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Hello again folks! Stay a while, and listen. The highlights of today's third and last Sword of Islam developer diary are Muslim Casus Bellis, revised combat mechanics and cultural buildings. You know the drill by now; I'll talk about both some unique Sword of Islam features and some free stuff that comes with patch 1.06.

THE SWORD OF ISLAM

Our direction with the Sword of Islam expansion is that Muslims should have an easier time expanding, but have an additional layer of internal strife in the form of the Open Succession Law and the Decadence system.

Muslim Casus Bellis

Muslim rulers have three new options for conquest:
  • They can declare Holy Wars on anyone not of their own exact brand of Islam
  • They can use a form of the Invasion CB for the cost of 500 Piety
  • They can conquer any province bordering one of their own for 50 Piety (vassalizing the current count if possible)

Pious Muslim rulers can thus easily expand, although they lose 2 Piety per month while attacking a brother of the faith (same exact religion.) The councillor job to fabricate a claim is thus less useful for Muslims, but can still be handy versus islands or juicy coastal counties.

SoI_InvasionCB.jpg

Revokation of Duchies

Duchies (emirates) are not considered to be intrinsically hereditary, so Muslims are allowed to revoke duchy titles at no opinion penalty from other vassals. This is also a good way of properly landing your sons to avoid gaining Decadence. (Incidentally, the Byzantine Empire is now allowed to do the same thing, though it does not have the Decadence mechanics.)

Dynastic Imprisonment and Execution

Another Muslim exception to the normal rules is that they are allowed to freely imprison and execute men of their own dynasty, except for their own sons. Brothers and uncles are the usual targets for these Decadence reducing purges...

Temple Holdings

In the Muslim world, there is no proper equivalent to Bishoprics, so Temple Holdings are treated exactly like Castles, except for their different set of buildings. You gain Piety for having a Temple Holding in your demesne, but they are slightly poorer and provide smaller levies than their Catholic equivalents (in order to balance them against the investiture mechanics.)

Passing Laws

Muslims do not need to bother with a voting process when passing laws; they just spend an amount of Piety. However, there is still a cooldown and Crown Laws can only be changed once per ruler. The vassals will also still get upset in the same way as Christians.

Jizya Tax

To represent the Jizya tax (a special tax that should, according to Sharia law, be levied on infidels), Muslims gain a 25% tax bonus from infidel counties and a 10% tax penalty in Muslim counties. This creates an interesting dynamic where it's not always obvious that you would want to convert an infidel province to Islam. However, there is a special event where this happens anyway, even if you don't send in your Court Imam to convert the populace.

SoI_Jizya.jpg

That's pretty much it for the Sword of Islam expansion, although I'm sure to have forgotten about many minor little changes and tweaks.

THE 1.06 PATCH

Alright, so here are a few more freebies coming your way soon with the 1.06 patch...

Expanded Combat Tactics

We have added a bunch of more (and more decisive) combat tactics, to make combat less predictable and to tie in with the new Commander traits...

Commander Traits

We have added a special type of trait called Commander traits. These are only available to characters with a Martial education, and give more specific bonuses to the character's ability to lead various troop types, and the choice of combat tactics. Characters gain one or two Commander traits when they finish their education. The effects of the Commander traits directly scale with the Martial skill of the character.

SoI_Commander.jpg

More Culture Specific Buildings

One thing that many people have requested is a broader range of culture specific buildings, and who are we to argue? We have added loads of these to give more variety and flavor.

Destruction of Titles

You are now allowed to destroy ducal tier titles and above, at a hefty Prestige cost. This will greatly upset (-50 opinion) all vassals who are de jure part of the destroyed title. You cannot destroy your current primary title.

SoI_TitleDestruction.jpg

AI Improvements

Apart from some minor improvements, the AI is now better at jumping on rulers who are already embroiled in dangerous wars (though it's still not excessively aggressive about this.) I've also spent a bit of time on attrition avoidance for AI armies, and the AI will now assault besieged holdings when appropriate.

That's it for dev diaries for now. Next week, we'll post a short AAR by a member of the dev team!
 
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Doomdark said:
They have fewer Holdings. Mainly the Seljuks are more powerful, though, and the Caliphs are likely to call Jihad on the ERE. However, the ERE is still too powerful and we are looking into additional ways of nerfing them.
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Rather than nerfing them outright (after all, they should be pretty strong when unified), have you looked at ways of decreasing their internal stability, making vassals more likely to revolt, etc? Just giving it a quick thought, that seems more realistic than simply making them weaker and weaker. (I can't help thinking of DV, where they'd usually be wiped out in the first 50-100 years of every game.)
 
Garak said:
Rather than nerfing them outright (after all, they should be pretty strong when unified), have you looked at ways of decreasing their internal stability, making vassals more likely to revolt, etc? Just giving it a quick thought, that seems more realistic than simply making them weaker and weaker. (I can't help thinking of DV, where they'd usually be wiped out in the first 50-100 years of every game.)
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I guess a roadblock to making Civil Strife actually devastating is the lack of trade and the abstracted economies. I suppose if troops regenerated even slower, but that'd have pretty significant effects all over the map. I'd rather not have stupidly small revolts that are easily squashed pop up one at the time (random revolt chances), so hopefully they'd get nice half-splitting conspiracies going before trying anything.

NewbieOne said:
Just using the opportunity to note my dislike of the fantasy empires. Perhaps if enough people complain about this, some kind of solution will be found, like having two separate scenarios or a menu option to exclude fantasy states, whatever.
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I wouldn't count on it, considering Darkrenown told me to stop pointlessly arguing against something that will not be changed. They've already made up their minds to ignore history in this case because some segment of the player-base won't bother to look into any of the mods, since most of them seem to contain fantasy empires already. I wish they'd leave vanilla as reasonably historical, but alas here we are.
 
NewbieOne said:
I think the Cordoban Caliph should exist as a king-tier ruler with a claim on the leading Caliphate, much like the "Empire" of Trebisond was solved, although I wouldn't actually mind historical small-time emperors finding their way in (and being capable of vassalising kings).
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Eh, that solution was really just meant to handle that one specific case. Islamic civilization is not equivalent to Byzantine, and this sort of breaks down when you consider that a title like Caliph isn't really tied to any particular place, or anything else other than the willingness of the Umma at large to accept you as the rightful successor to Muhammad. The bar should be very high to reach that tier, but it's still best represented as a class of title, not specific ones.
 
Fawr said:
Except that the AI doesn't change crown laws except for the crown authority (and thats only in one direction), and as a player I'd be tempted by the though that I could use the money more efficiently than my (AI) vassals. Also I don't think stopping a player who chooses to be the Byzantines is ever going to be that effective.
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I don't understand why people always say this. I see the AI changing tax laws all the time.


KPJ said:
Do these Open succession mechanics allow Republics to play (albeit in an unfinished and unpolished way)?
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You still have to have a member of your dynasty be your heir, so I don't see that this really changes anything in that regard.


KPJ said:
Destroying titles: When it says you can't destroy your primary, does that mean your primary Ducal title or just your primary title if it happens to be Ducal? i.e. if one were a King and held two duchies could they just destroy them both? And penalty-free if they held all the counties? Would make Christian expansion (especially of the Holy War variety) easier...
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Should just mean your primary title, period. Otherwise it doesn't really make sense. And I don't see how it would make expansion easier. You're still bound by your demesne limit and all the usual penalties for vassals. If you conquer territory, you can already just decline to usurp the local duchy, so this wouldn't be any different.
 
just some questions since i like the idea of a DLC focusing on muslims...

1. are persian culture counties counted as arabic or r they a diffrent culture as they rly r in real life?
2. if they r diffrent will they get unique buildings too? examples r welcomed!
3. will the execute and imprisonment for other ppl other than kinsmen work the same as christians and cost same piety?
4. does caliphs have excommunication power too, like pope?
5. is there a possibility to rise against a caliph to become caliph? something like anti-pope or something? (or become a new caliph of ur own?)

tnx... i will get this game plus DLC if its as cool as it seems :)
 
Marcion said:
Eh, that solution was really just meant to handle that one specific case. Islamic civilization is not equivalent to Byzantine, and this sort of breaks down when you consider that a title like Caliph isn't really tied to any particular place, or anything else other than the willingness of the Umma at large to accept you as the rightful successor to Muhammad. The bar should be very high to reach that tier, but it's still best represented as a class of title, not specific ones.
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The runaway Umayyads had a strong claim on the Caliphate just like the Komneni had a strong claim on Constantinople (both descending from the previous dynasty of holders), while they both ended up staying where they were (and the Komneni eventually made peace with the Constantinople and gave up their claims). I think this is analogous enough. Some titles get adjusted a notch up or down compared to historical to make them more realistic from the point of view of mechanics. Otherwise you'd never have a count in Russia, everybody would be a duke. And the count of Flanders or Toulouse would be a poor local count like everybody else. ;)
 
Federalist girl said:
I like duchy revocation, though it's already in CK2+.

I like title destruction a whole lot. I don't plan on destroying duchies or kingdoms, but I definitely would like to gain the HRE title and destroy it. :)

As for Byzantine nerfs... meh. I really hope any and all nerfs have a historical basis, and aren't something insipid like cutting income or something (when the ERE was the richest state around, historically). Really, the next DLC just needs to be Byzantine: both with the true strengths of the ERE as well as its true weaknesses. There are ways to make the ERE weaker without undermining accuracy.




Just wait. People complained and complained until they got multiple empire titles coming in an official patch: they'll complain until you can have multiple caliphates too, regardless of what empire and caliphate means.
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Agreed. Constant nerfing of the Byzantines doesn't make the game more historical or fun overall. It just makes playing the Byzantines less fun. When they're unified, the Byzantines should be really tough. It's when they're divided that they start losing. I agree with the point someone made about it really being a problem with the Empire mechanic in general. The HRE is far too stable, centralized, and blobby, too, yet people seem to complain about that less (yes, people do point it out, but it doesn't generate the same level of excitement, and the HRE hasn't seen the same level of nerfs for whatever reason, despite its tendancy to routinely conquer France, Spain, and northern Africa).
 
Garak said:
Agreed. Constant nerfing of the Byzantines doesn't make the game more historical or fun overall. It just makes playing the Byzantines less fun. When they're unified, the Byzantines should be really tough. It's when they're divided that they start losing. I agree with the point someone made about it really being a problem with the Empire mechanic in general.
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+1 Yeah, the ERE shouldnt get crippled, like in CK1. Though it was still possible to play the ERE and prosper.

The HRE is far too stable, centralized, and blobby, too, yet people seem to complain about that less (yes, people do point it out, but it doesn't generate the same level of excitement, and the HRE hasn't seen the same level of nerfs for whatever reason, despite its tendancy to routinely conquer France, Spain, and northern Africa).
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You didnt see the many complain threads soon after the release of the game about HRE blobbing ? They just lost their powder on complaining about it. Now its quite an old topic.
adding: There should be an option before gamestart in the menu about "fantasy"-empires. But what can you do...

edit: I'm realy looking forward on playing Isnogud and realising his dreams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isnogud


 
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Marcion said:
Eh, that solution was really just meant to handle that one specific case. Islamic civilization is not equivalent to Byzantine, and this sort of breaks down when you consider that a title like Caliph isn't really tied to any particular place, or anything else other than the willingness of the Umma at large to accept you as the rightful successor to Muhammad. The bar should be very high to reach that tier, but it's still best represented as a class of title, not specific ones.
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It might make sense to use a kind of mechanic similar to the anti-pope, though, don't you think? Different dynasties were able to claim the caliphate and overthrow the previous one based on a claim to be more pious. I'm not sure how it would work exactly but it might make sense if a pious enough ruler were to be able to claim the caliphate (if the current ones were weak enough).

Unrelated, but is the Latin Empire finally going to be formable and use a short name (no "Empire of Latin Empire")? I mean they already put in completely fictional fantasy empires can't they at least make an empire that actually existed formable?
 
Theddude said:
It might make sense to use a kind of mechanic similar to the anti-pope, though, don't you think? Different dynasties were able to claim the caliphate and overthrow the previous one based on a claim to be more pious. I'm not sure how it would work exactly but it might make sense if a pious enough ruler were to be able to claim the caliphate (if the current ones were weak enough).

Unrelated, but is the Latin Empire finally going to be formable and use a short name (no "Empire of Latin Empire")? I mean they already put in completely fictional fantasy empires can't they at least make an empire that actually existed formable?
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With Sunni they can be declare Caliphate if pious enough extra point if gain the seal and sword of the prophet, Shi'ite depend on it branch, they can declare Iman or caliph if have blood of Ali more importantly they can traces it back to his daughter.
 
Doomdark said:
Revokation of Duchies

Duchies (emirates) are not considered to be intrinsically hereditary, so Muslims are allowed to revoke duchy titles at no opinion penalty from other vassals. This is also a good way of properly landing your sons to avoid gaining Decadence. (Incidentally, the Byzantine Empire is now allowed to do the same thing, though it does not have the Decadence mechanics.)
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Hmm interesting, I wonder though... How often will the AI be doing such things? Some people like myself prefer not to start as King or higher and I would hate to have my game immediately ended by the AI without the ability to do anything because my liege needs a duchy for his son.
 
Rilder said:
Hmm interesting, I wonder though... How often will the AI be doing such things? Some people like myself prefer not to start as King or higher and I would hate to have my game immediately ended by the AI without the ability to do anything because my liege needs a duchy for his son.
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Hey only take the Emir title so you still keep the shiekh.
 
l3ol3o said:
I love everything I read. Because of stuff like this, Paradox is truly the best gaming company around.
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Well you say this, but what about EA? With them you have genuine choice, value for money and are always guaranteed a bug-free experience.

Everybody loves games about mediocre Hollywood movies too, so at least consider my point of view.
 
Sleight of Hand said:
Well you say this, but what about EA? With them you have genuine choice, value for money and are always guaranteed a bug-free experience.

Everybody loves games about mediocre Hollywood movies too, so at least consider my point of view.
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i HOPE youre trolling. EA is a crappy publisher. look at how they raped the C&C franchise.
 
EA's games are amazing, at least to judge from my flatmates FIFA 12 online experience. He rages choleric and screams at those bastards all day long until he turns off his xbox finally, no shit.
 
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