I recently played with Iberia and finally managed to obtain the Pharnavazid bloodline, but the governor loyalty bonus does not apply, checking by chance I noticed that the intelligent trait also grants the same bonus that also does not apply
[MOD] Imperator Invictus
- Thread starter Snowlet
- Start date
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Quick bug/feature report: the “support the temple in Axum” decision can be taken by any Axumite country that was once part of Axum, and the AI will always click it, thereby strengthening a foreign city. This can happen dozens of times with no cap.
Source: I shattered my empire for immersion during a megacampaign run, and accidentally turned Axum into Wakanda:
Source: I shattered my empire for immersion during a megacampaign run, and accidentally turned Axum into Wakanda:
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Just a minor correction about a province name in the region of Asia. The small islands in the south eastern area of the Aegean sea (Rhodes being the largest of them) are part of a province called the Sporades but that's an incorrect name. The province should be called Dodecanese (in Greek it means the 12 islands) and not Sporades. Sporades is indeed a name for an island chain in the Aegean but they are the islands that are just of the coast of the province of Thessaly (connecting with Demetrias). Hope you can fix it, it's a minor mistake but it's quite noticeable if you play in the region.
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Apparantly the Dodeacanese are also called the southern Sporades sometimes.
DD79: Albania and the Hurrians
Dev Diary 79: Albania and the Hurrians
Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about the Caucasian country of Iberia, the possibility to revive the Hurrian religion but first another by Zorgoball.
Hello there!
Zorgoball popping in with a small announcement; as of today, we are starting another AAR contest! Come to our Discord and tell us the epic stories of your glorious campaigns in our #challenges-aar channel. The grand prize winner of the AAR contest will get to work with the Invictus dev team to help us design a mission tree for whatever tag they choose. We had a tremendous run last time and are excited to see what tales you have to tell!
Now onto Omega and the Caucasian country of Albania!
Omega here with an update on the team’s foray into the Caucasus, which some of you may recall was leaked as PDX’s next planned content pack before cancellation of development. We hope you have been enjoying the Caucasian Iberia mission tree developed by the amazing Zorgoball, because I have come to tell you that the Iberian taste was but a morsel of what is to come.
This is a shameless spoiler, but content is in various stages of planning and development for most every tag around the Caucasian Mountains. The list includes, but is not limited to:
For now, I will be discussing Caucasian Albania and what is in store for its content and mission tree.
Albania:
Mentioned only in passing by Greco-Roman authors ranging from Herodotus to Arrian to Strabo, the Albanians lived near the edge of the knowable world from the perspective of the Mediterranean civilizations. Even to the Achaemenid Persians and their Median predecessors, the Albanians were northern anomalies, best used as sources of tax revenue and army-filling.
Passersby have remarked that one could hear over 26 distinct languages among the tribes of Caucasian Albania, but it is likely that these 26 (or more) consisted of many dialects, sub-dialects, and language groups—some of which may have been inter-intelligible, while others were more alien to that of their neighbors. This is, after all, the eastern Caucasus, a messy puzzle of isolated cultural and linguistic groups.
With most writing on their dynastic tradition, consolidation, faith, and geography coming from later medieval sources, Albania at the time of 304 BCE is quite the enigma. Either by this time or during the 3rd century BCE, the Albanians consolidated into a semi-loose confederation of tribes with political centers based out of fortified settlements. While one of the most impressive sites to excavate and read about in sources has been that of Qabala, many sites around modern-day Azerbaijan have proven to be budding urbanization centers during at least the middle-3rd century BCE if not earlier.
In much the same way the medieval Britons and Saxons of Britannia were left with Roman infrastructure and the relics of Roman art and rule, so too were the Albanians graced with empty summer palaces and satrapy citadel fortresses along the Kuras and Araxes river from the time when the Achaemenids administered the land extensively.
Over the course of the mission tree for Albania, you will have the chance to explore those Persian relics and follow the dream of an Albanian Empire. Conversely, if you wish to follow a more historical approach, another branch of the mission will walk you through the difficulties of tribal power struggles and ruling over entrenched chiefdoms. Many of the cultural groupings of ancient Caucasian Albania were so strong that groups such as the Udi-speakers (at that time, speaking a theorized proto-Udian) continue to inhabit their traditional lands to the modern day. The Lezgi (Legians), too, were at times a part of the ‘Albanian’ group in the eastern Caucasus, and your mission will see you interacting them, but we felt it was best to leave Legia as its own, independent nation at game-start which will get its own limited content in the future.
A new cultural setup in Albania:
As previously mentioned, Caucasian Albania was a land of many peoples and languages. It is tough to parse out what really counted as ‘Albanian,’ and so we’ve diversified the Caucasus range overall, adding in new cultures to show the more granular nature of this region. The Caspians, especially, will figure into the story of your playthrough—will you choose to work with them, or will you give them justification to stab you in the back?
Be warned, the choices you make as a ruler could potentially balkanize the cultural landscape of Caucasian Albania even further…
As one of the more dominant tribal groups mentioned in both Greco-Roman and medieval Armenian and Apostolic Albanian sources, the Lupenians (or Lpin) and their capital in the modern area of Shamakhi may pop into your playthrough given the right push.
Our only known native writing from Caucasian Albania survives in the form of a supposedly ‘Albanian’ script written on the Albanian Palimpsest found in Egypt. However, it is clear that the Albanians were heavily influenced, at different times, by Kartvelian and Iranian languages, so you will have the chance, in your mutually exclusive mission branches, to invent the administrative Albanian alphabet.
On your journey towards greatness, you will likely come into conflict with the Iberians and the Armenians. Both of these groups currently hold rightful Albanian land (as determined by the game’s arbitrary region borders), so you must clearly take it back.
If you don’t feel particularly confident in conquering those pieces of land via conventional means, “there are alternatives to fighting”
Just don’t get too carried away with your ethno-nationalism…this isn’t supposed to be a real-life simulator.
Will you become…the greatest of Albanians?
Or will your people, provoked by your method of rule, rise up against you in various forms…?
With this mission tree, we wanted to give you as many chances as possible to mess up, make a lot of enemies, start a lot of painful wars, and achieve the worst possible border gore. The challenge: can you upset every single major tribal group within Caucasian Albania enough to cause a 4-way Imperator: Rome battle-royale on the level of the Diadochi but with a lot of crappy Light Infantry? This is your new AAR challenge.
(Yes, we thought democracy in the Caucasus was a hilariously fantastical idea as well)
It is recorded that, when Alexander was completing his Sogdian campaign, messengers from the king of Chorasmia (Khwarezm) arrived from beyond the desert and desert-steppe horizon, from the land of the 50 fortresses, to pledge fealty to Alexander. The king of Chorasmia only asked that he could assist Alexander in conquering the kingdoms and people of the Caucasus region, his rivals to the west.
Well, the Albanians caught wind of this…and they want to set things right. Not only is the Caspian sea a vital trade lane which the Albanians can profit off of, but it’s one major step on the way to conquering and permanently deleting Chorasmia from the face of the earth. Will your Albanian armies have the stamina to nearly circumnavigate the Mazandaran Sea and conquer the Oxiana river’s rich pasturelands and fields?
And, finally, we wanted to give you a rough estimate of the total land required in your conquests if you completed every possible task in the mission tree. But we know you… it’s never going to look like this. We look forward to seeing the very-messed-up borders you create and the incredibly blood-infused children you rear. And for you blood-sucking eugenicists out there, Albania adds one more bloodline to the collection. I’ll let you figure out whose it is and how to get it.
Till the next time, where we’ll have more updates on:
Till then, I was OmegaCorps, your legally Caucasian but not ethnically Caucasian host, and this was… Caucasian Albania.
Hey there, Izn here. Which meannnns, religion stuff! This time, I’ve got a dying religion on the table, one that is barely alive at game start but will have revival content in the future. The Hurrian religion!
Disclaimer, Hurrian is not a game start religion. This image is a mock-up.
This religion is based on three sources: pure Hurrian deities, Syrio-Hurrian deities, and Hurrio-Hittite deities. Because of its nature as a faith made to be revived, there are deities to be found from all the way back in the bronze age, but the most popular deity that was worshiped even till antiquity was Teshub. Hurrian Mythology revolves around Teshub and the so-called Kumarbi cycle. The cycle is divided into 5 primary ‘songs,’ which represent different parts of the cycle, and deities come with each song.
The song of Kumarbi, or the song of Emergence, starts the cycle. The god Anu, who is overthrown by Kumarbi, and has his testicles bitten off in the process. This would result in Kumarbi spitting out the semen of Anu onto a mountain, which in turn births the god Teshub.
Next tells of the song of Lamma or song of Kal. In this song, Teshub and his sister Shaushka are defeated by the god Lamma (side note, Lamma is not the name of the Hurrian god, however we do not know the proper name, only how it was spelled in Sumerian cuneiform, which was not pronounced the same nor represented the same thing in the Hurrian language.)
The next song is the song of Silver. This song is about the boy named Silver who is bullied, however he learns that he is actually the sibling of Teshub and Shaushka. This part of the myth is poorly attested and thus will not have any deities coming from it in Invictus. However, here’s a picture of a better attested deity who is also the sibling of Teshub and Shaushka called Tasmishu.
Next we have the song of Hedammu. This song speaks of Kumarbi fathering new gods in order to defeat Teshub. However, this is so destructive that Enlil intervenes in order to save mankind from annihilation. Prominently featured in this song are the sisters of fate, Hutena and Hutelluri.
As a side note, keep in mind that these omen effects are reduced significantly as the mock-nation I’m using has 0% omen power!
The final myth is the song of Ullikumi, in which Kumarbi attempts to destroy Teshub with the help of the stone giant, Ullikumi. They hatch a plan together for Ullikumi to hide until he is strong enough to defeat Teshub, and sure enough, this works and Teshub is defeated, and his wife Hepat is captured and imprisoned. Teshub recruits his former adversaries in the primordial gods Enlil and Ea. With his new allies he is able to finally defeat Ullikumi and return to him his wife. It is implied that Teshub becomes the king of the gods from henceforth.
With that synopsis over, it seems there are only a few gods, and many of them are straight from Chaldean mythos! However, rest assured, there is a full pantheon of gods. 23 different gods all fit into this mythical cycle, and I hope you take the time to read the deity descriptions. The descriptions mostly talk about which songs they fit into, their relation with Kumarbi or Teshub, and the details that I selectively skipped over in the summary above. Although some are unrelated and have their own unique piece to the Hurrian religion, like one of my favorites, Allani, the queen of the Dark Earth..
Thanks for reading all that, I know it was a bit wordy, but I think the mythos is fascinating and I had a fun time representing it via deities. That’s all I’ve got for today, I hope you look forward to trying to revive this ancient, yet still living, religion!
Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about the Caucasian country of Iberia, the possibility to revive the Hurrian religion but first another by Zorgoball.
Hello there!
Zorgoball popping in with a small announcement; as of today, we are starting another AAR contest! Come to our Discord and tell us the epic stories of your glorious campaigns in our #challenges-aar channel. The grand prize winner of the AAR contest will get to work with the Invictus dev team to help us design a mission tree for whatever tag they choose. We had a tremendous run last time and are excited to see what tales you have to tell!
Now onto Omega and the Caucasian country of Albania!
Omega here with an update on the team’s foray into the Caucasus, which some of you may recall was leaked as PDX’s next planned content pack before cancellation of development. We hope you have been enjoying the Caucasian Iberia mission tree developed by the amazing Zorgoball, because I have come to tell you that the Iberian taste was but a morsel of what is to come.
This is a shameless spoiler, but content is in various stages of planning and development for most every tag around the Caucasian Mountains. The list includes, but is not limited to:
- Iberia (adjustments/additions)
- Albania
- Kolchis
- Armenia
- Gordyene (I’m counting it as Caucasus…close enough)
- The Kolchians
- The greater Kartvelians
- The Albanians
- The Lupenians
- The Lezgians
- The Abkhazians
- The Svans
- And more !!!
For now, I will be discussing Caucasian Albania and what is in store for its content and mission tree.
Albania:
Mentioned only in passing by Greco-Roman authors ranging from Herodotus to Arrian to Strabo, the Albanians lived near the edge of the knowable world from the perspective of the Mediterranean civilizations. Even to the Achaemenid Persians and their Median predecessors, the Albanians were northern anomalies, best used as sources of tax revenue and army-filling.
Passersby have remarked that one could hear over 26 distinct languages among the tribes of Caucasian Albania, but it is likely that these 26 (or more) consisted of many dialects, sub-dialects, and language groups—some of which may have been inter-intelligible, while others were more alien to that of their neighbors. This is, after all, the eastern Caucasus, a messy puzzle of isolated cultural and linguistic groups.
With most writing on their dynastic tradition, consolidation, faith, and geography coming from later medieval sources, Albania at the time of 304 BCE is quite the enigma. Either by this time or during the 3rd century BCE, the Albanians consolidated into a semi-loose confederation of tribes with political centers based out of fortified settlements. While one of the most impressive sites to excavate and read about in sources has been that of Qabala, many sites around modern-day Azerbaijan have proven to be budding urbanization centers during at least the middle-3rd century BCE if not earlier.
In much the same way the medieval Britons and Saxons of Britannia were left with Roman infrastructure and the relics of Roman art and rule, so too were the Albanians graced with empty summer palaces and satrapy citadel fortresses along the Kuras and Araxes river from the time when the Achaemenids administered the land extensively.
Over the course of the mission tree for Albania, you will have the chance to explore those Persian relics and follow the dream of an Albanian Empire. Conversely, if you wish to follow a more historical approach, another branch of the mission will walk you through the difficulties of tribal power struggles and ruling over entrenched chiefdoms. Many of the cultural groupings of ancient Caucasian Albania were so strong that groups such as the Udi-speakers (at that time, speaking a theorized proto-Udian) continue to inhabit their traditional lands to the modern day. The Lezgi (Legians), too, were at times a part of the ‘Albanian’ group in the eastern Caucasus, and your mission will see you interacting them, but we felt it was best to leave Legia as its own, independent nation at game-start which will get its own limited content in the future.
A new cultural setup in Albania:
- The Caspian tribes (for whom the Caspian Sea is named) have been added, whom the Albanians will be able to interact with, for good or bad, as part of the new Albanian Mission.
- The Sasperians have been added to represent both their own Saspeires tribes as well as other related Southern Caucasian tribes practicing Caucasian-style burials, linguistics, and architecture.
As previously mentioned, Caucasian Albania was a land of many peoples and languages. It is tough to parse out what really counted as ‘Albanian,’ and so we’ve diversified the Caucasus range overall, adding in new cultures to show the more granular nature of this region. The Caspians, especially, will figure into the story of your playthrough—will you choose to work with them, or will you give them justification to stab you in the back?
Be warned, the choices you make as a ruler could potentially balkanize the cultural landscape of Caucasian Albania even further…
As one of the more dominant tribal groups mentioned in both Greco-Roman and medieval Armenian and Apostolic Albanian sources, the Lupenians (or Lpin) and their capital in the modern area of Shamakhi may pop into your playthrough given the right push.
Our only known native writing from Caucasian Albania survives in the form of a supposedly ‘Albanian’ script written on the Albanian Palimpsest found in Egypt. However, it is clear that the Albanians were heavily influenced, at different times, by Kartvelian and Iranian languages, so you will have the chance, in your mutually exclusive mission branches, to invent the administrative Albanian alphabet.
On your journey towards greatness, you will likely come into conflict with the Iberians and the Armenians. Both of these groups currently hold rightful Albanian land (as determined by the game’s arbitrary region borders), so you must clearly take it back.
If you don’t feel particularly confident in conquering those pieces of land via conventional means, “there are alternatives to fighting”
- Ben Kenobi, Ep. 4
Just don’t get too carried away with your ethno-nationalism…this isn’t supposed to be a real-life simulator.
Will you become…the greatest of Albanians?
Or will your people, provoked by your method of rule, rise up against you in various forms…?
With this mission tree, we wanted to give you as many chances as possible to mess up, make a lot of enemies, start a lot of painful wars, and achieve the worst possible border gore. The challenge: can you upset every single major tribal group within Caucasian Albania enough to cause a 4-way Imperator: Rome battle-royale on the level of the Diadochi but with a lot of crappy Light Infantry? This is your new AAR challenge.
(Yes, we thought democracy in the Caucasus was a hilariously fantastical idea as well)
It is recorded that, when Alexander was completing his Sogdian campaign, messengers from the king of Chorasmia (Khwarezm) arrived from beyond the desert and desert-steppe horizon, from the land of the 50 fortresses, to pledge fealty to Alexander. The king of Chorasmia only asked that he could assist Alexander in conquering the kingdoms and people of the Caucasus region, his rivals to the west.
Well, the Albanians caught wind of this…and they want to set things right. Not only is the Caspian sea a vital trade lane which the Albanians can profit off of, but it’s one major step on the way to conquering and permanently deleting Chorasmia from the face of the earth. Will your Albanian armies have the stamina to nearly circumnavigate the Mazandaran Sea and conquer the Oxiana river’s rich pasturelands and fields?
And, finally, we wanted to give you a rough estimate of the total land required in your conquests if you completed every possible task in the mission tree. But we know you… it’s never going to look like this. We look forward to seeing the very-messed-up borders you create and the incredibly blood-infused children you rear. And for you blood-sucking eugenicists out there, Albania adds one more bloodline to the collection. I’ll let you figure out whose it is and how to get it.
Till the next time, where we’ll have more updates on:
- Deities
- Flavor Decisions
- Map Setup changes (yes, we will explain why Armenia got a lot smaller)
- Other Mission Trees
Till then, I was OmegaCorps, your legally Caucasian but not ethnically Caucasian host, and this was… Caucasian Albania.
Hey there, Izn here. Which meannnns, religion stuff! This time, I’ve got a dying religion on the table, one that is barely alive at game start but will have revival content in the future. The Hurrian religion!
Disclaimer, Hurrian is not a game start religion. This image is a mock-up.
This religion is based on three sources: pure Hurrian deities, Syrio-Hurrian deities, and Hurrio-Hittite deities. Because of its nature as a faith made to be revived, there are deities to be found from all the way back in the bronze age, but the most popular deity that was worshiped even till antiquity was Teshub. Hurrian Mythology revolves around Teshub and the so-called Kumarbi cycle. The cycle is divided into 5 primary ‘songs,’ which represent different parts of the cycle, and deities come with each song.
The song of Kumarbi, or the song of Emergence, starts the cycle. The god Anu, who is overthrown by Kumarbi, and has his testicles bitten off in the process. This would result in Kumarbi spitting out the semen of Anu onto a mountain, which in turn births the god Teshub.
Next tells of the song of Lamma or song of Kal. In this song, Teshub and his sister Shaushka are defeated by the god Lamma (side note, Lamma is not the name of the Hurrian god, however we do not know the proper name, only how it was spelled in Sumerian cuneiform, which was not pronounced the same nor represented the same thing in the Hurrian language.)
The next song is the song of Silver. This song is about the boy named Silver who is bullied, however he learns that he is actually the sibling of Teshub and Shaushka. This part of the myth is poorly attested and thus will not have any deities coming from it in Invictus. However, here’s a picture of a better attested deity who is also the sibling of Teshub and Shaushka called Tasmishu.
Next we have the song of Hedammu. This song speaks of Kumarbi fathering new gods in order to defeat Teshub. However, this is so destructive that Enlil intervenes in order to save mankind from annihilation. Prominently featured in this song are the sisters of fate, Hutena and Hutelluri.
As a side note, keep in mind that these omen effects are reduced significantly as the mock-nation I’m using has 0% omen power!
The final myth is the song of Ullikumi, in which Kumarbi attempts to destroy Teshub with the help of the stone giant, Ullikumi. They hatch a plan together for Ullikumi to hide until he is strong enough to defeat Teshub, and sure enough, this works and Teshub is defeated, and his wife Hepat is captured and imprisoned. Teshub recruits his former adversaries in the primordial gods Enlil and Ea. With his new allies he is able to finally defeat Ullikumi and return to him his wife. It is implied that Teshub becomes the king of the gods from henceforth.
With that synopsis over, it seems there are only a few gods, and many of them are straight from Chaldean mythos! However, rest assured, there is a full pantheon of gods. 23 different gods all fit into this mythical cycle, and I hope you take the time to read the deity descriptions. The descriptions mostly talk about which songs they fit into, their relation with Kumarbi or Teshub, and the details that I selectively skipped over in the summary above. Although some are unrelated and have their own unique piece to the Hurrian religion, like one of my favorites, Allani, the queen of the Dark Earth..
Thanks for reading all that, I know it was a bit wordy, but I think the mythos is fascinating and I had a fun time representing it via deities. That’s all I’ve got for today, I hope you look forward to trying to revive this ancient, yet still living, religion!
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Since Scotland was sometimes called "Alba" I'm sad that nobody called the Scots "Albanians". Collect all three Albanias!
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Is that true? Wow I never knew. Does anybody have any link on discussions about what was it getting into?
Do video-AARs count? I'm finishing now a Youtube video half "let's play" half "let me explain you the invictus mission tree of cyrenaica".
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Can't wait to see more religion or culture revival in the future
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I have always had a fascination with mountains and those who inhabith them, Caucasian content is something i have been waiting for for a long time and am excited to play with.
And good luck to all those who wish to partecipate in the AAR challange, i will read your works with great interest.
And good luck to all those who wish to partecipate in the AAR challange, i will read your works with great interest.
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I saw the mention of Hurrians, and for a faint moment smiled from hope that the outdated (but awesome) Bronze Age mod was finally being updated.
This is nice content though, as someone who plays in Caucasus region a this is good work.
This is nice content though, as someone who plays in Caucasus region a this is good work.
The mod is now updated by Snowlet; last update was 10 Oct 2023.I saw the mention of Hurrians, and for a faint moment smiled from hope that the outdated (but awesome) Bronze Age mod was finally being updated.
This is nice content though, as someone who plays in Caucasus region a this is good work.
Hi there, I came here to say that the list of DD (and links) on the wiki hasn't been updated since DD 73. I might try the mod at some point in the future since it seems you made so much work on it and I sometimes have fond memories of IR.
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There were a bunch of little additions like heritages, new formables and a deity or two in the last patch. thw patches before that I also added a bunch of other things: Military traditions, even more formables (over 50), new trade goods including the lapis and tin trade mechanic (since it is from off-map)