Wouldn't that make them a collection of un-connected Counts with a strong natural negative opinion towards any liege they aquire? (the latter would probably be from different religion group)
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Wouldn't that make them a collection of un-connected Counts with a strong natural negative opinion towards any liege they aquire? (the latter would probably be from different religion group)
Or perhaps an event which gives a negative effects to a county which has a dragon nesting within its borders? With a new option you can make which is to "remove the dragon from [county name]'s borders" and it causes an event chain to happen?
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I still believe there should be some sort of greater tribe or kingdom for the dragons, even if they don't have too much land under it. Like I said, this is the DE JURE situation I was imagining. De facto would be a LOT more splintered EVERYTHING. Minotaurica for example...
Both the dragon kingdoms should be unformed, and in their place possibly a titular king or two. Their lands should be filled with settlers of other races. Regarding dragons in foreign lands, I'm thinking some sort of revers Holy Order castle mechanic - they show up and create a barony (temple?) in a province that has slots empty, and gives the county a large unrest modifier and the liege an event request them to be evicted.
Is it possible to have different names for the "piety" stat depending on which religion/group you are? "Harmony" doesn't feel too griffin/dragon... But, I digress.
Another idea I have is to have "filler" counties (where none of the sentient races have settled) occupied by a heavily buffed "Monster" race, like the Everfree Forest would be in current Equestria. If you want to settle there you need to clear out the monsters, raising unrest spectacularly, with regular uprisings of the natural population. I imagine we could have a lot of use for a "settlement manager" advisor, who could take care of all these things.
Is it possible to have more than 5 advisors, btw? If so, I believe we could use some extras.
Also, is it possible to have more than 3 types of holdings? If so, we should definitely get a separate "Nest" type holding that only specific species can inhabit. Otherwise we'll just make them culturally named, I guess.
OKAY, OPEN QUESTION TO YOU PEOPLE:
Do you think it would it be better to disable cultural shift (and thus represent the species/races through culture) between races, or enable it? (represent species/races through flags based off Ethnicity, allowing for more variety) This would allow for, say, successful dragon overlords without having them randomly being able to spawn like rabbits to "settle" a province, which to me seems ridiculous, but instead shift the culture to their own. Some flagging effort would have to be made (so that the game remembers that this province doesn't spawn dragons, for example), but I think it's worth it by far.
What do you think?
I think we should not disable ti and go for ethinicity based, since as we all know, pony genetics is insane.
Provinces should be able to swap, but I believe that characters themselves should more or less be locked in. Obviously a pony cannot become a dragon because of who tutored them.
With some of the mention of renaming piety, I'm kinda wondering who the heads for the religions would be.This is pre-Equestria, so the princesses wouldn't be able to fill in at first for the pony lands (though maybe they would spring up as a heresy? Haven't played enough CKII). Will all the races just be various types of Pagan at first, or will some of the larger ones have a unified religion to start with?
Debatable, considering we have graphical culture as another parameter. Spike (and his phoenix, possibly) can be considered as pony because he is not following dragon customs, but it is "modern" example.
I was speaking mostly about the character portraits. But whatever. I'd be willing to sketch out a map if you guys would like, but I am not interested in converting it to the actual game format.Debatable, considering we have graphical culture as another parameter. Spike (and his phoenix, possibly) can be considered as pony because he is not following dragon customs, but it is "modern" example.
Well really harmony would not fit as a religion till post Celestia and Luna. But it is a lot of work if we were to make the pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies, zebras, changlings and zebras all have their own separate religion.
Also I finished what I think the map should look like, I based the land mass off of this image
Here it is, I think this would make the most sense and is as close to the canon as possible.
I am terrable at naming things so I just put down names I thought would fit for the ones I had to name myself like Dragonia and Zebrazon.
Also I finished what I think the map should look like, I based the land mass off of this image
Here it is, I think this would make the most sense and is as close to the canon as possible.
I am terrable at naming things so I just put down names I thought would fit for the ones I had to name myself like Dragonia and Zebrazon.
Regarding dragons, cows, etc. we should include the fact they didn't influence on Ponyverse that much to consider them as available characters. Especially dragons, who is only Spike to keep relationship with them - resat of his species is rather some disastrous creatures, that can be showed by mechanics like modifiers, plagues, events... Cows would stay with event chain (like rampaging and destroying some city buildings). Don't know if goats couldn't be like that. We've seen only one minotaur though, so I don't know what to think about them, but they actually might be as different race like griffons and donkeys.
About traits and map (I still think to take American map from other CK2 mod), I will put here some ideas of mine this weekend.
About traits and map (I still think to take American map from other CK2 mod), I will put here some ideas of mine this weekend.
PLEASE don't make more square geography, man...
Re: snowy's map, that seems like an excessive amount of water and way too little land. Again, realm feels too small - your map makes Equestria 1/4 of the available territory, versus about 1/12 on the one I posted. Taking into regard how small canon Equestria probably is, that feels like working on the wrong scale (like CK2 with only Scandinavia or something - not that I wouldn't tap that, but still). And again, comparing your map to the image of that globe would make that roughly half the planet...
We'd need Gravity modifiers with a map like that (lol)
My suggestion is to retcon the globe and instead work against something sensible. To make a workable, sensible mod that's enjoyable, we need a few things from this map. We need territories roughly responding to the size of the vanilla CK2 map. We need geography that's not 100% square and boring. (Yes, we do) We also need balance between the different species/races/characters etc. I'll throw together a version of my map showing De Facto territories shortly and show you what I mean.
I sypose, but I just kind of do not like the shape of the land in your map, mainly the U continent, I would probably have it as two separate continents rather than 1 and we should still stick to the map as canonly as possible with it still being fun.
But there is no reason why we could not ask to use the Western Hemisphere mod and massivly alter it to be more, MLP canon while still being fun, like placing an island in the eastern sea of the map and removing a lot of the western land to have a western sea.
Also about my map, I just pictured Zebrazon to be on the equator.
But it's pony continent!
It's shaped like a horseshoe!
AM I TOO SUBTLE FOR YOU GUYS OR WHAT
durr. That aside, I don't like the idea of basing the map off the Western Hemisphere, it seems awkward no matter how you'd alter it.
THAT SAID, LOOK AT THIS INDEPENDENT STATES MAP I MADE!
MECHANICS AND OVERVIEW
The Unicorns rule the duchies of the north. They are fairly secure in their position, and have exterminated most monsters and other threats already. They are separated into 5 independent duchies (and some OPM's) at the start of the game: Cornica (east of modern day Canterlot), Throne (Everfree and the Old Capital), Cante-Wirl (Modern day Canterlot), Westerlot (duh) and Mane (Manehatten). Since we're starting before tribes unite, there's no Kingdom of Unicornia quite yet.
Cante-Wirl is ruled by the aging Star Swirl "The Bearded". Cornica is ruled by Duke Platinum "the Elder", and Throne is ruled by his son Duke Platinum "the Younger" (who in the canon later gets elected as King of the Unicorns, and whose daughter we see portrayed by Rarity in S2E11). Westerlot is ruled by Duke Bluehart, who's not the nicest of ponies but a good general. Mane is ruled by Duke Revelant, who is a big player in trade across the Sea of Ponies.
Unicornia is rich, with an emphasis on castles, but not as strong militarily as the Pegasi. Unicorns favor traits and education with bonuses to Diplomacy and Learning. Unicorns get a starting bonus to Culture tech, and any lands ruled by a Unicorn get decreased Construction time and cost, as well as a slight bonus to Culture tech advancement. Unicorns later get access to special cultural buildings that give them powerful mage troops, but they need to upgrade their Military tech before they can get those.
Pegasopolis is ruled by Commander Hurricane II, who's barely out of foalhood. He is, as we see in S2E11, not a very nice guy either, but a military genius nonetheless, which is why so many of the pegasi still follow him. Many have broken away from the realm since his father and predecessor Commander Storm Wing IV died, though, and he will strive to return them to his dominion before turning his eyes elsewhere.
Pegasus lands are poor in comparison to the Unicorns', and they have a lot of problems with monster invasions. They also have a dragon problem, with a larger tribe having settled some way north of the Pegasus capital. This is usually not too taxing for them, though, because the Pegasi are natural warriors, and they heavily favor Martial educations and traits.
Pegasi get a starting bonus to Military tech, and lands ruled by a Pegasus get increased levy morale and a defensive bonus from weather manipulation. They also have earlier access to their cultural levy building, providing additional bonuses to their military capacity.
The Earth Pony situation is rather peculiar. The Most Serene Republic of Pudding is actually a titular kingdom, headed by the quite insane Chancellor Puddingfoot. His vassals don't like him too much, and will most likely try and depose him in favor for his young son Puddinghead before long. When this happens they will likely start a slow expansion into the de jure lands of Earth, until they can found that kingdom.
The Duchy of Haycead is Duke Cookie VII, who has little respect for the Chancellor and his son.
Earth Ponies lands are usually pretty big provinces, with an emphasis on building cities. Earth Ponies favor traits and educations towards Stewardship. Earth Ponies get a starting bonus to Economy tech, and lands ruled by an Earth Pony get a significant bonus to tax income, and a slight bonus to Economy tech advancement.
The Crystal Empire has been forced to abandon bits of its territory with the onset of the Sombrians. They are ruled by Queen Paramor, who is a competent ruler. The Crystal Empire can only be held by a female ruler. Provinces held by the Crystal Empire get decreased build time and revolt risk, and slightly increased levy, garrison and tax income, but ONLY if the province is connected to the capital. The capital of the Crystal Empire can not be changed, and must be held by the Queen. If a province is not connected to the capital, it gets severe penalties to tax, levy, garrison, build time and revolt risk. Don't get isolated!
Crystal ponies do not favor any specific educations or traits.
The Sombrians are a religious cult (theocracy). They are zealous, pedantic and obsessed with rules, and despise Merry, Arbitrary and Slothful ponies. They are a mix of the various pony species culture-wise, but they are heretics to Harmony, bent on conquering the Crystal Empire. They are led by Cult Leader
Since Sombrians retain their racial culture, they do not favor any specific education just for being Sombrians.
The Changelings are splintered in 2 groups. First is the Kingdom ruled by King Carapace, and a small number of Hivelords under him. Any changeling with a Duke-level title is a Hivelord. The rest of the changelings are ruled as independent hives by their respective Hivelords. Most of them have titular tribe titles, but some have de jure land.
Changelings characters get a BIG intrigue bonus by default, as well as a big bonus to fertility for any ruler. They also favor further intrigue-boosting traits. However, they cannot survive well on their own, but instead need to feed off other races. For every province over 2 (first 2 are free) with the Changeling culture any realm owns, it must border half as many non-changeling provinces. If they own non-changeling provinces, this counts as 2 bordered provinces. The isolated Kingdom province to the south on the changeling island is a conquered Earth Pony province, which also borders against 2 other non-pony provinces; with a count of 4 total this is sufficient to feed 8 additional changeling provinces, giving a maximum of 10. If possible, independent hivelords should take into account how much food a realm has when considering vassalizing. They should also prioritize fulfilling their food quota before further expanding their native population.
Changeling states who do not fulfill their food quota get nationwide unrest for all changeling provinces, and disapproval from all changeling characters, ensulting in eventual rebellions that go on until the food situation is fixed.
Non-changeling vassals to changeling overlords get opinion penalties, and their provinces get raised revolt risk. This increases the closer to the food limit the state gets; if food is plenty the vassals aren't bothered as much, but when a small number of vassals are forced to give a lot of food they get pissed.
And, yeah, that's as much as I'm gonna bother typing for tonight. What do you think, people?
Also, another open question:
Should the Crystal Empire be a kingdom-tier title, or Empire-tier?
Audieu.
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I kind of like this, actually.
I'm still not sure about on-map dragons/changelings and all the "minor" races (cows, goats, minotaur, and so on). Minor races probably shouldn't be in the game at all, or only exist in flavour events.
Dragons and changelings should either be handled by events or exist as an off-map empire similar to the Mongols. Given what we've seen of dragons, I don't really see them organising into societies that can be represented by CK2. Additionally, given that changelings seem to exists on the "conquer everything" principle, I think they should be this mod's Mongol horde analogue.
For parallels to CK2 in terms of role/mechanics, I was thinking something like this:
Unicorns = Western Europe: rich and potentially very powerful, but also very decentralised
Earth Ponies = Eastern Europe: poorer and low density, but very hard to conquer (unless you're the Changelings)
Pegasi = Byzantine Empire: strong military and unified, but constantly threatened from within (INTRIGUE! PALACE COUPS!) and without (GRIFFINS!)
Griffins = Muslims: perhaps a bit more unified, but too far away to conquer the entire map
Changelings = Mongols: explained above
Crystal Empire: probably founded by some adventurous Earth Ponies trying to escape the instability of the Earth Pony lands. Can also be functionally similar to the Night's Watch from ASOIF; protects the other lands from whatever it is that lives in the frozen north.
You map is incredibly undetailed and it's only just above half the size of the vanilla map, and again, are you aware how much you multiply your workload with each new race/species added? I'd stick to ponies, really.
I have to say I am not very keen on the idea at all. It is well thought out and all but I guess, it is just nothing like what I invisioned or anything like tha maps we have. I understand things ahve to eb changed but we should still try to be as canon as possible with it still being fun otherwise it's not really a MLP mod as much as it is a mod heavily based off of MLP. Also yeah, I still do not think Dragons should be landed in any way, but the changelings do have an empire which is a location int he pony comics coming out. But yes, this really should be kept more canon...
Also I was thinking, since the events in hearths warming eve probably took place over a year or so and the event was the formation of Equestria then the three pony tribes should not be indipendant for a long time after the starting date. Also iw as thinking of how to handle the merge and I think the most logical way would be commander hurricane to marry princess platinum and well, pudding cup to take up her position as their chancellor.
Also I think we should stick it to ponies, griffons and changelings for now, perhaps add zebra at a later date.
Also I was thinking, since the events in hearths warming eve probably took place over a year or so and the event was the formation of Equestria then the three pony tribes should not be indipendant for a long time after the starting date. Also iw as thinking of how to handle the merge and I think the most logical way would be commander hurricane to marry princess platinum and well, pudding cup to take up her position as their chancellor.
Also I think we should stick it to ponies, griffons and changelings for now, perhaps add zebra at a later date.
Here is a very quickly drawn map from the official one, I just traced coastlines and then I expanded the canvas to CK2 size.
I'm not the best coder in the world, but from what I can guess, the added workload per race would be:
Portraits. Idk how big this is, so dunno.
Lands. Like you say the map is underdetailed and small as it is. We need more territories anyway, and to me adding more random places with ponies in them seems very unrealistic, not to mention boring. It seems better to go the whole way.
Flags, Traits and race-specific stuff general: This might take some time, but if we're doing it, we're doing it.
What else? I mean, sure, if it's too much then it would be a lot easier to skip the other races, of course, but I'd think it'd be worth some of the work. Sure, the minor races could be skipped (goats and cows and whatnot) without trouble, but the species that obviously have their own sovereign realms seem to me like a good idea to have in. It all depends on how much we want to do for things here, IMO.
Regarding the Changelings, I don't agree with your ideas of them being a mongol-equivalent of any kind. Dragons with their migrations seem to me like they would function perfectly, and if we already have them in the game they also seem like good candidates for filling up blank spaces and reducing blob factors. This is another argument for expanding the species roster, because otherwise we'd have to either make up a bunch of cultural differences among pony species (which would be pretty confusing imo, not to mention clashes with canon) OR end up with a unicultural happy-go-lucky empire blob in which everyone loves the crap out of each other within 100 years (let's face it, nobody wants that to happen - this is CK2 after all, not Farmville).
Again, the Changelings seem a lot more like the master plotters that infiltrate other governments and steal food and cash from them while sowing unrest like bosses. Besides, Pegasus plot only comes in NSFW flavor - they're WAY too overt (generally speaking) to handle schemery on any larger scale. Yes, their only appearance in the show so far was an invasion. Norwegians invaded places too, but they did a lot of other things. This invasion was, in my point of view, the response to a food shortage in the empire. I've explained those in my post.
For the rest of these parallels, I'll work my way down.
Okay, so the Unicorns work pretty well like that. Dominating the poorer earth ponies and using the other races as pawns, but squabbling among themselves all the time. Unicorns=An un-formed HRE, pretty much. Easy-built empires that fall easy and fall hard.htilden42 said:
Earth Ponies = Italians. Occupied by everything, but capable of becoming very rich if they get free and some time to spend. Stable with blob-capacity on high, but high difficulty as well.
Pegasi = Normans. Fighting everything everywhere since day 1, fighting against themselves and their lieges and whatever else they can find. Very good soldier material if you can vassalize them. They take easy targets first, but if they can they'll swoop in and claim bigger kingdoms and empires as well. Easy blob that falls flat on the first succession if you're not working your ass off.
Dragons = Tengri-worshippers general. First the Cuman/Pecheneg varieties hanging around at day 1, albeit weaker than their counterparts due to lack of initial territory. Then the Migrations start and the Mongol variety swoop in and beat the crap out of everything. They don't even need to settle - Dragon Migrations just DoW's everyone on the continent, with Dragon troops swooping in and raiding shit just because. It's like a combined Plague outbreak and Mongol invasion (THE HORROR!). Aztecs anyone? Eventually they'll find a (random?) target location to settle, and screw whoever was there before.
Changelings = Behaves like the Player managing the succession of his first blob. Except they don't have a blob (you'd better hope they fucking don't, at least) and they don't screw up as often. Nobody seems to understand what they're doing because the feeding mechanic (should) make them behave weird as hell. Couple that with some culture-specific plots and whatnot (like Infilitrate Government and Attempt Takeover or such things), and you have a bundle of madness.
Zebras = Mali/Abyssinia general.
Crystal Empire = Night's Watch actually works pretty well, if you add in the Sombrian Cult to blob in the north for a threat. Also gives more canon real estate. By extension:
Sombrians = Evil cultists with a heretic pope and insane buffs everywhere. Pretty much your average day Babby's First Alicorn OC on a rampage. Shouldn't be much work either, imo.
Griffins = Scandinavia general. Most of them united into little pockets of reasonably shitty lands, and some others spread out as OPM's with buffs to slow down the expansion of the rest. Far-off from the rich parts of the world, generally doesn't get much action...
...unless some madpony unites them and goes batshit warrior cult on everypony else (Norse Pagan Scandinavian Empire mode).
Minotaurs = Baltic pagans. Beat them up and vassalize for free clay, with the added bonus of keeping some of the extra military facilities they have.
Lastly, Monsters =
How you like them apples, people?
Also, anything regarding the map can be debated. The main Equestria area (basically the stuff I've painted with de facto shit in the last post) I'm pretty set on, because I think it works/makes sense/whatever. The rest can be done whatever with, I just drew what I felt like and tried to have it make reasonable amounts of sense. Also punny names are important, thus Plotland+Pone and the Isles is a MUST HAVE, even if it's just breeding ground for Sombrians.
Here is a very quickly drawn map from the official one, I just traced coastlines and then I expanded the canvas to CK2 size.
First off: Square geography. Boo.
For the rest I guess it'd work fine for mainland Equestria, but it still needs expansion in all directions if we want it to be a functional/fun game. Also, still feels relatively large in comparison to the CK2 map. Needs to be smaller, methinks - but that depends on how much other territory we want to add, ofc.
In any event, we need to design the minimap before we can make the map itself, so to speak.
What say you people? How many people do we have on this, anyway? I feel like we should do a roll call.
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