Dev Diary 30: Open-Source announcement, Panionian League and Scythia updates.
Today we’ll be talking about some changes to the Scythian tree, a new upcoming formable but first and foremost, we have a special announcement.
As the mod is now at a point we can consider it to be polished and of a quality we deem sufficient. I have decided to make the mod Open-Source, aka everyone gets access to the github link here:
https://github.com/SnowletTV/Invictus. You can experiment with mod features long before they come out but we DON’T provide ANY support for the Dev version. If you’re a bit tech-savvy you can learn how to set up a github and play it for yourself. (The dev-branch is the most important branch we work on as it is basically the running build.) Some small advice, you can’t have both the dev version and the workshop mod at the same time. Also the Discord includes a working .mod file for everyone.
For a lot of people this decision won’t change much, but for those of you who don’t like waiting for official updates can now just set up the dev-build.
We hope this provides some more transparency as to our development process and status.
Now onto Scythia:
---Scythia Mission Fixes---
Salvete! OmegaCorps, Olivenkranz, and I (Hannibal_theCannibal) have spent time developing the final missing components of the first Scythia Mission. When Invictus 1.1 dropped, there simply wasn't enough time left to finish scripting the event chains for two of the Mission tasks. Rather than holding the entire mission back, we released the mission with some dummy placeholder events with the understanding that we'd quickly patch them in when we had the time. I'm happy to say that we have accomplished that goal and the event chains for the Scythian Games are up and running. Let's dive into the mission to talk a little bit about the specifics.
Nestled within the "Our Stance on the Greeks" mission available to Scythia are two mission tasks that I'll be discussing today.
On the "Hellenizing" branch of the Mission, the task "Euxinus Games" refers to the desire for our Greek-loving Scythians to earn the respect of the Greek world by hosting an Olympics-style series of games. This mission task will invite athletes from the wider Greek world to compete in games to determine a champion. In order to complete this task, the player will be required to build up the infrastructure in a randomly selected territory necessary to host competitors. As we steeped ourselves in the alt-history of this mission, earning admission to the actual Olympics seemed too far-fetched for our aspiring Scythians without an in-between step. It made sense to us then that the Scythians hosting their own set of games would earn legitimacy for themselves while offering an exotic experience to the established Greeks, potentially warming relations between the two worlds.
Requirements:
Events:
On the opposite branch following the traditional path, the task "the Targitaoan Games" refers to a uniquely scythian/Steppe style series of games. Like the Euxinus games, the player will be prompted to develop the infrastructure of a random territory in order to host the athletes, selected from a pool of countries with the scythian culture group (e.g. Saka, Iazyges, Aorsia, etc.). While we do not have direct evidence that the Royal Scythians of the Black Sea held games like this nor is there evidence these games were directly dedicated to the Heptadic God Targitaos, there is scattered references to friendly competition between Scythian tribes which involved people from all over the Eurasian steppe. These games would have included wrestling bouts, drinking contests, hare Hunts, Archery, and horseback races. It is highly likely games like "Kok Boru" were played by the steppe peoples at this time as they still do today.
Kok boru, a traditional horse game, is a synthesis of traditional practices, performances and the game itself. It is a traditional game played by two teams on horseback, where players try to manoeuvre with a goat’s carcass (replaced with a mould in modern-day games), or ‘ulak’, and score by...
ich.unesco.org
In Invictus, this mission task will send invitations to other scythian culture tags, have their athletes compete in games, and crown a champion (similar to the Olympics), earning their nation great renown and prestige. As a fun sidenote, since scythian culture tags all/nearly all have gender equality enacted, this task will have a very good chance of producing female athletes and even champions!
Requirements:
Events:
---Scythia Roadmap---
Before moving onto newer, more concrete content, we want to quickly share our overall plans for Scythia. We have alluded to this in previous DDs but we are comfortable teasing some additional information.
If all goes well, we plan on creating another 4 missions for Scythia. The missions will be grouped based on the two 'paths' established by the first mission (Our Stance…). Two future missions will follow a historical retelling of scythian history. Although IRL, the Royal Scythians continued to lose Prominence and Territory to their neighboring steppe tribes over time, they were able to still engage in a number of adventures that we hope to emulate in our missions. This will include dealing with other steppe tribes, traveling through the Caucasus mountains, and engaging in a bit of diplomacy with Pontus and Armenia. The missions will culminate in recreating an earlier scythian achievement by fighting their way through the Levant and holding some Ptolemaic Egyptian land hostage (as they did prior to the game’s start date). It's a very ambitious path that will conclude with Scythia playing a major role on the world stage rather than being tucked away on the northern bank of the Black Sea.
The other two missions will be aimed at furthering the alt-history path of hellenization. This will include 'heading west', establishing a legitimized bloodline for the new monarchy, prying away the Greek colonies from the Diadochi, and ultimately confronting one (or possibly two) Diadochi in order to establish a capital in Greece to solidify their newly established identity.
All of these future plans are in very early stages of development. Many plans are still in flux and we are keen on any feedback or ideas from the community.
---The Pan-Ionian League---
Additionally, I've also been working on a new formable tag that can be created by National Decision, “Forming The Panionian League”. Eligible to any country who has Ionian, Aeolian, or Aegean primary culture, this decision will require the player to unify several important coastal Asian cities, either through conquest or vassalage. The required cities largely refer to the historical Ionian League that rebelled against the Achaemenid Persian Empire back in the 500s BCE. One of my favourite parts of PDX games are the 'in-between' steps, the goals and achievements made along the way to performing a higher, more ultimate function. Tier two formables offer a nice early goal that players can work towards while working to achieve a higher goal. I also felt that there was a lack of content for the Greek states on the coast of Asia, so creating a goal for those tags (e.g. Ionia, Kos, Miletus, etc) seemed like an obvious inclusion.
Once formed, the decision generates some pops in your capital, grants some free province investments, and gives claims on every province (state) that has a coastline in the ‘Asia’ region. This will hopefully serve either as a springboard to bigger and better tags, such as the Hellenic League or give some nice, logical borders for those aiming to play a tall style naval game. Once formed, the players will still be able to complete the generic Greek mission tree available to Greek tags in the Aegean. As most of the eligible tags that can take this decision begin the game as a vassal or tributary of one of the Diadochi, success is by no means guaranteed. We don’t imagine the AI may ever successfully take this decision but players who are looking for a bit of a challenge sandwiched between nearly all of the Diadochi will enjoy creating this formable. Special shoutout to our artist RetconCrisis who helped put the flag together based on some obscure Ionian coinage I was able to look up.
