Dev Diary 41: Gaul rework
Salvete! Today we’ll be talking about Palando’s work on Gaul and the British Isles. Including culture reworks, a new setup and a few mission trees. For all this I’ll hand you over to Palando, but first a note from me:
Note from Snowlet: again there has been an increase in rudeness towards our devs (not just what you see here on the forums but in rude DM’s usually directed at me too), I wish to remind you that all our devs have real lives and they only work on this in their spare time, they’re not paid to do this and they aren’t capable of magically fixing everything. If you have found a bug, please do report it in as much detail as possible, if it’s unclear what’s wrong, we’ll ask for clarification until we as Devs can understand. Answering this rudely is unproductive and frankly if you’re going to be rude to the devs who have poured tons of time into this project, I kindly ask you to remain silent or go away.
Link to our Discord:
https://discord.gg/5K9fd3qSjx
A while ago, I posted a poll on what ‘barbarian’ region you think should get content next. You can see the results here:
You can also see my own bias.
Gaul Rework
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.
I’m pleased to announce that the development of content for Gaul has started. In today’s dev diary, we are going to start with the cultural rework. A general change is that cultures should now better follow the tribal borders, as it was odd that the heartland of a tribe wasn’t populated with its own culture.
The most striking change should be that some cultures were moved out of the Belgae group. Internally, we had thorough discussion about how to deal with the mixed Germano-Celtic nature of the Belgae that was reported by Caesar. Given that there seemed to be regional and long-standing connections between the Belgae tribes, we decided to leave them in their own culture group. But because of this interpretation, the Treveri, Ubii and Sennones could no longer be part of it.
Furthermore, the size of the Helvetian culture was reduced and now is reserved only for tribes that belonged to the Helvetii. The southern Helvetian pops are now called Allobrogian, and Lemovician was merged into Arverni to not increase the total amount of cultures in Gaul. Additionally, the Arecomici are now Volcae. Finally, Teurian was added for the Naumburger group in the border region between North-Western Bohemia and Eastern Germany.
Caesar’s tripartite division is clearly visible here.
Gaulish Mission Trees
The content update for Gaul is going to be accompanied by several mission trees that will either be tied to a certain culture or tags. We currently have a list of these, but we will not share it publicly, because some may be added to the list or maybe also removed. You can speculate below what trees are currently planned, though some should be easily guessable by readers of Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
The first mission tree will be for Celts living on the eastern side of the Celtic world, the Boii. Caesar defeated a migratory band of this tribe in the Battle of Bibracte. However, the missions will deal with preventing some of the causes of this migration instead.
During the Celtic migration period of the 4th century BC, Boii settled in what we now call Bohemia but also in Cisalpine Gaul in modern Italy. The first task is to reform the Boian society into a federation under a central tribal council before eyeing further expansion and claiming the whole Bohemian basin. Afterwards, one path will guide you towards the north by going into Silesia and, from there, convincing the local Vandals that it would be beneficial for them to join a league under your and Lugus’s aegis. From there, you can claim the riches of the amber coast, but have to secure your north-eastern flank by dealing with the Germanic people living there.
The other mandatory path is about conquering Pannonia, with which an alliance with the Taurisci might help you. The Boian presence in Pannonia was historically ended by the Dacians under King Burebista, but it is up to the player to prevent this. Completing the northern and Pannonian paths is required to complete the mission tree with your own ‘commonwealth’ obviously led by yourself.
Other optional tasks thematise the Boian coinage standard, expanding your capital with an acropolis or gaining access to valuable resources in your vicinity, the iron and salt of Noricum.
In the next dev diary about Gaul, we will delve into more mission trees, most likely also in the centre of Celtic Gaul.
The Northern Brethren
Although, there are currently no plans to add mission trees to Britannia - that is for the foreseeable future, some of the Gaulish content will interact with the isle. There were e.g. trade networks between Brittany, Cornwall, Wales and Southern Ireland or between Belgium and Kent.
Because of this, a slight setup and cultural rework is going to be part of the next update. So, Parisian was added as a culture to represent the distinct Arras culture, Hibernian was split into a southern culture representing the aforementioned ties and a northern one, and the cultures in south-eastern Britain were fixed (no Cantians in Trinovantia and vice-versa).
Lastly, there is going to be only one Insular Celtic culture group. So for the reasons, the linguistic split between proto-Goidelic and proto-Brythonic is e.g. also present in the Italic languages, yet in both cases it would make for a granular division. Furthermore, Cornwall and Wales (also Aremorica) had e.g. far stronger ties to southern Ireland than to the tribes of the west coast, as the seaways were better suited for communication than most land routes via forests or mountainous terrain. In general, it is, therefore, hard to estimate where exactly the isogloss between proto-Goidelic and proto-Brythonic was in around 304 BC, and we don’t know for certain when this split began to arise.
The western coast of Hibernia is now also playable, though for now, not all tribes mentioned by Ptolemaios were added. Based on a foxy request, you can also start on the Isle of Mann with Monapia, the name recorded by Ptolemaios for the island.
Roman Britannia
As I recently read Sir Barrington Cunliffe’s book, Britain Begins, the description of the Roman invasion of Britain inspired me to script a new Roman mission tree. I also personally like to play a Roman campaign from time to time. Anyway, the effort spent on scripting and localising this tree was far lower than any barbarian tree, so you don’t have to fear that this delayed the development of more content for Gaul.
The structure of the tree is mostly based on the Gaulish one. The main path asks you to establish a base for your naval invasion in Belgium and Aremorica, and one optional task will help you to build a navy for this invasion.Then you have to conquer the territory up to the border of the Roman province. Thereafter, it is your decision if you want to complete what Agricola could not and subdue the Caledonians or secure the border as Hadrian did with his wall. In the former case, you can also eye Hibernia and potentially conquer it with just one legion, at least that is what Agricola claimed. One unique optional task is centred around the Interpretatio Romana of the Celtic goddess Sulis, which will grant you access to a new deity, Sulis Minerva.
