Imperator: Rome Development Diary - 27th of January 2020

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Trin Tragula

Design Lead - Crusader Kings 3
Paradox Staff
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Hello and welcome to another development diary for the upcoming Archimedes update.

Today I will be talking about a revamp of one of the games more integral systems, Character Loyalty, as well as some of the map changes that will be coming in the update.

Reworking Character Loyalty

Character Loyalty, especially for characters with high Power Base, is one of the most important metrics that exist in the game. It is how we measure whether any given characters are likely to turn on you, as a participant in a civil war, or stand by you. If characters with high enough Power Base are disloyal this will in itself kick off a Civil War.


Currently Loyalty is constantly drifting either upwards or downwards. This means that in most cases all Characters in your country are either headed towards complete blind loyalty to the state, or falling into absolute hatred of all things you do. This is obviously not very realistic, and it presents some weird situations when playing where suddenly your entire court is rapidly losing loyalty at once.


loyaltyrework.png


Very early screenshot of how loyalty modifiers might work after the rework. Since this is work in progress no number here can be considered final.


What we want instead is for Loyalty to be a more individual number, one that is not so uniform and that won’t always be in flux. Temporary issues should be able to affect it but at its base it should consist of things like traits, current ambitions, power, and memories of past slights.

To this end Character Loyalty is being reworked be the sum of static modifiers that add or remove loyalty. A system not too dissimilar to Loyalty National Opinion that a foreign country have of you, or the Character Opinions that your courtiers have of you in Crusader Kings 2.

monarchloyal.png


Like opinions, Loyalty modifiers are not always permanent, they can have a duration or decay, but their impact on a character’s loyalty will always be static, instead of a change over time. You will at all times be able to see what the loyalty of any character is impacted by and how your actions have affected it.

loyaltywork2.png


These changes will mean that there should be a fair number of characters that can exist with a loyalty that is not at the extreme points of the scale, and that the “normal” situation should be for characters to have a loyalty rating that is relatively stable over time (only changing when circumstances around them change).


We hope that this will mean that at any given point you will have characters that are more or less loyal, for their own given reasons that you can see. Instead of having all characters trend up or down towards the extremes, and that we think will make loyalty a more enjoyable experience to deal with, even if it is still something that can break your country.


Map Changes in Archimedes
As is customary for updates to our Grand Strategy Games we have taken the opportunity to revisit some areas of the map and political setup at the start of the game.

One area that I have wanted to revisit ever since the original release is India.


As I noted in the original development diary ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-development-diary-4th-of-march-2019.1157578/ ) on India the subcontinent has a political and religious history that is every bit as complex as the mediterrenean and Europe. India is also very relevant to the Diadochi and the Greek world since Alexander’s empire extended into the subcontinent and the newly born Mauryan Empire is in conflict with the Seleucid Successor state at the start of our game.

Western India would also see the rise of another Greek state once the Mauryan influence waned towards the middle of the period covered by the game.


Northern India

One of the main goals when revisiting India has been to take another look at the Mauryan Empire. In 304 BCE the Mauryan Empire is a relatively young polity. Having expanded from a base in the Lower Indus region it has in short time come to usurp all the lands under the Nanda Empire, and relocated its capital to their imperial center at Pataliputra in the north east.

This was not a journey that could be made while retaining total control over all regions conquered. While the Mauryan empire in time would build a strong state, with a sizable bureaucracy and administration its rapid rise was in part due to it gaining support of local powers in the regions on the border between Greek and Indian states in Punjab. Not long ago this region was ruled by a great number of powerful Indian Republics, some of which offered their support to the Mauryas and who would retain great influence within the Maurya Empire.

In other cases it was more the case that Mauryan advance against greek forces led to old local magnates becoming independent until later subdued by other Mauryan emperors once the wars with the Greeks and the Nandas were over.


northernindia.png


The north will now therefore feature a number of new independent states such as the Khasa (in Kashmir) and the Nabhaka and Nabhapakti (further west into the Himalayas).

In the plains of Punjab and Haryana the Paurava and Yaudheya are powerful Republican states that are subjects to the Mauryan Empire.


Further south Mahisamandala and Palada are now represented as tributaries of the Mauryas in the northern Deccan rather than as directly controlled land.

Southern India

southernindia.png


It is hard to say what southern India was like with the exactness that we can in the north specifically in 304 BCE. The Tamil country has always been one of the richer and more fertile parts of the subcontinent and by digging into the history of states such as the Pandyas, Cholas and Anuradhapura we have been able to give a better picture of the political realities that would have existed around the time that our game portray.

This means that many of the polities which exist in Livy and before have now been broken into smaller states. The island of Lanka is not yet unified entirely under Anurudhapura at the start, and the inland beyond the Pandyas is now under various chiefdoms known from the Sangam literature such as Kosar and Parambu.


Arachosia and the Mountains


syburtius.png

The border region where Maurya and Seleucid interests meet was still contested at the start of our game. While Seleucus himself and his son Antiochus had recently spent some time getting the eastern satrapies in line their hold over the far east where this conflict takes place was less absolute.

The Archimedes update introduces Syburtius of Arachosia as a playable satrap (subject state) of the Seleucids, together with the locally ruled Gandhara principality controlling the Khyber pass. Historically this region would come under Mauryan control shortly after our start, with the Syburtius becoming a greek subject ruler under the Mauryan king, a relationship that may have lasted well into Ashoka’s reign, when Greek (Yonas) are noted as subjects of the Indian emperor in this region. Even further on Arachosia is one of the regions under Indo-Greek empire.


That was all for today!

This was a brief look at what the Archimedes update brings to Characters as well as some of the Map and Setup updates we have planned.

Next week @Arheo will be back to talk about things close to his heart.
 
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First!

Cool stuff. The changes to loyalty should definitely make interaction with characters more meaningful.

Also, know this isn't a suggestion thread, but here's an idea - when a character dies, can you make the portrait take on a monochrome marble texture? That way it'll look like the bust of a dead character.
 
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Interesting map changes.
 
Interesting changes to loyalty. :) This will only apply to characters I take it, not to province loyalty for example?
 
In general I think the loyalty changes seems nice. I do wonder if there needs to be a certain way to handle disloyalty though. Wasn't a big problem that whenever you risked having a governor turn on you that it was easy to temporarily bribe them and then remove them from their position? Also will it be made harder to ignore disloyal people? I wonder if there should be a system where say they'd start spurring on their family to protest or demand things so you'd actually have to satisfy them or kill them or similar. I'm not sure how much gameplay space the characters in I:R should take but I'd love it if they felt a bit more alive and something you need to manage beyond small buffs.
 
Have you considered doing like in CK2 and have different UI depending on Culture, like barbarians could have their UI be made out of Wood rather than marble for example:rolleyes:

In general I think the loyalty changes seems nice. I do wonder if there needs to be a certain way to handle disloyalty though. Wasn't a big problem that whenever you risked having a governor turn on you that it was easy to temporarily bribe them and then remove them from their position? Also will it be made harder to ignore disloyal people? I wonder if there should be a system where say they'd start spurring on their family to protest or demand things so you'd actually have to satisfy them or kill them or similar. I'm not sure how much gameplay space the characters in I:R should take but I'd love it if they felt a bit more alive and something you need to manage beyond small buffs.
We could add in things like CK2 style command traits for generals, even EUIV generals who are not even really characters have atleast 4, not one attribute determining how good they are as commanders.
 
Obviously I don't know what all the new modifiers regarding loyalty are, but it seams that maintaining 100 loyalty on governors will now be hard or simply not possible. Will there be any changes to the requirement of having 100 loyalty in order to gain the a +0.25 province loyalty tick, or some other change to province loyalty to take account of this change?
 
Obviously I don't know what all the new modifiers regarding loyalty are, but it seams that maintaining 100 loyalty on governors will now be hard or simply not possible. Will there be any changes to the requirement of having 100 loyalty in order to gain the a +0.25 province loyalty tick, or some other change to province loyalty to take account of this change?
Make it so governors gain loyalty for acquisition of wealth policy which make alot of sense, maybe negative loyalty for some other policies such as converting/assimilating pops if not of state religion or state Culture.

The fact the governor don't care at all about the policies is one reason why they lack life;)
 
Obviously I don't know what all the new modifiers regarding loyalty are, but it seams that maintaining 100 loyalty on governors will now be hard or simply not possible. Will there be any changes to the requirement of having 100 loyalty in order to gain the a +0.25 province loyalty tick, or some other change to province loyalty to take account of this change?

Without commenting on this in particular (since all things are a bit work in progress right now) I will say this:
The above is an overview of what we are changing and what are goals are. It is fair to say a lot of balance work will have to be done for the new system in general to adapt the game to these new rules. :)
 
Please, elaborate how will change initial Maurya-Seleucid events will change, sicnce the borderlands are changing

The main structure remains the same. The Arachosia satrapy will be transferred as a subject to the Mauryan empire instead of being annexed though.
Most of all since Syburtius in real life seems to have been a Mauryan subject (also in a way Megasthenes ticket into the Mauryan capital).
 
Simple yet facinating changes to loyalty. It'll take me a while to wrap my mind around it... At a glance it seems like a system is quite capable of adressing the issues we discussed back in august of 2019 https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/can-we-talk-about-loyalty.1228877/page-2


upload_2020-1-27_12-44-18.png

Looking at this example, i presume losing a job would give something like -20 loyalty fading over 5 years. Neat! … this is a rather slow decay though, i would kind of have expected it to be done on a monthly basis. (or maybe we'll be back to zero-sum for hire/fire with -15?)

What we want instead is for Loyalty to be a more individual number, one that is not so uniform and that won’t always be in flux. Temporary issues should be able to affect it but at its base it should consist of things like traits, current ambitions, power, and memories of past slights.

I wonder to what extent we'll see examples of relatively quick forgiveness and lasting resentfulness reflected through this system - i could see it done favorably with respect to particular traits like forgiving, spiteful vengeful and proud, but also with particularly memorable events and interactions.... this system allows for certain characters to react to certain occasions with life-long impact to their loyalty...! perhaps even that of their entire family for generations!

For example, imprisoning a character in 1.3 Livy gives them -50 loyalty. in 1.4 i could see that -50 be handled in a number of ways, perhaps a portion of it will fade over 10 years if the imprisoned is kindly or forgiving? perhaps another portion can be "refunded" as fading gratitude if released? conversely, a vengeful , spiteful or proud character would have their gratitude-modifier fade away faster, and retain a (larger) part of the "imprisoned" modifier as a permanent grudge...

This is promising. Maybe one of those systems it'll take time to start utilizing more fully. Its the kind of thing that makes me consider take up modding again.
 

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