Dev Diary 42: Military traditions, QOL changes and maintenance
Salvete! Today we’ll be talking about some QOL changes with the map, an update on the Spanish translation, code maintenance, a new military traditions system and 3 new military tradition sets.
But first a little rant from mostly me, almost all of the bugs reported to us are not caused by Invictus, on the steam workshop we have a list of mods compatible with Invictus but please know they will 100% not work all together. If you have a problem, please first test it without the submods since it is almost always one of the submods causing the problem. Do not use more than 1 major submod, meaning you can use HIP or the Timeline extender but not both, in almost all configurations/combinations of submods Better UI should work as long as Invictus is loaded after. That was my rant, please save me time debugging and be sensical when using mods, now onto Juanen and some QOL changes.
Hello everyone. Today I’m here not just to speak about the Spanish translation, but also about some QOL changes for the maps of the game, and some work behind the scenes I’ve been trying to do. Most of these are small changes I’ve made (as I’m not a coder and don’t want to break the game more). But I hope you’ll appreciate them.
First of all, I’ve changed the colour of the Cybelene religion. So now when you migrate with your celts to Anatolia, and create your big chad Galatian empire, you’ll recognize easily where your subjects follow the “right religion”, and where you should “teach” your ignorant subjects which gods are the real ones.
Continuing with my crusade against wrong colours being used in-game, my next logical candidate was the Region Mapmode. We discovered that the game didn’t have colours assigned for the regions, but it was programmed to give random colours to the regions if not specified. This code was making the map really purple, and not in a good way, as we can see below. (Why purple PDX, why…).
Now the Region Mapmode has been recolored. We have given Rome a really sexy and roman red, and every region is distinguishable from its neighbours.
Now, to the “work behind the scenes”.
One (really important) part of developing and maintaining a mod (or a game), is keeping your files clean and organised. Just imagine trying to make some sense of the code of the game/mod, when you have lots of people from different backgrounds coding at different times, with their own style of organisation and their own kind of content being produced.
This part is even more important form modders, as we do this just for “fun” (Snowlet didn’t force me to say this, I’m a freeman and not a slave of the state, I promise). People join and leave our team much more often than if this was a company, and if the guy who created that really cool mission but totally broken just disappears, good luck trying to understand how/why nothing that you try fixes it. It also helps us to have a bigger picture of what we’ve done until now, and which parts of the game we haven’t touched much yet.
Note from Snowlet: fixing things other people made is painful and often takes a very long time, look at Cyrenaica for example which forced us to cut 3 out of 4 paths.
This work adds “nothing” to the game, but makes working on the mod a bit easier. It can also break lots of stuff, which I’m sorry if I did. This is not a finished work, as there are many parts of the mod that need some cleaning and organising, but it’s just a beginning. And, just as every loc needs to be translated, every file needs to be properly organised (and eventually it will be).
Another note from Snowlet: a lot of work has gone into cleaning the code, while some have focused on organising the spread-out Localization files, I have focused on cleaning old code often incorrectly using file names or code unadapted to new formats causing tons of legacy bugs. A lot of these will be fixed by next update, most notably the Mithridatic events will work correctly again.
Before I speak about the progress we’ve made on the Spanish translation, I wanted to comment with you all that if you have any suggestions regarding the colour changes made on the map, or you have found any map not distinct enough, feel free to comment as I’ll be checking the forum for feedback.
Regarding the Spanish translation, not much can be said. I’ve had some progress with the localization of some of the new missions added to the mod, and so I’ve finished the missions for Kalinga, Lanka, North Africa (Fezzan), Greek Pontus, and the new missions for the German Tribes. So now only some are left to be done (Rhodes, Kush, Cyrene, Scythia, and Maurya), which not casually are some of the biggest and with more localization content of the mod, but that I’ll beat and translate as soon as I can. Cyrene and Scythia are particularly huge, so I’ve started working first with Rhodes ^.^
In this part of the dev diary, I (Olivenkranz) will give you a rough overview over the 3 new military traditions that I ported from the Huge Multiplayer Overhaul mod and Snowlet who helped with a lot of the bugs. I have slightly adapted some modifiers, they are not 1:1 the same military traditions.
Before I let Olivenkranz continue, I (Snowlet) will quickly explain a change to how military traditions will be unlocked, this painful script originally written by Dustin (from HMO/Molon Labe) has now been rewritten for the second time by me. Now what has changed and how does the system work?
In order to integrate and unlock a new set of military traditions, you need to integrate enough cultures of the relevant groups so the pops are more than 25% than the amount of primary culture pops you have (min: 50 max: 350, and before you ask, yes you can integrate multiple smaller cultures to get the needed amount). At this point, you can enact a cultural decision in the culture screen to embrace their ways of war giving you some debuffs but you unlock the military tradition tree.
Now here is where the new version will differ from the old, it used to be that you needed to maintain the 25% pops forever to take new traditions of the unlocked group, now while this is a good system, it breaks completely due to internal code reasons when integrating more than one group. So now the new: after taking the cultural decision you can take the mil trads freely, but when you unintegrate one of the needed cultures, the game will check whether you still have enough % pops, if you don’t you can no longer take new military traditions.
Basically this means you only need the required pops for enacting the decision but you cannot unintegrate the cultures, this seems fair enough as the influence would remain even after forming an empire. Now back to Olivenkranz:
The first military traditions (always a pair of two trees) is
A Germanic and Balto-Slavic tree
This pair will boost your archers, spearmen, light cavalry and navy. Sprinkled in are some other buffs, such as a possible migration cost reduction, if you are a tribe. Here is a picture with one of the paths.
The second military tree is for the Anatolian culture groups.
This one focuses a lot on the use of cavalry. Interestingly enough, ancient Armenian cavalry was famed during the game’s era. The second branch features a lot of boats. After all, the Cilician pirates were an infamous threat during the time period. Hereafter will be a screenshot of one of the branches with one path shown.
The last military traditions are a Steppe and Bactrian branch. As you might expect, these feature a lot of horses, light, heavy and even the humped variation. The Bactrian branch also features these units, but also boosts archers and light infantry in a more distributed manner. Once more, a picture.
A huge thanks to the HMO modders for allowing us to use their content.
As always, do remember that numbers and localisation are not final and may change. If you have any suggestions leave them on the forums or better yet on our discord.
