DLL file, which is part of the expansion.
 
Uhm, no, it wouldn't? At least not necessarily.

Just split the mechanics in two: Low-level game mechanics needed to synchronise the gameplay between machines in MP go into the executable directly; additional program parts which are only needed for the UI changes ("How do I deal with multiple wives?" or "Muslim-specific ledger pages" as an example) as well as mechanics which don't need to be synchronised (triggers for events which can only apply to Muslim player characters, for example) go into a separate (potentially cryptographically signed by Paradox) DLL file, which is part of the expansion.

I still dont see how this is helps bug finding/fixing?
 
I still dont see how this is helps bug finding/fixing?

It doesn't help (though it could make it easier, since smaller components mean easier bug finding too), but it doesn't hinder it either and is a way to get additional mechanics to buyers of the expansions without them being in the main executable.

For a fictional example, let's assume in the upcoming Pagan Expansion, the lunar phase becomes important for religious purposes. The expansion gets a DLL which adds a "current lunar phase" display element to the UI, and which adds a bunch of triggers which fire off at full moon, at new moon and during a lunar eclipse. People with the expansion get to use those, people without have just the AI use generic triggers instead of the lunar-based ones - which isn't as precise, but doesn't matter either, since they aren't getting to see the lunar phase in the first place, nor is it important for them.

In a multiplayer game, the guys with the expansion get to run the expansion-specific triggers; if no-one has it, everyone just uses the generic random ones.
 
It doesn't help (though it could make it easier, since smaller components mean easier bug finding too), but it doesn't hinder it either and is a way to get additional mechanics to buyers of the expansions without them being in the main executable.

For a fictional example, let's assume in the upcoming Pagan Expansion, the lunar phase becomes important for religious purposes. The expansion gets a DLL which adds a "current lunar phase" display element to the UI, and which adds a bunch of triggers which fire off at full moon, at new moon and during a lunar eclipse. People with the expansion get to use those, people without have just the AI use generic triggers instead of the lunar-based ones - which isn't as precise, but doesn't matter either, since they aren't getting to see the lunar phase in the first place, nor is it important for them.

In a multiplayer game, the guys with the expansion get to run the expansion-specific triggers; if no-one has it, everyone just uses the generic random ones.

Aww I see.
 
It doesn't help (though it could make it easier, since smaller components mean easier bug finding too), but it doesn't hinder it either and is a way to get additional mechanics to buyers of the expansions without them being in the main executable.

For a fictional example, let's assume in the upcoming Pagan Expansion, the lunar phase becomes important for religious purposes. The expansion gets a DLL which adds a "current lunar phase" display element to the UI, and which adds a bunch of triggers which fire off at full moon, at new moon and during a lunar eclipse. People with the expansion get to use those, people without have just the AI use generic triggers instead of the lunar-based ones - which isn't as precise, but doesn't matter either, since they aren't getting to see the lunar phase in the first place, nor is it important for them.

In a multiplayer game, the guys with the expansion get to run the expansion-specific triggers; if no-one has it, everyone just uses the generic random ones.
I think the devs specifically said they do not want to have to do bugfixing for MP games where players have different versions, regardless of what exactly the differences would be. Because it's just sooo much more work. Even if as you say they try to split the game mechanics into (somehow) interaction-relevant parts and interaction-irrelevant parts, odds are they WILL overlook some tiny little details, which end up causing crashes or de-syncs under some combination of CK2 versions.

The only way to really avoid crashes, and to ensure any sort of quality in software development, is to have well-defined test scenarios for your software, that cover all of the ways a user could use your software. You never fully cover all of it, but it is important to cover as much of it as possible. If you allow users to run MP matches with different versions of your software, you must logically also design test scenarios that cover this specific application. I.e. say you have two versions, CK2addon and CK2vanilla. Any test for the single player part of the game now needs to be maintained and checked for both versions of the game. You double the testing effort, because you must maintain both versions of the game bug-free at all times.

But in MP games, where one player must be host, and the others clients, your test effort does not just double: MP games involve by definition interaction between users of the same software, and it is crucial that your tests cover all relevant ways in which they interact. As part of your test scenarios, you not just one host/client setup that covers as much of MP mechanisms as possible, but four different host/client combinations: CK2addon/CK2addon, CK2addon/CK2client, CK2client/CK2addon and CK2client/CK2client. And this is just if you want to do MP tests with just two players. If you want to also test it with three players, and if matters if the clients have different versions too, the testing effort increases eightfold. And so on.

In short, the effort to keep up good quality increases enormously. Paradox has, with the release of Sengoku and CK2, apparently adopted a new Q&A philosophy, and I suspect their DLC policy is part of that philosophy: They want to do much more quality control than in earlier games, but the price of that is that testing their software must become easier than it was with EU3 or the other, non DLC games. They now make this easier by designing their games in such a way, that even though players can have different DLCs installed, 100% of their actually installed software on their users' machines is the same, at all times.

On a sidenote... this also means, that all hackers need to do to turn a patched but non-DLC version into a DLC version, is to circumvent the disabling mechanism.
 
Also it would be problematic if you think about this from a history perspective: Why should the "emperor" titles be so exclusive?

They shouldn't necessarily. But other than the HRE or ERE (we could also argue about Bulgarian and Serbian empires that were actually recognised by the Byzantines but those wouldn't be made into empires in the game for reasons of relative size), empires would not have the benefit of being 'de iure', which literally means 'of right' or 'by law', which is also the fixed meaning of this phrase in diplomacy, law, politics, history. Fictional states don't fit here.

Empire of Scandinavia or Francia in CK2 is like a de iure United States of Europe (or South America) in Victoria or Hearts of Iron would be.

IMHO somebody is simply mixing in EU3 stuff (creatable Scandinavia, ability to form an empire out of any country large enough) into CK2, while departing from the original concepts.

You mention Charlemagne later. He basically either created Western Roman Empire, which was dormant (standard de iure conditions) or got the title (whether de iure or titular) through an event, depending on which interpretation you choose. The future Basileus would have a strong claim on it (just like in CK2 you can have claims on states that don't exist at the moment). The de iure empire being Western Roman Empire, not Francia or France or anything.

Lastly, even if you want to fight the HRE emperor, and you want to be the #1 empire, why would a military victory over the HRE dissolve his empire? Since the consituent kingdoms of the HRE and ERE (Germany, Italy, Greece, etc) cannot be created by the sitting emperor himself, losing the confrontation with the challenger wannabe Emperor of Britain or Spain would insta-implode all his power. Without the imperial title, he is no longer liege of the dukes, and unless (low chance) he somehow created the kingdom crowns before losing this war, he loses all his rule and reverts to a simple duke or count. This is drastic, waaaaaay too drastic in my opinion. It also makes no sense from an alternate history point of view: So the emperor of Britain has sailed over to Germany, has defeated the HRE emperor in battle, forces from him a concession that the Emperor of Britain is now the supreme monarch of Latin Christendom. Why would this dissolve the HRE ??? The British Emperor sets sail and goes home to Britain, but the German emperor is still the lord of Germany. The dukes still owe fealty to him. Why should this be dissolved.

In the situation you describe, historically that'd basically mean the British Emperor replacing the previous Holy Roman Emperor as the Holy Roman Emperor. The previous Holy Roman Emperor would retain his imperial dignity, now subordinate to the British Emperor's headship or stay independent but without wielding influence out of Germany. His title would need to change. Basically, whoever became the supreme monarch of the Latin Christendom would be the Holy Roman Emperor (Kingdom of Germany notwithstanding as irrelevant to the point).

As for not railroading new empires into confrontation with the HRE/ERE, some kind of opinion modifiers with diplomatic options to get rid of them peacefully could be a way.
 
First off, we thought the southwest corner of the map looked a bit dull, so we added a bunch of new provinces down there, representing the flourishing civilizations of the Manden people; Ghana, Mali and Songhay. The area comes with historical rulers (of course) and a new West African culture group. The region is rich but hard to reach.
Sounds interesting. I am curious where you found sources for this, as the sources I've read say things like "Songhai seems to have gained its independence from Mali sometime in the 14th century."
 
I dont have time to read 41 pages but after reading this dev I cant believe they didnt add the Ottoman Empire.

The Arabian Empire (which actually never excisted) is already in the game as the Caliphate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate So I dont see the reason to achieve an Arabian Empire in the game. It would be more exciting if the Ottoman Empire could be created. I know they are already in the game as a kingdom but this could be explored more in depth with this expansion/patch. I cant see why the devs wont jump into this and still leave this blank in the expansion. The only thing that differs are the icons and playable nations.

If I were given the choice on how and what to create in this expansion I would definetly add the Ottoman Empire because it would offer more dimension and dynamisn to the area. I like the new empires such as Spain and Russia but the Ottoman plays a more crucial role in history during that time (and in that region). I'm not nationalistic here or critisizing other nations or gloryfing the Ottomans. I just want that content that should be in the expansion pack really be included. If it was do-able to create playable Muslims why wasn't this done in the first place? And if you can now why not deliver something more meaninful to this region but this is a different discussion

Edit: Heck I'm going to open a new thread about this when writing the ideas are flowing..
 
@axiomtk, i dont agree on your ottoman empire thigny. im not going to repeat my post on your thread.

anyoen knows how late we can expect the second development diary?
 
I really only ever use the ledger for the religion and independent states tabs. Also, the direct vassals tab is occasionally useful, as sometimes I don't notice a vassal turn heretic until he converts counts under him.

I use the ledger but wish there was more useful information there (plus a full detailed history log), and that the coats of arms were links to the relevant rulers.
 
I dont have time to read 41 pages but after reading this dev I cant believe they didnt add the Ottoman Empire.

The Arabian Empire (which actually never excisted) is already in the game as the Caliphate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate So I dont see the reason to achieve an Arabian Empire in the game. It would be more exciting if the Ottoman Empire could be created. I know they are already in the game as a kingdom but this could be explored more in depth with this expansion/patch. I cant see why the devs wont jump into this and still leave this blank in the expansion. The only thing that differs are the icons and playable nations.

If I were given the choice on how and what to create in this expansion I would definetly add the Ottoman Empire because it would offer more dimension and dynamisn to the area. I like the new empires such as Spain and Russia but the Ottoman plays a more crucial role in history during that time (and in that region). I'm not nationalistic here or critisizing other nations or gloryfing the Ottomans. I just want that content that should be in the expansion pack really be included. If it was do-able to create playable Muslims why wasn't this done in the first place? And if you can now why not deliver something more meaninful to this region but this is a different discussion

Edit: Heck I'm going to open a new thread about this when writing the ideas are flowing..

King = Sultan, while Caliph = Emperor.

If you want to RP the house of Osman on its historical path, then it actually makes sense that these two are separate. First you become a powerful lord by raising yourself to the Sultan level, which just requires you to beat up on the Byzantines. But then to really become a supreme leader of the faithful, you also need to usurp or otherwise grab a Caliph title. Just like in real history (although a little after the game's time frame) when they seized Egypt and made Al-Muttawakil surrender the claim, as well as the sword and the mantle of the Prophet, to the Sultan Mehmet.
 
Or if the Byzantine Empire still doesnt have an allow ={ religion = orthodox } then the Ottoman Empire would just be when the turks conquer enough to usurp the ERE as happens in alot of games if you havent modding that from happening.


Anyway, has there been any word on whether or not DLC stuff will be able to be activated for modded in religions?
 
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Or if the Byzantine Empire still doesnt have an allow ={ religion = orthodox } then the Ottoman Empire would just be when the turks conquer enough to usurp the ERE as happens in alot of games if you havent modding that from happening.


Anyway, has there been any word on whether or not DLC stuff will be able to be activated for modded in religions?

No word that I've seen but I'm doubtful. If the new islam features can be used by say, adding a "can_use_feature_a = yes" in the religion.txt, then nothing would stop you from making a copy-paste of muslims and renaming it muslim2 or something.
 
No word that I've seen but I'm doubtful. If the new islam features can be used by say, adding a "can_use_feature_a = yes" in the religion.txt, then nothing would stop you from making a copy-paste of muslims and renaming it muslim2 or something.

It would seem to me that the line "can_use_feature_a = yes" would only be read by the game if you had the DLC activated, and if you didnt it would have no effect.
You can in the files link to the CoA or Mongol DLC, but it doesnt have any effect unless the DLC is activated, why should this be any different?
Circumventing the DLC wouldnt work and i cant see why everyone is obsessed with it as an obstacle. Either whatever religions/religion groups have the SoIDLC=yes line wouldnt be playable without the DLC or they would be playable but the DLC content would be locked out for them without the DLC activated. I would suspect the former.

If the DLC content cant be used for modded religions then thats returning to how it was on the old engine in CK:DV where to mod in a religion you could only change the localisation of an existing religion and would mean only one religion group would ever be able to use the mechanics which wouldnt be very good.
 
I wouldn't worry until it gets there, Orinsul. The price of the DLC puts more money in the project if you want to buy it. The mods that do things with Islam or add a second religion modeled on Islam (with polygamy, decadence, etc.) could simply make their mod dependent on the DLC. We all had to pay up in EU3 to play mods that updated to the new expansion, but this is better because most of the content will be free; only playing a Muslim ruler is for-pay AFACT.
 
I'd like to be able to go duchy of Flanders --> kingdom of Flanders --> Empire of Flanders
That's my idea of fun alternate history, it should be possible for every duchy to do this