Roman calendar from what time? January and February were not part of the year which started the first of March.
Ab Urbe Condita?
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By the start of the game, the reforms of Numa Pompilius (which added January and February to the year) had been in place for hundreds of years. The Romulus version with only ten months didn't last more than a few decades.
More exactly, months were March, April, May, June, Quintile, Sextile, September, October, November, December, January, February and, sometime, Mercedony, in that order: years started with spring, at the Ides of March.
Also, days of the months weren't numbered increasing but decreasing. Today wouldn't be Thursday, the 7th of June but the 7th day before Ides of June, yesterday was the 8th day before Ides of June, and tomorrow will be the 6th day before Ides of June.
This reverse numbering is based on three days of the months: Calends (the 1st day of the month), Ninth, nine days before Ides, and Ides the 15th day of 31 days months or the 13rd day of strictly less than 31 days months.
As far as I know, January and February were added after December, not before March. The New Year day formally moved from Ides of March to Calends of January with the Julian Calendar, but it wasn't much respected before the Gregorian Calendar definitively generalised the beginning of the year with the alleged anniversary of the circumcision of Jesus, the 1st of January. Equinox of Spring was a much more appealing New Year Day than the approximative perihelion.
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For anyone who knows the numbers in Latin, the original order of the months should be obvious as well (Quintile meaning fifth through December meaning tenth months). The Julian Calendar moved the months January and February, which messed up the numbers, and that was AFAIK seen as a regal act - something that may have contributed to his demise.
I don't have strong opinions about AUC. It was a nice immersive thing back in EU:R when I didn't know it was invented some centuries after the fact, and I don't think it's hard to subtract to get recognisable BCE/CE dates. I wouldn't feel strongly about a Holocene Calendar or the modern BCE/CE calendar either (Though I don't feel my lacklustre programming skills leaves me with the pathos to tell PDX how easy it would be to program a BCE/CE Calendar with negative numbers). Completely anachronistic calendars (Like Muslim or Christian Calendars) should be avoided, though.
The BCE/CE calendar is the Christian calendar...
And it is one of the most anachronistic calendars they could possibly use in the game. What kind of person would ever say they lived before the Christian/Common era? How could you even know you lived before an event that hasn't even happened yet?
No, since the actual Roman dating system would be really difficult and confusing to implement, AUC dates are the next best thing. It may be anachronistic, but at least it is a Roman dating system. Not to mention that it is simple. By all means, they should add a tooltip explaining what AUC is, but adding additional calendars to the game? What a total waste of time and resources. I'd rather see them spend their time on the actual game, rather than on something so extremely trivial.
No, BC/AD is not BCE/CE. It's explicitly a move away from basing our epoch moment on a birth we know either didn't happen, or happened another year.
I agree that it's anachronistic. I don't know how you got something else from my post. That doesn't remove the point that some posters have that it's the calendar that we are familiar with today, which could have some value in itself. Personally, I can live with either.
We need more developer diaries and other assorted information related to game mechanics and we need it soon, otherwise every thread on the forum is going to be about silly crap like this. A.U.C works for the purposes of the game and a certain amount anachronism is perfectly fine so long as it doesn't go too far.
Personally I date the world from the date of my own birth. The current year is 30 AD (after Damian). When this game starts it would be 2291 BD (before Damian).
Why doesn't Paradox just go with that method?
2291 BD = game starts
2252 BD = Start of first Punic War
And so forth.
Why doesn't Paradox just go with that method?
2291 BD = game starts
2252 BD = Start of first Punic War
And so forth.
It literally is the same calendar / date system.
It is the same epoch, so we're still basing the epoch on a possibly misdated, possibly non-existent event.
It isn't used for 500 to 700 years after the game.
AUC at least has passing connection with the period of the game, being brought in around the end of the period by Varro, even if not widely used.
Not only that, it will likely be possible in this game to stop the christian religion from either existing at all, or spreading very far at the very least once the timeline has been extended a bit through various DLCs.
BCE/CE is the same calendar as BC/AD, just with different terminology. It's a removal of explicit references to Christianity to make the terminology more neutral. But it's the same calendar; the epoch moment is still the same. In the context of Paradox games it's the same system with different localizations.
Paradox could make the AUC terminology less Rome-centric by calling it the Ancient Ultra Calendar, but that wouldn't make it a different calendar.
It doesn't even remove the Christian terminology. The BCE/CE notation, although historically not as popular, is almost as old as the BC/AD notation is, and CE stands for both Christian era and Common era, both of which are explicitly Christian concepts. But unlike AD (which stands for anno Domini, or 'year of our Lord'), it does not refer explicitly to Christ being your lord. Imagine being Jewish or Muslim and being forced to say 'Christ is my Lord' every time you want to note a date. That is why a lot of people think the AD notation is offensive and why it is being replaced by the somewhat more neutral CE, which is still Christian in nature but at least doesn't force people of other religions to blaspheme every time they write down or read a historical date. The idea that they are removing Christian symbolism altogether most likely originates with political conservative overreaction.
Actually it also means 'Year of the Lord' without the 'our'. There is no 'our' in it in latin. In German it's often called 'Im Jahre des Herrn' (in the year of the lord) for exemple. So nobody is forced to say 'OUR lord'. So technically the 'our lord' is only in the English phrase, not in the Latin one. It CAN mean it, but technically it's just 'year of the lord'
Are people arguing against the proposals of using BC instead of AUC, or against having any in-game help converting the years? I have trouble deciphering that. I can accept AUC being the main calendar since it adds flavour, but having a little tooltip and a piece of code for year conversion would be a huge help to me, since I personally prefer a calendar I am used to. It shouldn't be a big deal for Paradox to implement.
"Year of the Lord" is just as bad as "Year of our Lord".
He's not my Lord. He's not the Lord of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Shintoists, Sikhs, any group of Atheists, the assorted revised and revived pagan groups, or any other non-Christian group.
Mostly using BCE instead of AUC, at least on my side.
There are a couple of minor problems with a conversion tool tip, mostly centred around a simple conversion tool resulting in a year 0.
Personally I don't think there's much of need to have the game date compared to an event that's in the future from when the game starts, and that may be possible to avert, or if dynamic may happen on a different date, thus throwing the calendar out compared to it's supposed start point - imagine if the "birth of Christ" event dynamically fired in 100 BCE, or if there wasn't a sufficiently populous Jewish area for the birth to happen at all.
I understand it's more familiar, but it's completely isolated from meaning in the context of the period the game is in.
Its mostly against using bc not against haveing an ingame tooltip or so.
Well and as was stated before it doesnt matter if you call it common era or whatnot its still a fundamentally christian calender. While i have no problem with that in principle its simply stupid to be against auc cause its anachronistic and propose bce instead.
And even comprehensibility is no valid argument cause it could be solved via tooltip and a strong comprehensibility isnt needed. Its enough to have a rough overview of your timeframe in nce and thats quite simple to achieve. Auc is at least somewhat adequat for that time bce simply isnt