[MOD] Imperator Invictus

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 59: Sogdia & Zhanzhung Missions

Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about mission trees for Sogdia and Zhangzhung as presented by Zorgoball. However first i'd like to announce that the next update which will include everything revealed in DD's so far (and quite a lot more) will release at or around Christmas.
That being said, time to hand you over to Zorgoball.


Well met, traveler! It is I, Zorgoball, your faithful guide and interpreter, here to show you the way forward to the very ends of the earth. When we first embarked on our DD journey together, we set sail from the Balearics and made our way to Crete, but we will be taking the overland route east this week. Our first stop is Sogdia, where a nice chonky mission tree awaits - a tree so massive, in fact, that we should present it in sections for legibility’s sake. We turn our attention to the majority of the tasks;

The Sogdians have an intriguing story before game start, one with ramifications for the present day; after being conquered by Cyrus the Great in the 540s BCE, both the territories of Bactria and Sogdia were ruled as one satrapy. Eventually, the Sogdians would break free from Achaemenid control, embracing a semi-nomadic lifestyle before being conquered by Alexander and his armies - the fall of the fortress known as the Sogdian Rock, a shameful episode from this period, has become the stuff of legend. Once again, Sogdia found herself reincorporated into an administrative unit with the Bactrians, nominally ruled by a foreign governor in a faraway capital - a fate that they cannot seem to escape. But the terrifying sound of “Ten Thousand Hooves” will echo throughout the mountain valleys as the horse armies of Sogdia charge into the fray and rewrite the history books!
At game start, the Sogdians don’t even own their namesake province of Sogdiana to the south, nor its prized city of Marakanda, but the right side of the tree will aid in evicting the mighty Bactrians from these lands. After your claims have been prepared, there will be a special opportunity for your ruler to smuggle a message down south. As some of you might know, in 324 BCE Alexander famously oversaw a marriage ceremony at Susa where many of his Macedonian generals were wed to Persian royalty, and the Basileus of the Seleukid Empire happened to marry an old friend of yours…

It’s a race against time if you don’t want to face the combined armies of the Bactrians and the Seleukids; you will have to grow your strength quickly, for if your ruler or Apama dies, that tenuous connection will be lost and you’ll have to duke it out the old fashioned way. Difficult, yet not impossible, and a successful campaign against the Bactrians will allow you to move your capital from the mountains of Barkshan to Marakanda, the future site of the famed Samarkand, where you will be poised to conquer the heartlands of Bactria itself.

Of course, one of the first priorities will be rebuilding the Sogdian Rock. Alexander and his men took the fortress through trickery and deceit, but you won’t be fooled again so easily a second time. Besides, you can expect that the Bactrians will throw everything they have against you once your truces expire, so building up your fortifications is a prudent idea.

If you aren’t willing to fight the Bactrians straight away, the left side of the tree will give you opportunities to expand westward, challenging the Sakan tribesmen for control of the plains north of the Karakum Desert. Your initial clashes with the fierce barbarians will soon expand into a larger conflagration, drawing you into further wars with the Massagetae and the Scythians. If you are able to take the lands away from the Sakan horsemen, you will be able to develop the region, taking advantage of its natural wealth.

The Sogdians will soon find themselves controlling vital trade routes, cementing their reputations as the preeminent traders in the region. During the period after the game’s end, the Sogdians would become known for their roles as merchants and middlemen, helping to facilitate economic connections between the Chinese Han Dynasty and Parthian Empires. If you are able to conquer enough territories, bringing much-needed stability to the trade roads, there is a special reward waiting for you, one that reflects your new status.

There are so many more things we could discuss about Sogdia, but we still have another location to visit today, so we will quickly peek at some tasks before following the roads into the mountains. A grand 33 tasks and events await the Sogdians!

Friend, perhaps in your wanderings you have heard of the distant mountain kingdom of Zhangzhung? Not much is known about her or her people - even the true extent of her borders are questioned, and archaeological studies are ongoing in the region - but there are rumors that all of this will change in the 1.5 update of Invictus. Let’s take a look at their 25 tasks and events.

The state of your eastern borders has remained problematic for some time, and the initial tasks for Zhangzhung will focus on consolidating the lands occupied by the Bon faithful that do not yet acknowledge your authority. Seizing the capital cities of your neighbors will also give you the chance to pillage for slaves, but taking fortified cities built into the mountains themselves will be quite the chore. Luckily for you, an unscrupulous ruler will also have the option to hire local informants that are willing to betray their own cities for money.

Although the wars of unification fought into the mountains will be arduous, the culmination of this momentous task will result in your seat of government being upgraded into a new city, a true capital for a united people.

Once Zhangzhung is situated in the Himalayans, you will have a mixture of the usual tasks one could expect for a growing power; you’ll have to build up your capital city while making sure that your borders are secure. In your quest for stability, your territory will slowly expand as you begin to seize the highland passes around you, and new lands will bring new sources of wealth for your people.

The rich oases of the Tarim Basin and the rumored wealth of the Ferghana Valley will send your armies farther than they have ever been before; all of the kingdoms in the mountains will fall before you. Once you have captured the valleys to the west, the gateway to distant countries, a zealous ruler will have the ability to send out explorers to search for the fabled realm of Olmo Lungring.

There are many rewards for Zhangzhung at the end of the tree, allowing the player the choice to pursue their claims in northern India from a position of strength, for how can the Mauryans hope to stop the raiding armies of the Mountain King? For now, our journeys end - until next time!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 60: Tons of Minor changes
Salvete!
Today will be a slightly different Dev Diary as it won’t have one theme, rather just a bunch of smaller changes piled together for the next update. This is so there aren’t any unwanted surprise changes when the update finally comes out (before Christmas).

So, let’s begin, I did roughly sort the changes into various themes but don’t expect one cohesive text:


For military traditions, to make it clearer which culture group gets which military tradition, I have gone through and added a tooltip to all of them listing the groups that have it and can be used to unlock it. Here are some examples:

Hopefully there isn’t anymore confusion as to how to unlock any particular set of military traditions.

For those of you looking to play Carthage, I have finally fixed all their Senate events and their custom law set should no longer break within the first year of gameplay. Might be worth playing them and checking them out next update (maybe even check out the vanilla second Iberian tree for Carthage, which in vanilla is broken and doesn’t appear. It isn’t large but it’s content most will have never seen before).

For AI changes, the AI should now save a bit more money, construct more buildings and only spend those reserves if they get a bad event or they’re at war. This leads to the AI being a bit better in developing their country and not going bankrupt. Martial stats of their general now matter 50% more to an AI; previously the AI barely accounted for it, even if they had a far superior general. Terrain now matters 25% less to an AI; the AI in vanilla overestimates how much terrain matters and this leads them to often abandon sieges as they’re too afraid of fighting on a mountain/hill. This change slightly resolves that abandoning siege issue, leads to less stalemates in war and leads to more aggressive behaviour.

The AI army composition in legions has now also changed. It used to split the army like this:
Flank: 0.2
Primary unit: 0.4
Secondary unit: 0.4
It has been changed to:
Flank: 0.1
Primary unit: 0.45
Secondary unit: 0.45
This change is done as flank units serve a limited purpose in Imperator and leads to a more consolidated legion with less varied units and thus more specialized modifiers and higher quality units. The AI’s legion, especially large ones, should be slightly harder to beat now.

The AI no longer declares a war to conquer something overseas (no land connection) if they have less than 8 ships. It used to be that the AI would declare with as few as 5 ships, but would more often than not be unable to bring their army onto the foreign shores, or would have their small navy sunk by the other nation’s small navy. Now the AI should only declare overseas conquest wars they can actually win.

This is about as good as I can get the AI to be without letting them cheat. Certainly compared to vanilla, they should build stronger empires by the endgame, be smarter in sieging, declaring war, fighting with legions and develop their lands more.

For removals, we have removed the regency mechanic which allowed a ruler to lead a legion as it was very buggy, complicated a lot of scripts and functioned essentially as a cheat as it allowed you to reset your national ideas for free. Additionally, the Tanist government types have been removed - the only thing which made them different was the national idea distribution and they produced a few unnecessary bugs while serving little purpose. They might be reintroduced with actual mechanics upon a later date.

For some minor map changes, Pamphylia is no longer in the Anatolian culture group but in the Hellenic group, better matching the description in ancient sources such as Herodotus, Strabo, & Theompompus. Paradox's inclusion of the Pamphylians in the Anatolian culture group may be due to the strong Anatolian influence on their Greek, or due to some sources (notably the Encyclopædia Britannica) emphasizing the assimilated aboriginal Anatolians, and Cilician migrants.

A lot of cultural localisation (e.g. province names, character names, titles etc) has been made more era-appropriate, with Greek now reflecting early Koiné, Phoenician & Punic their native pronunciation (rather than Hellenised or Romanised renderings), Hebrew an approximation of the Second Temple-era pronunciation, and Germanic cultures now using reconstructed Proto-Germanic.

Some culture names have also been slightly tweaked so that they are now all consistently adjectives.

The Jewish diaspora had already gone through several waves by the start of the game. The Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel scattered many across Syria and Northern Mesopotamia, and the Babylonian conquest of the Southern Kingdom of Judah led to the Babylonian Exile, which was ended by the rise of the Achaemenids when Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judaea and invited them to settle throughout his empire. To represent this early Eastern diaspora, Jewish pops have been added to much of Persia and to Bactria, as well as the ancestors of the Cochin Jews in Southern India (some of whom seem to have already been in place prior to the destruction of the Second Temple), and in the sites of some notable ancient synagogues (such as on Delos).

For changes to navies, navies now take 5 points of dmg instead of 4 when outside of naval range and the chance that you take this dmg is increased from 40% per monthly tick to 50%. This is to prevent exploiting the monthly repair at sea modifiers that previously allowed you to sail anywhere in the world.

For changes to Republics, you no longer need more than 50 approval; 50 approval is enough to pass a law/declaration of war without taking the tyranny hit. This change helps the AI and makes Republics a bit less of a hassle to play.

For changes to tradegoods, we have raised the minimum threshold of slaves per good to 4 instead of 3, as only needing 3 slaves to produce a tradegood leads to trade being a bit too powerful for a player. This should slightly nerf the most extreme cases.

For some more general changes, having great relations threshold (which leads to taking a heavier stabhit when declaring war) has been lowered from 100 opinion to 80. Again this helps the AI, mainly so it realises better when the player might declare war upon them (as the player needs to sabotage relations to not take a stabhit which the AI picks up on). As far as I can see, AI itself never takes the stabhit mechanically; presumably it cheats here so another buff to AI.
A decision has been added that allows the player and an AI to subjugate the nation dominant on the Maldives if they own the Southern Indian coastline; this is done so the AI can actually form certain countries and so that the player doesn’t potentially get locked out of making a claim there.
Civil wars now also have a higher threshold for smaller countries decreasing the likelihood that AI with 2 territories has a civil war, which it gets eternally stuck in due to not having enough forces to siege, forcing you to make even more claims.

The German translation has also been vastly improved and updated so it should be much more playable, only occasionally missing an entry.

Finally for the changes, a decent amount of behind the scene changes have been done to improve performance (stricter decision triggers, reducing unnecessary checks, etc).

As an item of possible interest, the website Paizomen, which “is a work-in-progress database of video games set in Greek and Roman antiquity”, released a blog this week that describes some of the work being done on Invictus. If you'd like to read about one of the “Hidden Gems of Ludic Antiquity” and what it's like behind the scenes for the Invictus dev team (as presented by an observer), please do so here; https://paizomen.com/2022/12/02/an-...ent-on-abandoned-game-by-alexander-greyswood/. A special thanks and shoutout to Alexander Vandewalle at Paizomen. There are so many wonderful blogs on the website and many more scheduled to come, so please check it out!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 61: Atropatene, Samaritan missions and Generic Events
Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about a juicy new Atropatene tree, a redesign of the Judean tree for the Samaritans and some new Generic events, all of this will be coming in the Christmas update! (The update will break saves but in the announcement i'll link the old version of the mod to continue those older saves.)
To begin, the Atropatene tree as worked on by Aerozona, OmegaCorps, and Zorgoball.

“Rise of the Medes”

Once a satrapy and a relic of the times and people whom Cyrus and his Persians left in the dust of history, Media Atropatene’s freedom, courtesy of the dissolution of Alexander’s Empire, is once again able to exert its power over the region and the lands of the Iranian peoples.

One unique feature of Media Atropatene wholeheartedly adopting Zoroastrianism was the terribly effective and widely-believed rumor that the faith’s figurehead, Zoroaster himself, had been born in that land, precisely around in-game Ardabil. Should you lean into this assumption and fan the flames of the rumors, you may have yourself a staunch and faithful country, treating you like a god-king. This line of investment could lead you down a path some would consider…. unnatural.

Make a holy city out of Ardabil, convert the local Cadousii and diminish their bid for independence and freedom, and you may even re-discover some ancient texts along the way. The Magi class you reinstate could assist you in this task, building their base out of your holy capital of Ganzak.

Better yet, why not go to the source of your Zoroastrian roots, obtain control of and visit the holy city of Kashmar, and perhaps the holy priests there may send you into a kingly trance, in which you cross the realm of the living and the astral, walking in a daze to find the truth of your faith. How you fare on this spectral journey - now, that is up to you. No matter your choices, it is certain that your faith shall be tested, your resolve and determination bent to the will of the spirits, and your body given the consequences of your mind. Even your title and role in this world may be at stake.


But let us pretend that you are not one so interested in the mystic arts - what else might a powerful king with such a rich opportunity do in times of chaos and confusion? Will you settle and old score to avenge a family member’s murder?

Or perhaps you seek a more long-term glory and legacy? Maybe you feel the Median people have suffered the Persian and Macedonian yokes too long and yearn for freedom. If so, perhaps you might consolidate the lands which were once called Media and reform it on the world-stage. Once again, Media may claim the spice-lathered trade routes that run the Persian plateau, or it may control and explore the Hyrcanian forests which remain full of myth and mystery. Ganzak will become a great hub of civilization and trade in the region, feeding off of the successes Media once enjoyed.

And yet, there may still remain one task for you. Long ago, Cyaxares gave Media its legacy of prestige when he took back the throne of Ecbatana from the Scythians and crushed the Assyrians at Nineveh. His body was thought by many lost ages ago - perhaps the will of Cyrus, who had no desire to stoke Median nationalism - but it may yet exist. Could you not travel south - conquer, even - and search for his tomb; bring some dignity back to his people and properly bury his remains? Perhaps you are his true successor, and can claim the domain of his kingdom at its greatest extent - only you know this; you, and the spirits which rule the lives of mortals.

Here is the final territorial extent that the mission tree guides you to conquering:

Moving West, the game has previously treated Samaritans as identical to Jews resulting in widespread inaccuracies, which this next update will aim to address.

Samaritans believe that rather than the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Mount Gerizim near Shechem is the place designated by G-d as the sole location for his worship. Following this belief, they view the movement of the sacrificial cult from the Tabernacle in Shiloh to Jerusalem (and later Solomon’s Temple) at the end of the rule of the Israelite Judges as the start of an Era of Divine Disfavor and so where Jews have traditionally looked back to King David’s rule as the high point to return to, they instead view the rule of the Judges as that peak.

Because of this, lots of the Israelite prophets previously in the game and available to Samaria were only really suitable for Judea. We’ve now added several new prophets, some available to both Judea & Samaria, and some specific to Samaria.

Samaria no longer has access to the Promised Land mission tree, and instead has their own Northern Israelites tree which follows a similar structure, but made more suitable for Samaritans.

As the minority among the Israelites, the tree includes the enforcement of Samaritanism on the Judean population, including the destruction of the Second Temple (which would be viewed by the Samaritans as heretical), a revolt by Zealots (a potential tag switch!), and the eventual building of a temple on Mount Gerizim.

And of course, whilst the Promised Land tree culminates in restoring the Kingdom of David, the Northern Israelites tree ends with a restoration of the rule of the Judges.

Hello again friends, it’s Zorgoball with yet even more content to round out this week’s diary. In our quest to bring you more exciting flavor, we have expanded the number of generic, non-repeating events that will pop up during the game. Don’t expect anything insane, like a massive stability drop or a huge civil war that comes out of nowhere, but there will be some cool new events to keep you entertained during times of war and peace. Your ruler might gain a new trait, many of your personal relationships will grow (or suffer), and maybe a traveling merchant might offer you a unique item for sale the next time they are passing through town - keep an eye out for pop-ups that you have never seen before. Our Christmas update will have 10 new generic events - let’s take a look at a handful.

Your people are a contentious lot at times, much to your chagrin, and you will sometimes be called to settle arguments between the nobility. Unfortunately for you, some of your own family members might ask for favors, even when they are clearly in the wrong…

Certain advisors will come to you with religious problems, but hopefully your piety is made of stronger stuff than your greed is…

Of course, there is always the potential for drama with your family, but when has this ever been different?

The minutiae of ruling isn’t always doom and gloom matters of life and death however. You will celebrate the small things with your people from time to time.

Some events will bring foreigners with intriguing backstories to your gates…

In addition to the 10 generic events, there will also be 10 more events available to Punic Cultures only; a salute to our very own OmegaCorps for giving me some fantastic suggestions to work with. And, as a tiny teaser, our next expansion (the one that comes out *after* the Christmas update) will have even more generic events available to unique cultures, so there’s something to look forward to. I will leave you with a few screenshots - see you soon!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 62: Burma/Jain/Balto-Slavic additions, Persis mission and Christmas Update patch notes

Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about some content Dementive has made, including a mission tree for Persis and Jain flavour. Also Balto-Slavic religion changes made by Palando, the addition of Burma to the map as presented by Shocky, and MattTheLegoman will go into more detail on his additions to the mod on the graphical side (big thanks to you Matt).
At the end of the Dev Diary, i'll post the patch notes for the Christmas update.
But first i'd like to inform people about the recent Bronze Age update: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2448788091.
The BA update adds a lot of decisions, content and bugfixes for nearly every tag in the game, go check it out!

The glorious nation of Persis has a new mission tree! This mission tree leads up to the freedom of Persis from the Seleukid empire and ends when freedom is gained. Here is a look at the tree:

These missions take you through developing Persis, adhering to Persian customs, and freeing yourself from Hellenic rule. This mission tree will be available with the upcoming update; in a future update they will get another mission tree to lead to the formation of Persia and there will also be a unique Persia tree for post unification Persia.

In addition to Persis, I did a lot of work to bring more flavor to the religions of India. 11 Jain and 9 Buddhist deities have been added throughout India. There are also 10+ new Jain flavor events that go into the life of the Jain leader Bhadrabahu in Maurya.

Take control of the First Jain Council in Pataliputra and decide the fate going forward of the Jain people!

In addition to the Jain Council events, there are several other events that depict the general spread of Jainism after the first Jain council.

Burma Map Expansion

Hello, shocky27 back again with some additions to the map in the Burma region. We have added a total of 2 areas to the map in the Irrawaddy River valley as well as 1 area along the coast of the Bay of Bengal, as seen below. Once again, thanks to Licarious for his assistance with adding the Irrawaddy River here.

The setup in the Irrawaddy Valley reflects a clash of ethno-linguistic groups as shown in the archaeological record around 300 BC. A number of small states, many known by the name “Pyu city states”, have been added, representing Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples having recently migrated to the valley from the north. Cities such as Tagaung, Halin, Beinnaka and more have been added as recorded Pyu sites. However many of these sites, including the ones furthest south and the far northwest, had not yet been colonized fully by the Pyu, remaining as likely Afroasiatic speakers related perhaps to modern Mon peoples, known archaeologically as the Samon culture. The Shan, although likely a Tai speaking group recorded by the Han Chinese, have been lumped in with the Pu (Afroasiatic) group for purposes of gameplay.

The Burmese map​

Jungle terrain
G’day Invictus map enthusiasts! Firstly, with the introduction of the Burma region into Invictus by Shocky, Matt Alexi has returned to extend the splendid terrain of the base game into this region at the edge of the world. Secondly, you’ll see new art tucked into this corner of the map, the very limit of the known world beyond the Ganges.

Southeast Asian architecture set
The Southeast Asian architecture set was originally created last year for the CK3 ModJam event, which was focused on the Java and Bali islands. This year, with the expansion of Invictus and Terra Indomita into the region, these buildings have been claimed for the hidden jungle cities of Burma.

Papermap
The paper map has been updated to include all new lakes and islands added to the map of Invictus.

Changes to the Balto-Slavic religion:​

As you might still remember, the last major update included a map extension for Eastern Europe. I, Palando, have used this as an opportunity to take a closer look at the religion of the Balto-Slavic inhabitants of this area.

The current Matrist religion is based on a description by Tacitus that the Aestii worship a Magna Mater. However, no female deity enjoys a position equal or superior to the position of male deities in Baltic beliefs; unlike in Germanic (e.g. Tacitus also mentions Nerthus as an important goddess) or Finnish ones.
Additionally, the reference made by Tacitus that the Aestii wear the images of wild boars is quite incompatible with the archaeological and archaeozoological sources from the Baltic territory. Instead, horses played an important role in the religious beliefs of these societies, but no hints that this was so with pigs. In contrast, the boar was indeed a prominent divine and emblematic animal of Celtic and Germanic peoples.

Therefore, we completely rework the Balto-Slavic religion which is now called We’ra’. Its ingame description reads like this:

Little is known of the Baltic tribes and their religion. Nonetheless, archaeological records survive, telling of cults worshiping several naturalist gods, along the Baltic coast. Most likely, based on reconstructions for the proto-Balto-Slavic language, their name for faith was We'ra’, from which the modern words víra in Czech, wiara in Polish and véra in Russian descend.

Some 16 deities were added based on important naturalistic aspects. You can see four in the following screenshot, and, for those of you who speak a Slavic language, the names might sound familiar. Zorgoball has come up with marvelous flavour texts for each one of them, so be sure to read them.

And now finally the patch notes for the Christmas update coming before or around Christmas!
V1.5
New mission trees:
- Large tree for Sogdia including mechanics
- Large tree for Atropatene
- Large tree for Zhangzhung
- Large tree for Persis
- Large tree for Treveria
- Large tree for Nuragics after unifying the Mediterranean islands as Gymnaesians or Sardinians
- Large tree for Samaria (reworked version of Judean tree + custom flavour)
- 2 Roman trees for conquering Rhaetia and Pannonia
- Regional unification tree for Cretans
- Regional unification tree for Korkyra
- Regional unification tree for Gymnaesians (Balearic Islands)
- Regional unification tree for Sardinians

Map changes:
- Expanded map into Burma with full graphics
- Added Pu culture group
- Custom city models for Pu culture group
- Updated zoomed out map (Lakes look better, Maldives now show up as actual islands)
- Added Israelite diaspora pops around the map
- Added historical minority pops in India
- Added historical barbarian cultures
- Pamphylian is now in the Hellenic culture group (from Anatolian)

Added content:
- Reworked rebellions for larger nations to allow for a full regional rebellion with various levels of strength under one tag (You'll always be able to reconquer your land without having to take the massive AE penalty, instead of several minor rebellions we now have one large tag per region if the conditions are met.)
- Added a dozen generic events
- Added 8 Punic events
- Added a dozen Jain events
- New (family)naming for Pannonian, Levantine, Germanic, Hellenic, Punic, Thracian and Arabian culture groups
- Added Tibet/Media formable
- Added several dozen inventions exclusive to certain culture(groups)
- Added several dozen heritages
- Removed commander kings mod
- Removed Tanist governments (they didn't do anything)
- Added several new custom flags and emblems
- Added several Buddhist deities
- Added several Jain deities
- Added more historical province names when owned by certain culturegroups for almost all groups
- Reworked Israelite Deities to better account for Samaritans
- Reworked Matrist religion into the new We'ra' religion
- Added unfinished AI only galatia content
- Added some new icons for obscure modifiers
- Added several historical characters around the map
- Added Blood of Pharnavazid

Changes:
- Split Judean and Samarian content
- Added tooltip for Military traditions listing which culturegroups unlock the tree
- Optimised backend scripting of the military traditions unlocking system
- Raised naval attrition chance when out of range from 40 to 50%
- Raised naval damage from attrition from 4% to 5%
- Raised minimum possible goods per slave from 3 to 4
- Lowered maximum levy size from 150 to 140%
- Lowered treshold for having great relations to 80 from 100
- Slightly reworked national ideas
- Carthaginian AI is now more competent in consolidating North Africa
- Gave AI slight naval budget cheats for a number of years
- Improved AI's ability to intelligently pick national ideas
- Improved AI pathfinding
- Improved AI's ability to evaluate battles (see DD60)
- Improved AI budgetting (AI will construct more and use their reserves if in need during a war)
- Made sure AI can cancel custom missions if they get completely stuck
- Performance optimization by reducing monthly/yearly checks
- Nerfed some overpowered deities
- Changed naval unit abilities modifiers to be more balanced
- Updated generic development mission to account for new tradegoods
- Changed colour of plains
- Locked Yamnat formable to Southern Arabians
- Vanilla annexation event now integrates more characters when integrating a family
- Chandragupta commits suicide slightly later
- Added an Imperial CB to the first Punic war in the Roman mission tree

Bugfixes:
- Updated Spanish and German translation
- Re-added 2.0.3 feature allowing you to see what unassigned offices would give as modifier if assigned
- Lots of grammar corrections
- Fixed Pregnant being unlocalised in GUI
- Removed Give up Claims and sell Provinces buttons when selecting your own country
- Fixed lankan bug where creating a feudatory accidentally vassalized you to them
- Fixed Western Rome getting too much land when becoming the Eastern Roman Dictatorship
- Fixed Heavy Infantry distinction being impossible to get
- Fixed broken tradefleet decision for Southern indians
- Fixed being unable to switch to Puntic religion
- Fixed generic missions being available for nations with custom missions at gamestart
- Fixed Tibetans and Punics getting the wrong military traditions
- Fixed broken Rhodes battle counter
- Fixed some broken Indian mission tasks
- Fixed some minor bugs in tradegood decisions
- Fixed similar religion colours
- Fixed succession modifiers occasionally breaking upon succession
- Fixed several broken modifiers
- Fixed every case of released countries or when changing culture, the primary culture becoming unintegrated
- Fixed Antigonids being able to access the Antipatrid Legacy missions
- Fixed Hadrami levy template
- Actually fixed Carthaginian senate events and demands
- Fixed Carthaginian laws possible getting stuck
- Fixed minor bugs for the Carthaginian missions
- Fixed a number of vanilla bugs in the Antigonid tree
- Fixed deities for Mithridatic kingdom and Pontus
- Fixed Britannic Coat of Arms not applying properly
- Fixed a broken vanilla Epirote mission
- Fixed Arabic deities being unavailable to Aksumite culture group

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 63: Dies Natalis Update + new Mauretanian Map Setup
Salvete and ofcourse Happy Holidays!
As of right now, the Dies Natalis update (v1.5) is out, go check it out at: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532715348
Or for GOG users: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/27170/Any
For those of you who want to continue your old saves, use this version: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2651142140
And for those of you who just want to chat, here's our Discord: https://discord.gg/eaPhRbSq73.

Before I go into the final patch notes, we first have a small change to the Mauretanian setup to present, for that i’ll hand you over to Tudhaliya.

A new setup for Gadir and the Mauretanian Coast

Hi! I’m Tudhaliya and I’m happy to show you a sneak peek for the future content for Iberia. Gadir is our main target and we want to show you the new starting point for this Punic colony. Gadir was a Phoenician colony founded by settlers from Tyre beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. Gadir and the Mauritanian coast looks like this right now:

When we were reading about Gadir to make the Mission Tree, we noticed how misrepresented the situation of Gadir and the Mauritanian coast of the 4th Century BC was. In the actual setup, the influence of Carthage in the region is too big for the time (the actual map is more accurate for the 3th Century BC form over the First Punic War). We tried to represent the best we could the situation of Southern Iberia of the final years of the 4th Century BC and this is the result:

The Coast of Mauritania has been populated with new tags, all Punic ex-colonies, some under the influence of Carthage and others over the sphere of Gadir. The fall of Tyre in the 7th Century BC created a power vacuum many colonies took advantage of, like Gadir or Carthage. Gadir reinvented itself from an extractive colony to become the main trade hub beyond the Pillars of Hercules, asserting its influence over the isolated Phoenician colonies of the region and developing the Atlantic trade routes, controlling the commerce between the Cassiterides on the North to Arambys on the South. During the start date, settlers from Gadir founded the city of Qarta, at the other part of the strait, a city Carthage and Turdetanians covet alike. But the power of Gadir is fragile, Carthage is starting to expand itself into the region. When the Punic Wars erupted, Gadir lost much of its influence and power to the Carthaginians, developing between the two Punic ex-colonies a tense relation.

To represent this situation, Gadir starts leading a Defensive League with the new Punic tags of Kuass, Lixus, Rusaddir and Arambys. Carthage still directly controls some lands in the province of Safim and the important territories of Tingi and Alu/Baylon (the two coasts of the Strait of Gibraltar). As well, Carthage gains two new tributaries: Thamusida and Aggadir. In Iberia, the territory of Qarta changes ownership from Carthage to Gadir.

The League of Gadir:

Carthage and its new tributaries:

We have worked in rebalancing the pops in the region. We wanted to show the connections between Southern Iberia and Mauretania, especially because of Punic trade, normally as slaves or artisans. You will notice some Turdetanian pops around the main Punic cities of Mauretania and some Maurians and Massaesylians around the Punic cities of Iberia:

You may find Maurians on the Western Punic settlements in Iberia while Massaesylians will appear in the eastern territories:

We have lowered slightly the presence of Punic pops in the interior and rural areas of Turdetania and Canaanites majorities are located in major urban cities around the Baetis river and less presence in rural areas of the interior.

All that has been exposed will be available in this Christmas update! Happy Holidays!

And now for the full Patch Notes,
V1.5 - Dies Natalis:
New mission trees:
- Large tree for Sogdia including mechanics
- Large tree for Atropatene
- Large tree for Zhangzhung
- Large tree for Persis
- Large tree for Treveria
- Large tree for Nuragics after unifying the Mediterranean islands as Gymnaesians or Sardinians
- Large tree for Samaria (reworked version of Judean tree + custom flavour)
- 2 Roman trees for conquering Rhaetia and Pannonia
- Regional unification tree for Cretans
- Regional unification tree for Korkyra
- Regional unification tree for Gymnaesians (Balearic Islands)
- Regional unification tree for Sardinians

Map changes:
- Expanded map into Burma with full graphics
- Added Pu culture group
- Custom city models for Pu culture group
- Updated zoomed out map (Lakes look better, Maldives now show up as actual islands)
- Updated Mauretanian nation setup with historical Leagues
- Added Israelite diaspora pops around the map
- Added historical minority pops in India
- Added historical barbarian cultures
- Added Veltia in the Baltics
- Pamphylian is now in the Hellenic culture group (from Anatolian)
- Rebalanced pop amounts and minorities in Iberia/Italy/North-Africa
- Changed some tradegoods around the map

Added content:
- Reworked rebellions for larger nations to allow for a full regional rebellion with various levels of strength under one tag (You'll always be able to reconquer your land without having to take the massive AE penalty, instead of several minor rebellions we now have one large tag per region if the conditions are met.)
- Added a dozen generic events
- Added 8 Punic events
- Added a dozen Jain events
- New (family)naming for Pannonian, Levantine, Germanic, Hellenic, Punic, Thracian and Arabian culture groups
- Added Tibet/Media formable
- Added several dozen inventions exclusive to certain culture(groups)
- Added several dozen heritages
- Removed commander kings mod
- Removed Tanist governments (they didn't do anything)
- Added several new custom flags and emblems
- Added a dozen Buddhist deities
- Added a dozen Jain deities
- Added a dozen Celtic deities
- Added more historical province names when owned by certain culturegroups for almost all groups
- Reworked Israelite Deities to better account for Samaritans
- Reworked Matrist religion into the new We'ra' religion
- Added unfinished AI only galatia content
- Added some new icons for obscure modifiers
- Added several historical characters around the map
- Added Blood of Pharnavazid

Changes:
- Split Judean and Samarian content
- Added tooltip for Military traditions listing which culturegroups unlock the tree
- Optimised backend scripting of the military traditions unlocking system
- Raised naval attrition chance when out of range from 40 to 50%
- Raised naval damage from attrition from 4% to 5%
- Raised minimum possible goods per slave from 3 to 4
- Lowered maximum levy size from 150 to 140%
- Lowered treshold for having great relations to 80 from 100
- Slightly reworked national ideas
- Carthaginian AI is now more competent in consolidating North Africa
- Gave AI slight naval budget cheats for a number of years
- Improved AI's ability to intelligently pick national ideas
- Improved AI pathfinding
- Improved AI's ability to evaluate battles (see DD60)
- Improved AI budgetting (AI will construct more and use their reserves if in need during a war)
- Made sure AI can cancel custom missions if they get completely stuck
- Performance optimization by reducing monthly/yearly checks
- Nerfed some overpowered deities
- Changed naval unit abilities modifiers to be more balanced
- Updated generic development mission to account for new tradegoods
- Changed colour of plains
- Locked Yamnat formable to Southern Arabians
- Vanilla annexation event now integrates more characters when integrating a family
- Chandragupta commits suicide slightly later
- Added an Imperial CB to the first Punic war in the Roman mission tree
- Changed some of the Diadochi's children to be of a more accurate age
- Updated 'nations with missions' at the bottom during the nation selection to account for the new mission trees
- Updated various localization for Deities to be more consistent

Bugfixes:
- Updated Spanish and German translation
- Re-added 2.0.3 feature allowing you to see what unassigned offices would give as modifier if assigned
- Lots of grammar corrections
- Fixed Epirus not gaining access to Macedonian missions after forming it
- Fixed Pregnant being unlocalised in GUI
- Removed Give up Claims and sell Provinces buttons when selecting your own country
- Fixed lankan bug where creating a feudatory accidentally vassalized you to them
- Fixed Western Rome getting too much land when becoming the Eastern Roman Dictatorship
- Fixed Heavy Infantry distinction being impossible to get
- Fixed broken tradefleet decision for Southern indians
- Fixed being unable to switch to Puntic religion
- Fixed generic missions being available for nations with custom missions at gamestart
- Fixed Tibetans and Punics getting the wrong military traditions
- Fixed broken Rhodes battle counter
- Fixed some broken Indian mission tasks
- Fixed some minor bugs in tradegood decisions
- Fixed similar religion colours
- Fixed succession modifiers occasionally breaking upon succession
- Fixed several broken modifiers
- Fixed every case of released countries or when changing culture, the primary culture becoming unintegrated
- Fixed Antigonids being able to access the Antipatrid Legacy missions
- Fixed Hadrami levy template
- Actually fixed Carthaginian senate events and demands
- Fixed Carthaginian laws possible getting stuck
- Fixed minor bugs for the Carthaginian missions
- Fixed a number of vanilla bugs in the Antigonid tree
- Fixed deities for Mithridatic kingdom and Pontus
- Fixed Britannic Coat of Arms not applying properly
- Fixed a broken vanilla Epirote mission
- Fixed Arabic deities being unavailable to Aksumite culture group

I hope you enjoy the update!
If you find any bugs, report them in our Discord: https://discord.gg/eaPhRbSq73.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 64: Iberia, Atropatene, Translations and More!

Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about an upcoming Iberia tree, a rework to the Atropatene tree, some more heritages and finally a script Raichuu wrote for us to speed up translation.
But first, i'll hand you over to Zorgoball and his work on Iberia.

Greetings everyone, it’s Zorgoball, and I will start my segment of the dev diary off by making a miniature announcement - in the 1.6 update of Invictus, we will be bringing missions to the Caucasus region! Today it is my pleasure to reveal the first finished tree, “The Rise of the Iberian Kings”, which is not referring to the sunny peninsula of Hispania, but rather the mountainous country of Iberia and its reform-minded ruler. Let’s dive right in;

These fourteen tasks are a nice supplement to the vanilla events for the country of Iberia, which reveal the unstable political situation at game start. But before we get into some of the special tasks that are eventually unlocked, we will look at the part of the tree that any ruler has access to. On the left side, there are a series of conquest missions that will allow you to grow at the expense of your Armazic brethren. Here is a look at the countries which share the Armazic faith at game start.

As the first mission so aptly notes, despite these religious connections, you are literally surrounded by enemies; the unfriendly Republics on the coast of the Black Sea, the monarchy of Colchis to the west, the wild Albanian tribes to your east. Although you all share the small Armazic faith, you are not united politically - yet. Some of the tasks will deal with the ever-present threat of the Armenian juggernaut to the south, but you will have plenty to do when it comes to subduing your fellow worshipers of Armazi.

Once you conquer the Albanians, you will have a decision to make; do you rule the remnants of their rump state directly, or release them as a feudatory?

When not waging war against your neighbors, you will be able to develop the local infrastructure, making the famed wine that this region is known for.

Evicting the Colchians and citizens of Phasis from their port cities will give the Iberians, traditionally mountain folk, access to the water for the first time in memory - your people will take to the water like dolphins, with the right amount of luck.

The right side of the tree has tasks that are only available to you if Pharnavaz Pharnavazid, founder of the dynasty of the same name, is King of Iberia. A couple of years into the game, a series of vanilla events will fire that culminate in Pharnavaz taking power (if you allow him to) - you can certainly choose not to allow the usurper to claim the throne and you will still have access to all of the conquest missions. But if you decide to follow in the footsteps of history and watch the legendary monarch seize power and rule from Armazistsikhe, you will be able to change the kingdom of Iberia forever.

One of the first tasks that any newcomer to the throne ought to undertake is shoring up local support, and so Pharnavaz will first be entasked with entrusting special administrators known as “eristavi” with authority to rule in his name.

After Pharnavaz has transformed the bureaucracy with his creation of the Georgian script and enforcement of official dialects in the “A Unique Language” task, you will be able to build up the capital city’s fortifications, which, when combined with the existing vanilla events that allow you to build up the capital, will offer staunch protection against any invaders foolish enough to siege a mountain fortress.

If you are able to successfully complete all of Pharnavazid’s tasks during his lifetime, you will unlock his Bloodline. During his reign, he overhauled the spoken and written language, brought stability to the region and set up his family to rule for the next five hundred years, and so his bloodline reflects his natural political gifts - special thanks to CrazyZombie for making the Bloodline icon. That’s it for now - talk soon!

Hello all, it is OmegaCorps. “I am once again asking you to” look at my Atropatene Tree.
You will all remember the nice, scrawny Atropatene Tree that was released last update with lots of conquest tasks, some religious affairs, and whatnot.

I present to you, the (still WIP) NEW and IMPROVED Atropatene Tree!!!!

Looking back on the old tree, I thought it was missing a lot of the nuance and Mede-focus the tree really needed to stand out from any Persian/Generic Iranian trees.

While the old tree was very conquest-based, the new version of the tree is going to provide reasons for conquest and the interesting consequences/rewards that those areas will bring to you.

Ex/ Civilize the Amardi

This mission task will not only grant you cultural and economic benefits in the Hyrcanian region, but will also afford you the chance of going on an expedition in the wild temperate rainforest bordering the Caspian Sea. The decision and subsequent events may result in a unique treasure for your reliquary.

Ex/ The Median Triangle

The Medes, when they controlled the central Iranian plateau, ran their power through the cities of Ecbatana, Ray, and Aspadana (with ancient respect for Kashan as well), and you will now have the chance to build these cities up properly into a thriving metropolitan area.

There are some interesting decisions connected to these cities as well: completing “The Red City” will allow you to exploit the “Lapis Mountain” north of Ray and introduce a wealthy trade good to the area.

More Atropatene to be revealed later on……..

Now, for some more Heritages!
We are still continuing the Heritage Project, and the newest addition to the map has been Illyrian heritages. Here are some of the new ones you’ll be getting used to:
Abria:

Daorsia:

Epidaurum:

Delmatia:

Libernia:

Istria:

Hello, it’s me, Raichuu (aka Mikail in real life)! I am a Day 1 player of Imperator Rome and truly love the game. I am thankful for the additions from Invictus but the translation in German was really bad. That’s why I have joined the team and fixed the translation. Before, the German translation was outdated and no longer maintained - causing new content to show variable names in the game instead of actual words and sentences. There is so much added content in Invictus that it is not feasible to translate everything manually.
Therefore, I have created a little Python script which automatically translates the language text files of one source language (in this case, English) to another target language for all the available language text files. It is inspired by another git project called “ck3_ml_translator” which uses Google Translator to translate the text files. However, it is not so well written and runs very slow. The creator claims that it needs 2 seconds per translation.
Thus I have written my own approach which I already created for my previous work: An asynchronous translator using Google Translator with multiple proxies. It runs 25 times faster than the ck3_ml_translator and completes a full translation run in about 45 minutes. Asynchronous programming is very beneficial for Input/Output-bound code. In our case it means that we already send the next pending requests to Google to translate without waiting for a response first. This way, the waiting time between “I send the request” and “I have the response” is used efficiently to continue with the rest of the code in the meantime until a response is received. I have picked a few random samples out of the German translation and even for previously existing manual translations, the new translation sounds better, it is an overall great result. This would allow us to also use it for any other language that Invictus isn’t supporting yet or no longer have maintainers for. Let me know if there is enough interest! For now, it will only be used for the German translation for each update to ensure that everything is properly translated.
In the remaining part I will talk about the technical details for people who are interested. Firstly, the script accepts two run parameters: The source language (default English) and the target language (default German). Then the script looks for all the files in the source language’s folder including its subfolders and keeps track of them with an absolute path created by a relative pathing from the script’s file location to ensure consistency across different operating systems. After that, each file (YML format) is loaded and prettified to clean out the game-specific tags and placeholders, resulting in a final list of text with a corresponding list of tags. One difficulty here was that the YML files were not following the correct format, so I had to first manually rerun the script multiple times and fix the errors on loading each YML File until there were no more errors. This is hopefully only a one time issue, as long as everyone in the team follows the right format from now on.
Now that we have the list of text to translate in a clean state, we can create the pending future tasks for Python’s built-in module asyncio to work through the tasks in an asynchronous manner, see the translate_batch function below.

However, we have to fake our identity for Google to avoid being blocked after that many requests. That’s why we do not send individual requests but instead create client sessions. Each client session contains a randomly selected user agent which contains meta information to spoof our identity. On top of that, each client session runs through a randomly selected SOCKS5 proxy (I have 100 paid SOCKS5 proxies in a list). This way the client’s IP address is different, see the create_session function below.

To make sure that we regularly create a new client session, we have to chunk the future tasks in multiple sets of roughly the same size. In our case, every 15 tasks/requests, a new client session will be created for another user agent and proxy.
For the request I use the mobile website of Google Translator because it contains much less HTML content. Once the response has arrived, the response’s HTML content is parsed with BeautifulSoup4 and the translated text is extracted through a CSS selector. That translated text is then manipulated with the previously extracted game-specific tags for the final text, see the function translate_async below.

Once all the translation tasks for a file are completed and the final text output is all together in one list, the data is saved in a proper YML format in the corresponding file associated with the right variable name for mapping the translation. If the file doesn’t exist yet, it will be automatically created. If it already exists, it will be overwritten. The filename is identical to the source’s language except that the suffix has changed to the target language, e.g. a file “xyz_english.yml” is changed to “xyz_german.yml” in the case of an English->German translation. Of course the root folder location would also be changed from english/ to german/.
This is essentially a really great and easy way to automatically translate and sync-up the translated content with the original content which is written in English - as long as Google Translator does a good job in translating of course

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 65: Illyrian Pirates + Personality Traits

Salvete!
Today we'll be talking about new missions for the Illyrian pirates, integration of some very well-made mods for which i'll hand you over to Zorgoball but first, for those of you who want to know what country they should play. I present a map by Juanen which shows every mission available to countries neatly on a map.

Let me also quickly thank everyone for the support we've received, we're now just a few hundred subscribers away from the 50k milestone!
Now, i'll hand you over to Zorgoball to present his missions.

Hello, Zorgoball here with a brand new mission tree to show off today, one that is available to any tag with the Illyrian culture group. Before we get into that, however, I have two announcements - Invictus has been generously granted permission to incorporate two more fantastic mods, so I first begin my segment by gratefully acknowledging the authors and giving them due credit. We have added Crownsteler’s lovely Vexilla Coronam, so your next playthroughs in Gaul will be even more flavorful, and we have also integrated the Personality traits from the outstanding More Character Traits mod by RetconCrisis - you can expect to see events with some of these new character traits, including in the new tree “Scourge of the Mare Adriaticum”.

When Invictus reached the milestone of 10,000 subscribers, we announced a story contest, and in a (somewhat late but better than never) salute to the winning entry, “Pirate Illyria” is finally here. Those familiar with the history of this region might know of the story of the queen of the Ardiaei tribe that ruled around 230 BCE, but this mission tree is not about recreating the narrative of the historic Pirate Queen. Instead of being railroaded down her path, we have created the conditions that will allow your own pirate nation to organically form, but with a few very obvious easter eggs and other historic nods to those looking for them. Let’s take a look at the 22 tasks, each with their own event (and a couple of event chains as well).

The right side of the tree will assist the Illyrians in conquering their neighbors while boosting some of the cultural heritages and military traditions that you will find waiting for you in this region. Once you have built a worthy armada, all bets are off and “Raiding For Slaves” will become a new national pastime. Illyrian tribes already gain substantial bonuses by accessing vanilla military traditions and unlocking certain inventions, and this tree will help to make you into a raiding juggernaut.

Don’t expect to gain a ton of foreign claims throughout this campaign, because this mission does not focus on expanding wide, but will rather help you play tall in the region of Illyria - you, as the player, can decide where you’d like to conquer. A few important foreign islands, like Korkyra and Meligounis, will become targets of your warships, however - you will need fortified harbors as ports of safe refuge for the…partners…that you are working with. Before we go any further down the right side, we should meet the scalliwags that are docked in your waters, waiting for you in the left branches of the missions.

In time, this clandestine relationship between you and the pirates develops into something official, but only after you two have worked together to build up your shared nation.
The “Pirate Shipyards” modifier that they will help you construct will become a prototype of sorts, one that will be built a couple of other times throughout the mission, yet they come with a little unrest…that’s the price of living a pirate’s life, I’m afraid.

Once you make the momentous decision to embrace piracy, the grateful buccaneers will send you the Pirate’s Crown, carried by the official liaison between your two worlds, a respected pirate named Teuta. You can choose to abandon your national heritage and embrace the Pirate’s Heritage, as well as obtaining one of the newly added character traits, Pillager, but be advised that your neighboring countries will be very unhappy to see you go down this road…but who cares what they think, anyways.

Without giving too much away, be sure to keep one eye on Teuta, because as the influence of the pirates grows within your nation, her status could change accordingly…her event chain is memorable, to say the least.

As the story of this mission tree unfolds, there will be ample opportunities to upgrade your navy and fighting forces. The “Libernian Liburnians” task will incorporate the latest developments in aquatic fighting technology to strengthen your fastest ships, and the “Fearsomely Arrayed” task will require that you unlock both of the Illyrian cultural military technologies that Invictus added. Your armies will be well-equipped for your profitable raids on Greece, Magna Graecia and Italia.

Dementive has also worked some GUI wizardry to bring even more art to this next update, so you will now see military traditions being used as event pictures.

As your power grows, you will eventually be given permission to officially wear the Pirate Crown, receiving a new title as your country embraces an Elective Monarchy to choose this prestigious role (and yes, if your ruler is a female, she will be known as the Pirate Queen). You will also have opportunities to claim the Mare Adriaticum as your personal sea, with some nice bonuses to accompany this brash declaration.

You will have fun doing dastardly things that are expected of pirates, like stealing the entire island of Rhodes (as long as it’s not player controlled). The corresponding event chain for “The Isle of Roses” task will see you personally leading your fighting men in their finest hour.

Over time, if you take the decision to form Illyria, you will be able to throw your lot entirely in with the pirates, receiving an upgraded “Illyrian Pirate Heritage” that is a souped up version of the “Pirate Heritage” you have the option to choose earlier in the tree.

Of course, there are some more cool things I could talk about, and I genuinely want to because this tree is so fun, but we have to leave you something to discover for yourselves. See you next time!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 66: The Tribal Menace

Salvete!
Today we’ll be talking about a rework of the AI tribal collapse (which will now function more like a midgame local threat), many more AI changes and a rework to the gamerules.

To begin, during the last few months I have reworked the tribal collapse event. In vanilla, if tribes are large enough and get to low stability, they implode, and this often means tribal regions are completely unable to unite and rarely form a threat to players. To make the game more interesting, instead of imploding, the event (which only fires for AI) now works like this:

• A tribe of sufficient size (110 territories) that is either unstable or highly decentralized will see the event trigger within a year. Should it have collapsed before and managed to rise again, it will immediately skip to the next step.
  • Should the tribe be of one of the Steppe culture groups, it will gain the Tier 4 Steppe Horde government, greatly buffing it and turning the AI extremely expansionist after about 20 years. The next step will fire.
  • Should the tribe not be of the Steppe culture groups and be a migratory tribe, it will gain many bonuses to migration, morale and more. The AI will also again turn extremely expansionist, spreading out rapidly after about 20 years. The next step will fire.
  • Should the tribe be neither of a Steppe culture group or be a migratory, it will gain mainly bonuses to help civilize, build cities, centralize quite rapidly, after about 20 years. The next step will fire.
• The 20 years since the initial event has passed; if the AI has not managed to civilize during this time and become a monarchy/republic, it will implode, the player will be notified with a news event. (This will logically always happen for migratory and steppe tribes, as only federated or settled tribes gain aid in civilizing.)
  • The AI will receive a bad modifier for 5 years, reducing its morale, manpower and more making their rise from this collapse much less likely.
  • Every region of the country will become its own settled tributary tribe (unlike Vanilla which implodes into weak areas, a state the size of a region is still a functioning country). They will also gain a temporary bonus to aggression and morale to make it more likely for them to take over their overlord.
  • Should the AI manage to somehow collapse twice in one game, the country will still implode however the regions will be independent. (Our testing has shown this leads to very dynamic tribal regions.)

To summarize: the AI will unify barbarian lands more, be much more likely to form a threat to you, and they will collapse when unable to reform or when losing authority over time as a Steppe horde.

Now onto some more general AI changes:

• AI will now get the optimal law choices by events (like the 10% levy size law) as they cannot change laws naturally; only effects like in events can do it for them.
• Carthaginian AI has received major tweaks speeding up their conquests outside of Africa, and letting them keep their subjects for longer. Our tests have shown this has made it easier to play in North-Africa but harder to invade Carthage from, let’s say, Rome.
• Rome has received some tweaks to make them more likely to invade Africa and Gaul and focus less on Germania/Pannonia.
• AI will save up less money and thus be more likely to spend it on developing.
• AI will spend slightly less on Navies if it isn’t a major power.
• AI will spend a greater percentage of its money on buildings.
• Barbarians are more likely to accept settling.
• AI now accounts for Levy Size when deciding which modifiers to go for (previously they ignored this crucial modifier completely).
• Traits are now better accounted for in AI aggression; this will mostly lead to more expansion, but in some cases, like a Pacifist ruler, they will try to be at peace.
• AI will stop letting all its provinces starve when it can actually import food.
• AI no longer has to deal with the Indian religious laws.

Honestly, I hope you all will appreciate the work I've done on AI/tribes. It takes a long time and is maybe less fancy than mission trees and event chains, but I believe a good strategy game needs competent AI to play against and to challenge you more to succeed.


Now onto the game rules which have been reworked by Dementive based upon Agami’s original work. It is once again a separate menu:

With this change, we can now accommodate more gamerules:

The options you’ll now have:
- Disable Seasonal Food Mechanic
- Disable the Larger revolts/regional rebellions as described a few DD’s back
- Disable the New Diadochi CB mechanics where entire provinces switch
- Disable the scripted Mauryan collapse
- Disable the scripted Galatian Invasion
- Enabling the Diadochi Dynastic names (Thrace to Lysimachid Kingdom, Macedon to Antipatrid Kingdom)

And finally, it’s Zorgoball sneaking in with a teaser for next week’s DD…

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 67: Nabatea

Salvete! Today we’ll be talking about a new mission tree and content for the Nabateans, for which I'll hand you over to OmegaCorps.

OmegaCorps here, I would like to introduce you to a passion of many of the team’s devs: Arabia.

Yet, I am here to challenge your perspective of this vast, desolate landscape which has long piqued the interest of many unfamiliar with its sands and rocky cliffs. I am here to tell you how the Arabs built cities, how they forged a centralized and unified people, and how they contested with the Greeks and other Mediterranean juggernauts - I’m here to tell you about the NABATEANS!

(I also wanna send out a huge thank you to Aerozona and Zorgoball for putting in some major work to help bring the Nabataean content to life!)

The Nabataeans, who both lived in tribal villages/holdings, built marvelous rock-cut architecture cities and rich processions into the crevices and cliffsides of many large rock formations in the desert - Petra was one of the most exquisite of these.

The capital of the Nabataeans will now be the holy site for the solar deity and high-god of the Nabataean pantheon, Dushara, and, to honor the story told in the Zenon Papyri, Nabataea is going to default to mixed-gender rules, because that Greek man’s records tell of how his friend went into the desert to sell slaves to the Nabataeans, but upon finding them was beaten and chased off, for the Nabataeans respected women and deplored the actions of the slave-trader who would do such things to women. For players, this will mean being able to utilize the full might of your character screen, placing women into administrative/government roles should your male characters’ stats prove lacking.

Here is the nation:

Here is its mission:

With the Nabtaean mission, we attempt to have the player interact with the cultural, historical, religious, and economic aspects of these still little-known people.

Reliving the complicated past the Nabtaeans had with the Israelites of Judea, you may both fight for and against them as it suits your interests and the status of important ports and trading cities such as Gaza. Similarly, the Diadochi will fear you as you become an expert in Desert warfare, outpacing them, out-supplying them, and outmaneuvering them in the harsh environment. You can be sure you’ll take your environmental expertise to the lands of the Sinai, Basra, the Levant, and the Arabian coasts and interior.

Similarly, your people became rich through their control of the spice trade along the rocky coast of Arabia Petraea - why should you not seize the opportunity to take the riches for yourself and bolster your people’s geopolitical position. Cities such as Hegra, practically a second capital for the Nabtaeans, will be your bastions and your tolling stations, almost like the ports of the desert. They will assist you in conquering south-wards and setting up waystations, also known as caravanserai, where camel-travelers rest and trade on their way up and down the spice roads.

But fear not, for your actions are not unholy in the eyes of Al-Qaum or Dushara or any of the like - some would say that the Nabataeans are the fiercest of holy people, building incomprehensible monuments to their gods and the leaders who took on their images. The holy processions to the rock-cut tombs, the dolmen-like Beryl blocks, the great tombs themselves - all of these will be yours and will help you reach towards the heavens and deify the strongest of your royal line as your ancestors did, for how else would we still know of the Obodids?

Yet, in the end, is the goal of any people not to conquer their homeland (or to even make a final decision on which place they consider their homeland)? Why should the Nabtaeans remain boxed in the northwestern Arabian peninsula when the whole expanse of Arabia waits for them, ripe for the taking, the rich spice lands ready for the exporting seasons. Walk the paths of the Liyhanites and the Qedarites to reach the most distant, holy, and prosperous corners of the sands where you might yet find riches and wonders… perhaps new pathways in the desert have been unlocked for you.

There’s also a secret new tag for those with the courage and ambition to realize it:

Zorgoball, popping in at the end with more teasers for a looming DD…

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 68: 100+ New Events

Salvete! Today we'll mainly be talking about the more than 100 total events that will be added next update, all made by the amazing Zorgoball which i'll hand you over to now.

Greetings, Chef Zorgoball here, working hard in the kitchen with some fun news about flavour in the 1.6 update for Invictus. As you might recall from DD 61, we added twenty new events last time; 10 specifically for Punic Cultures and 10 generic events. Well, if the title hasn’t given it away, we are bringing some new events for you to experience this summer when the update drops. We have a lot to look at today, so let’s just go for it; there will be 10 new events that are available only for the Romans, with a tip of the hat to Suetonius for providing occasional inspiration - keep an eye out for historic nods here and there.

A few of the rarer events will give traits, in addition to boosting things like popularity or stability. You can expect legal entanglements involving those obnoxiously litigious Romans, and your personal relationships with family members and colleagues will be affected by the whims of fate - storms at sea might affect your investments, and bad weather could disrupt trade in the capital for a week or two if the roads get washed out. There are plenty of events that focus on the ups and downs of everyday life, so hopefully these types of interactions between characters in your nation will make them feel more alive.

Unlike last time, we are not adding 10 generic events, however - we are adding a *lot more*. I personally have finished about 106 (!) in total, and as a tiny teaser, I can even let you know that I am not the only dev that is working on adding a substantial amount of generic events - a project that is meaty enough to get its own future DD, so stay tuned. It should also go without saying that all of these events, both the Roman and the generic events, will fire only once, so you won’t be spammed with the same things happening throughout a campaign.

As a fun little easter egg of sorts, you will see more of the Invictus devs being added in-game (did you know there was one added in 1.5?), and if you are lucky, then perhaps one of the event chains involving them will happen to you in the course of your campaign. But a tiny peek at the topic at hand; if a dev is from that region or has worked extensively on missions in that corner of the world, then a strangely-familiar Minor Character might come knocking one day with a story to tell (and a treasure to sell, and an event chain, and a…)

Some events affect your entire country, as could be expected.

Events that impact randomized provinces are cool, right?

And what do you think about event chains that are dependent upon the types of buildings you have in your capital?

You will not only need certain buildings for some events to fire, but your ruler might need to be pursuing a particular scheme as well, like increasing their popularity - you might find yourself hosting spectacles in a cheap attempt to win points with the mob. Place your wager on your favored rider and best of luck!

As you can see, I could keep going on, but I’m going to wrap up by showing you the two longest event chains because they are awesome. One day, your ruler might have the opportunity to ride out from your capital and go lead an assault on a barbarian camp - the big brother to a smaller bandit camp event chain that could also happen at some point.

The spoilers stop here, unfortunately for you - it remains to be seen how the duel resolves, and what, if anything, you’ll find if you plunder the barbarian camp; perhaps gold, or maybe even a treasure of some sorts? You’ll have ten events to find out, though, so good luck!

Finally, we will take a look at a long, randomized event chain - your ruler will have the opportunity to forget about work for a month and go hunting with some friends. Let’s take a look at what can happen if you’re willing to spend the coin to go on this getaway, accompanied by a family member and another nobleman. There are some twenty events, some incredibly rare (1% chance of firing), so there can be drastically different outcomes, some amazing and some amazingly awful. Let's follow Sophytes of Bactria on his trip with the boys and see how it turns out, for better or worse.

There was a 5% chance of this next outcome firing, so not bad, Sophytes.

The opportunities for intrigue and excitement will be there until you’re back home within your citadel, so don’t let your guard down until you’re absolutely sure that you are safe! The wildlands of your country, as you know, can be a perilous place.

That’s it from me; see you soon!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 69: Illyric, Agamic, Vedic and Ajivik

Salvete!
Today Izn will be presenting his first Dev Diary, but it’s a big one, it includes 3 new religions, Illyric, Agamic and Ajivika and plenty of new deities. First though, an announcement, the Bronze Age reborn 2.5 version of the mod is out containing a lot of new content, go check it out: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2448788091 (patch notes can be found in the Steam changelogs)

Now onto the map changes as presented by Izn.

Hi hi! I’m Izn, also known as LinkLuver. I’m only 2 months into modding in general. I made a mod adding deities and immediately got told it could be useful in Invictus and was invited to the team. It’s been an incredible honor to join the Invictus team and I hope you’ll enjoy all the stuff I’ve worked on. Speaking of the stuff I’ve worked on, let me tell you about some of my latest work.

From the ports of Istria in the north, past the mountains into Pannonia in the east, straddling the rugged coastline of the Adriatic in the west, and clashing with the Hellenic world in Macedonia to the south, the Illyric religion flourishes.

What a pretty color if I do say so myself! Very distinct from Druidic, very distinct from Hellenic, man, it’d be nice if the culture’s color was as distinct as the relig-oh wait it is.

Anyways, with that aside, let me tell you about what Illyric is. Illyric is based on the beliefs of the Illyrians (go figure). While the religion itself has very little centralization and even lacks a shared cosmology, the Illyrians still had a distinct pantheon and religion from Hellenic. To reflect this, decentralization though, Illyrics will have the option of one of three cults to follow.

Historically, the Northern Illyrians were famous for their Cult of the Sun. The Southern Illyrians were instead associated most with the Cult of the Serpent. Finally, across Illyrian lands, there was widespread worship of a newer cult, the Cult of the Thracian Horseman. In game, this will be represented by a choice of one of these cults with a system very similar to the Hindu personal deity decision. Choose the Sun, and you will receive religious buffs. Choose the Serpent and you will receive fertility buffs. And choose the Thracian Horseman, and you will receive cavalry buffs. The buffs aren’t the only things to take into account when selecting a cult. Keep an eye out for both good and bad events associated with your choice of cult.


Oh dear Tadenus! I almost forgot, it’s time to talk about the deities! Deities are my specialty, so let me quickly go over all the deities available to Illyrics. I’ve notated every brand new deity with an asterisk. Any without one were previously in the game as Hellenic-Illyrian.

War
Armatus, Bindus, and Enji* will be available to all Illyric followers. Meanwhile, Melosocus and Iria* will be exclusive to Histrians and Iapodians. So, in total, 5 war deities.

Culture
The culture deities available to everyone are Tadenus, Deipatros, Sentona,* Nebres,* and Taotor.* That makes 5, plus don’t forget Dualos,* available to Paeonians; and Histria, available to Histrians (go figure) as well as Iapodians.

Fertility
Alright, next we have the deities most associated with the number of this Dev Diary. Thana, Anzotica, Dracon dhe Dracaena, Ica, Damatira,* and Eia!* Eia is limited to Histrians, Iapodians, and Dalmations too, while the rest are here for all. That’s 6 right there.

Economy
Phew, running out of breath here. Economy deities include Latra, Vidasus, Redon,* Aecorna,* Boria,* Trita,* and Andinus.* Aecorna is for Pannonians and Catarians only; Boria is exclusive to Histrians, Iapodians, Liburnians; Trita is the same as Boria but also includes Dalmatians, and Andinus is solely for Dardanians and Deraemestians! And that’s 7 deities.

So! Illyric has 23 deities available to them, you might assume. Well actually, you’re half right. Illyric has 23 deities in its religion, but Illyric will actually get access to one more brand new deity. Medaurus from the Zalmoxian faith will be available to all Illyric followers. Medaurus is a special deity for Illyric as he became synonymous with Illyrian religion after the Roman invasions. So, Medaurus will stay with the Thracian’s and their Zalmoxian faith primarily, however if you’re playing as the Illyric faith, you will still have access to him. If you were wondering, he’s also very related to the Cult of the Thracian Horseman. Now, that’s all right? No more deity talk.


Well, you may have noticed that there’s one Illyrian culture that’s already gone through the Hellenization process.

The Messapians, the Illyrians of Italy. They will retain their unique deities within the Hellenic faith of Zis, Damater, and Aphrodite Lahona, but in addition to that, I’ve given them a few more. Athana will be available to them, and any Illyrian culture that converts to Hellenic. And too will they receive Illyrius, a rare deity with the same conditions. Illyrius is a bit special as he was the Greek god of the Illyrians, and represented the explanation to the Greeks of where the Illyrians came from. In addition to those two, Messapians will also always have access to Taotor and Damatira, two Illyric gods who were believed primarily by the Messapians.


Now, time for the other major project I’ve been working on. Keep in mind that this is much less complete than Illyric because of the complexity of this region. This region is very misunderstood by the game at the moment. While it is divided among different culture groups, it is swallowed by a catchall religion of the region for the most part. It’s the land of a thousand languages, spices, and elephants, it’s India! Here’s the before and after.

A lot to talk about here. First, let's talk about the War Elephant in the room. Hinduism is gone! Kind of. Hinduism still exists, it’s just split into two. Historically, (and in fact, to this day to an extent) Hinduism wasn’t a single religion at all. The concept of Hinduism as one religion really gained traction as a concept during Indian Independence movements in the 20th century and through centuries of rivalry with Islam. Hinduism is more so a series of religions that interacted and influenced each other rather than a single religion. In Imperator Rome’s time period, these religions were even more separate. You’ll also notice some bright green dots sprinkled in there. Let’s get into the changes you see above now.


Vedic religion represents what is most commonly thought of when you talk about Hinduism, or Vedic Hinduism. For gameplay purposes, they will pretty much be exactly the same as Hinduism from before, just with a name change and deity changes. I’ve also reworked holy sites for Vedic. While I’m here, I’ll also mention I’ve added Agni for Vedic.

Agamic represents the Dravidic religion, of course, and is by far the biggest new addition to the region. The Agamic religion used to be very widespread in pre-Indo-Aryan periods, but with the settlement of the Indo-Aryans, Agamic has been reduced to primarily the Deccan plateau and Dravidian nations. Even the island of Sri Lanka is almost entirely Vedic at this point. Yet Agamic would persevere to this day as non-Vedic Hinduism. You’ll find that many previously Hindu deities will go over to Agamic instead, especially the Dravidian exclusive ones. Despite the difference of Agamic and Vedic, by this period there were also some shared deities. This will be reflected by some deities being available to both Agamic and Vedic, with the origin of the deity being the determiner of which pantheon it belongs to.

































I should also mention the second largest difference in this map, the spread of the Sramanic religions of Buddhism, Jainism, and of course, the new Ajivika.

Jainism will be spread a little more in Dravidian lands, mainly as minority pops, a province or two on the Eastern coast, and many provinces in the Indus Delta and East Magadha. While there are a lot more Jainist pops, they’re again, minority pops, so you won’t see them much in the screenshot, however, this should give Jain a better shot against its rivals than before. Here’s a screenshot of Jain spread in Dravidian lands as it’s one of the few places that’s been finished with minorities.

Buddhism will be much more thickly coated in the Delta and primarily in Kalinga and Bengal regions. As a general rule, Sramanic religions in North India are in the East or West, and Vedic remains even more dominant in the center. Notably, Buddhism will receive a nation heralding Buddhism as its state religion: Kalinga.

Now for Ajivika, the other new religion of the subcontinent. Ajivika was another Sramanic religion like Buddhism and Jainism. One of the biggest differences was the belief of Niyati, or, fate. This means that Ajivika followers did not believe in concepts such as Karma. Ajivika by this point is still very influential and relevant, but it's quickly being overtaken by Buddhism and Jainism. That said, Ajivika is still in a position to overtake Jain and Buddhism. It’s not unrealistic at all to imagine a world where it replaces Buddhism entirely. To reflect this, Ajivika will be widespread as a minority religion. It’s primarily going to be found in North India, including the Indus Delta but not downstream of the Indus. There will also be hotspots in the center of India with a new tag that embraces Ajivika as its state religion. It’s in a very precarious situation and players looking for a challenge of reinstating a niche religion have a fun choice in Vidarbha.

This is such a massive change to the Indian region, and there’s so much more work to be done for the region’s religions, but what I’m showing you is from the first three days of work on it. As such, I can’t tell you much more about the deities, events, flavor, and other stuff that simply hasn’t been thought about quite yet. Nonetheless, India is definitely worth trying out if you haven’t in a while and there’s more to come! Before I move on, huge shoutouts to the amazing Dementive and Shocky, both of whom helped me immensely with figuring out the new Indian religions, supported and suggested for me to add them, and helped me map their spread. And shoutout to Omega as well, who helped me with resources and research for many of the other religions I’ve worked on.

Now then, time to talk about deities again. I will quickly mention that there is a special Greek deity for Greco-Indians only. I want to share more deities with you, but the Indian content I’ve just talked about is hardly 2 or 3 days old, and deities have not been worked on yet. With that out of the way, I will be taking you on a tour of the world and generally the deities and holy sites I’ve added!

Welcome to the lands of the Nile, my favorite region of all. The Upper Nile was home to many deities that were either never worshiped downstream, were much less relevant, or simply weren’t worshiped anymore. While it’s too much of a stretch to provide a whole new Kushitic religion, they will have access to a half dozen exclusive gods and holy sites accompanying said gods. Don’t worry if you’re prefer sailing downstream, there’s more than a dozen new deities available to all Kemetic believers, and they have new holy sites too! There’s also a small Easter egg deity somewhere here. Kudos to anyone who finds them.

Speaking of new holy sites, how about Bon? Check out the plethora of new holy sites, 7 new ones to be exact. Oh, by Tonpa Shenrab, that means every deity in Bon has a holy site… well we can’t have that! How about doubling the number of deities for them then! 8 new deities for Bon it is.

How about Anatolia and their religion of the great goddess Cybele? Yep, 7 more deities, more holy sites. If you’re a Greek culture who converts to Cybelene, you might have access to a few more deities too.

Perhaps the lands of Canaan are more your fancy? Well, here’s some new holy sites for the Levant. You’ll find plenty of new deities as well; there’s more than a dozen new deities for you to try, including some available for Canaanite follows across the Mediterranean.

Or maybe Africa? Sure, why not. 9 new deities for Megalithic, along with around 10 new holy sites, of course. Megalithic is filled with primordial origins for many gods. From Moneiba to Antinus, there’s a wide variety of gods to select from over the massive expanse Megalithic covers.

Ah, a Europe enjoyer I see. Well, here’re 2 new holy sites for Tuistic accompanied by 9 new Tuistic deities too! Hopefully those who prefer Norse will read the descriptions and learn about the Germanic origins of said Norse gods.

Perhaps you prefer the weather to the south, in the land of Iberia and their religion of Mari. That’s fine, you have the 8 new Marite deities and 3 new holy sites to play with in their unique religion.

Of course, I’ve mentioned the Illyrians plenty. Here are 7 of their holy sites, though more to come. And to the west, with two new holy sites (more to come hopefully), the lands of the mighty Zalmoxis have 5 new deities to play with too.

Let’s slide to the steppe and see the Scythians and Sakans with a small surprise! No new holy sites, but you do get 2 new deities.

Holy Ishtar! How could anyone forget the legendary pantheon of the Mesopotamians, one of the most well documented and interesting ancient religion?! Not me, that's for sure. Enjoy a dozen new holy sites, and more than 20 new deities! There might even be some more hidden deities from long gone cities to rediscover.

As you can see, this is a ton of deities. Way too many to go over individually. I hope you take notice of the minor changes like new localizations for names, new descriptions, and changed holy sites, but also some major changes like new modifiers, new types of deity conditions, and more.

Thank you for reading. I’m so excited to continue working on religion and deities in the future. I hope you’ll enjoy the more than 100 new deities across the map, 3 whole new religions, and any future content I get to be a part of!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 70: Largest Dev Diary in PDX history + 1.6 Release date

Salvete!
Today we have assembled for you the largest Dev Diary in the history of Paradox games (if i'm wrong DM/reply to me and i'll edit this to link to the one true victor).
We have a variety of subjects for you today including but not limited to, in order:
- Patch notes
- Arabian map rework
- Steppe map rework
- Indian area expansion
- New impassables in Iberia, North-Africa and India
- Dumnonian mission tree
- Eburonian mission tree
- Fezzani mission tree rework
- Tasm mission trees (2)
- Germania formable
- Cappadocian mission tree
- Antigonid mission tree expansion
- Pauravan mission tree
- Armenian religious rework
- New Natic religion (in Burma)
- More generic events

Now before I hand you over to my fellow devs, I have several things to say, first of which is an announcement; the 1.6 Pantheion update will release on the 5th of May:

Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532715348
Our Discord: https://discord.gg/5K9fd3qSjx
Paradox mods: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/27170/Any

Spoiler: Patch notes

V1.6 - Pantheion (new save needed)
New/expanded mission trees:
- 2 mission trees for Tasm
- Large tree for Cappadocia with many paths
- Large tree for Paurava
- Large tree for Nabatea
- Regional tree for Odrysia
- Regional tree for Dumnonia
- Regional tree for Iberia (the Caucasian country)
- Regional tree for Eburonia
- Regional piracy tree for Illyrians
- Expanded Antigonid's first mission tree
- Expanded Hellenistic empire mission tree
- Expanded later Macedonian mission trees
- Reworked Fezzani missions
- Reworked Numidian missions
- Minor rework to Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdom missions
- Slightly reworked most of the Germanic mission trees

Map changes:
- Reworked and Expanded Arabia: new South Arabian culture group, interior passage and more
- Reworked and Expanded the Steppes: new cultures, tags and a larger map
- Reworked and Expanded India: 3 new areas, 3 new religions and a new tag setup in Central-India
- Added minority and enslaved pops around the world
- Added many new impassables to Iberia, North-Africa and India
- Added several new navigable rivers
- Added Steppes terrain type (increased movement speed, decreased population capacity)
- Added 150+ deities to every religion around the world
- Added 5 new religions, Illyric, Natic, Agamic, Ajivika and Anahitic
- Hindu has been split up into Agamic and Vedic
- Added new map models to Burma
- Updated regions setup

Added content:
- Added 200~ generic events
- Added 30~ events for specific religions
- Regional rebellions will no longer cost more than 100 warscore to retake, they'll have larger levies and be consolidated into one country
- Tribes will no longer just collapse, instead they'll turn very aggressive for several decades before finally collapsing into Regions instead of Areas
- Reworked all levy templates to make historical sense, account for military traditions and make AI more intelligent in their usage
- Implemented Crownsteler's Coat of Arms
- Added dozens of new event pictures
- Added dozens of new icons
- Added a dozen heritages mainly in Illyria
- Added new gamerules: toggleable Galatian invasion/regional rebellions/Mauryan Collapse and Seasonal food, also option for extremely aggresive meme-ai
- Integrated and adapted More Character Traits mod
- Added Arabia, Odrysian Kingdom and Germania as formables
- Added Gallus decision to Cybelene countries
- Added Persian decision to rebuild Persepolis
- Added cult decision to Illyrians
- Added predefined characters to a number of countries

Changes:
- Improved performance due to new 2.0.4 debugging tools
- Deity GUI now shows deity description when hovering
- Removed custom achievement system since 2.0.4 will allow vanilla achievements
- Aqueducts now additionally give 1 civ cap
- Indian caste laws disabled for AI as they can't handle it
- Nerfed a lot of broken modifiers
- Made Parthia more likely to form
- Dahae is now a tier 2 formable instead of tier 3
- Archers have slightly lower maneouver than cavalry now
- Chariots have higher maneouver than infantry now
- Heavy infantry do less damage to spearmen, but take 5% less damage in general
- Light Infantry have a lesser penalty against Heavy Cavalry and Horse Archers
- Spearmen do slightly more damage against Light Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Horse Archers and Chariots
- Improved AI's budgeting skills
- Tweaked AI's diplomatic acceptance values
- AI now accounts for the Levy size modifier
- Improved general AI's ability to declare war
- AI won't go bankrupt when they get spawned units
- AI is slightly better at choosing governor policies
- Improved Carthaginian's AI ability to navigate its missions
- Improved Rome's ability to expand into Gaul
- Made Roman/Dictatorial civil war less likely to crash the game
- New traits are now accounted for in AI decision making
- Improved religious holy site triggers in generic missions
- Added centralization to Steppe Horde government type
- Caucasian culture group now has access to Anatolian/Armenian traditions
- Greek traditions now give more Spearmen bonuses instead of boosting Archers
- Iberian traditions now give Light Infantry bonuses instead of boosting Archers
- Iberian traditions now have bigger Heavy Cavalry bonuses
- Celtic traditions now give Spearmen instead of Heavy infantry bonuses
- Nabatea now has access to Arabian traditions
- Nerfed Nubian archer traditions
- Occidental culture group now has custom Graphics group (combining several models)
- Egyptian AI now accounts for new Cyrenaican content if a player is on it
- Updated tooltips and minor effects in Judean tree
- Ashoka dying should now trigger the collapse instantly instead of having to wait for a yearly tick
- Ptolemaic Kingdom now has access to Pharoah trait
- Updated tradegood triggers so valuable goods now won't get replaced, and all food tradegoods now actually are ones that give food
- Updated a number of province names
- Updated console GUI with QOL features
- Updated Government GUI with QOL features
- Updated Portrait Editor with QOL features
- Updated techonology view GUI to show relevant traits
- Updated localization files
- Expanded French, Spanish and German translations

Bugfixes:
- Cleared the error log
- In doing the above, fixed many tiny errors not worth noting
- Fixed naval raiding not being unlocked for various countries
- Fixed broken treasure icons
- Fixed a dozen of broken unit models
- Spreading tradegoods by decision no longer replaces other high-value trade goods
- Switching countries using scripted effect will now account for the Noble levies law
- Fixed custom distinctions being untriggerable
- Fixed several broken Macedonian mission tasks
- Fixed several broken Cyrenaican mission tasks
- Fixed several broken Gymnaesian mission tasks
- Fixed a number of small bugs with Cyrenaican mission trees
- Pu culture group now has access to Indian traditions
- Fixed a broken Berber tradition
- Bactria no longer has access to Scythian traditions
- Slave wonder effect now properly gives 20% slave output
- Pyramids now properly give political influence modifier
- Updated atropatene localization file to be more readable
- Removed duplicate manpower entry in Barracks building
- Fixed broken sogdian emporium modifier
- Consolidated some NOT OR triggers into NOR
- Properly indented a bunch of files

Now, about the very exciting elephant in the room. The 2.0.4 beta patch has allowed us to make several performance improvements, the update is also fully compatible with both the release version of the mod and the upcoming update and I just which to say thank you to everyone at Paradox who helped in releasing it, especially: PDX_Gorion for doing the work, Johan for helping and initially releasing this great game and PDXKatten for acting as Community Manager for this update.
(Also for those of you who missed it, you will be able to get achievements using Mods in an upcoming iteration of the Beta patch.)

But as exciting as the update has been, it's now time to talk about the mod again. I'll begin with the work me and OmegaCorps have done on levy templates. For this update we've gone through and updated every single levy template to make them more historical, more fitting with military traditions and make AI more capable at fighing. That was my part, now i'll hand you over to Shocky27.

Hello all! Shocky27 here once again with some various map expansions - 2 major expansions in Arabia and Steppe, and some minor expansions in India. Let’s first take a look at an Arabia before and after:

As you can see in the above photos, we have added several new playable tags and provinces through the central portion of Arabia where previously you could not cross. Let’s start in the north, where the oasis city of Jubbah has been added, Qedar has been given a new province of Sakkala to the northeast, and some new provinces added in the interior section of Thamud. Most of the added provinces here in the north are left as colonizable oasis and highland areas, which leads through an uncolonizable section to the center of the peninsula.

In the center of Arabia lay two storied ancient tribes of Arabia - Tasm and Jadis. Mentioned as extinct tribes of Arabia in the Quran, they are thought to have been located around the al-Kharj oasis near modern Riyadh. Their placements are based on Iron Age archaeological finds in the Ain-Dila area for Tasm and the Layla pottery tradition to the south for Jadis. Zorgoball will introduce some fun new content for these tribes later in the diary.

Moving over to the Gerrha area, several new provinces have been added and some broken up to increase province density. Overall, Gerrha has been a major buff to its starting position. Maka has shifted westward to only encompass finds of the “Late Pre-Islamic” cultural tradition of the UAE, with major sites such as Saruq and Dur. The area of eastern Oman is now inhabited by a totally separate culture known as Samad - an Iron Age tradition that began around the time of the start of the game (likely immigrants from southern Arabia based on pottery). The next screenshots will take you around the periphery of the peninsula so you can get a sneak peek at what has been added to the various regions - the sharp-eyed will notice the new federated tribe tag of Samad in the west and the settled tribe of ‘Aad in the south. Aad is yet another tribe mentioned in the Quran as an extinct Arabian tribe, and we have created new provinces in the south near the Shisr oasis, where there lost oasis city of Ubar or Iram can be found, which we have identified with the Aad.

As mentioned, Arabia was not the only region to receive some extensive reworks, so why don’t we continue exploring? We will now leave the deserts for the northern steppe, where rumors of invading barbarians have set the region on edge. Certain tags, like Aorsia, have had their holdings increased, and when combined with the new tribal AI rework that 1.6 is adding, this reimagined region will feel fresh and dangerous - the civilized nations should be quite nervous about invading steppe armies. We will look at a before and after pic of the general area before focusing on some details.

The picture above reveals that steppe terrain has been added to appropriate areas in Invictus, it's unique in that you can sustain very few pops in the steppes but you have a large increase to movement speed.
Moving on to India, you will see that the Indus River has been extended north, thanks to the efforts of the incomparable Licarious. As a matter of fact, a bunch of rivers have been reworked/been extended, including the Nile up to the first cataract - we shall leave a few surprises for your fleets to discover.

New areas in India have also been added - new provinces have been created and carved out of old ones on the Indus River, reflecting where the Mallian peoples and their cities were (from Alexander's famous conquests). We've also added several provinces between Kalinga and Maurya to reflect the peoples who lived in these areas and give Kalinga a bit of a boost.

One of the last things we will look at are some mountain ranges that have been added to various corners of the world. The Iberian peninsula has received a few new mountains and so has Carthage, which will not only increase the defensibility of the areas, but will force a change in military tactics. You can expect the same in India and in Sri Lanka as well. A few more pics before I hand the baton over to Zorgoball so he can start showing some missions!

Salutations, it is Zorgoball, here to blow your minds with what will undoubtedly be the largest contribution to a DD I will ever make. We have a TON of new mission trees to look at today, so instead of taking time to make clever introductions, we are diving in head first. Our first stop on today’s international tour will be Dumnonia, where you will be charged with helping the tribesmen that live in the Tamar Valley grow their kingdom. The mission, with 18 tasks and as many events;

Dumnonia starts the game in an interesting predicament of sorts; known for keeping to themselves, they have quietly watched as the neighboring tribes of Durotriga and Dobunnia encroached on their land. Your initial task “Reclaiming Our Province” will see your claims prepared for a small regional war, although it might be best if you keep an eye on your rebellious Tribal Chieftains. Once your peace-loving kinsmen get a taste for war and glory, you might have a hard time restraining them…

At first, you will only seek to expand your holdings along the hinterlands, but over time, the idea that something greater can be achieved - the formation of Pritania - will guide your people in the days to come. While you are busy battling for your new nation, you will also be tasked with improving your infrastructure back home.There are valuable tin mines in the province of Dumnonia that are begging to be exploited, for example, especially because the Aremorican and even Carthaginian traders that visit your ports are desperate for the base metal and are willing to pay exorbitant prices. There will even be opportunities to expand your trade networks with the Aremoricans in particular.
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As your borders grow and your economic situation improves, there will be a concerted effort to build throughout the nation; cities, ports, farms and fisheries - you have need of it all! Unfortunately, our Aremorican trading partners might get irritated at us for trawling the same waters that they do, so it would be wise to prepare for conflicts…the local sea might not be large enough to support two growing nations.

Let’s return to domestic matters, though, and look at a few event chains. Once you are in possession of the province of Aquae Sulis, you will be tasked with constructing a holy site in the province for the pilgrims that come to take the healing waters. And once Stonehenge is safely within Dumnonian hands, you can request that the Druids on the mainland pay your thriving nation a visit in order to give you their blessings.

The Dumnonians observed rituals that were rooted in Bronze Age traditions, but your country has not properly celebrated within recent memory - but this will change. Once you are in the position to do so, your ruler will have the ability to reinstate the Harvest Festival, which will take place every twenty years. Be sure to have enough food and drink on hand for the congregants, for your reputation for Dumnonian hospitality is something you should aspire to keep!

One would assume that, after you have led your triumphant levies to the far north and have conquered your neighbors and formed Pritania, your Tribal Chieftains would respect what you have done for the nation. Yet the infighting that has plagued your people since you first tasted victory will rear its ugly head, and your kinsmen will embrace their new roles as opposition in the Pritanic Federated Tribe with gusto. It remains to be seen how your Chief Magistrate will respond to the lies and slander being thrown about in your Council Meetings, however…

Let us leave the Dumnonians to their War of Unification and cross the Mare Germanicum, where we see a similar situation playing out in the east…it seems that the fierce Eburones are attempting to unify Belgae at the same time that the Dumnonians are chasing the dream of Pritania. In a mission tree collaboration between yours truly and Snowlet, you’ll have sixteen tasks and events to help the “Bravest of the Gauls!” create the mighty nation of Belgae.

As you can see, the Tribal Chief has big plans for the region, but this won’t be the same kind of war that you are used to fighting. Considering how warlike and savage the Eburones and Belgic tribes are, there won’t be too much time spent on the pleasantries of court. During your initial campaign to conquer your neighboring tribes, you’ll have access to a special event chain that allows you to send an ultimatum to the targeted region - submit peacefully or be destroyed! Let’s see how the “Southern Strategy” plays out, as it is different every time.

Some regions will break with their neighbors and submit as vassals, whereas others will hedge their bets and stand up against you, sending you to war immediately.

Word will rapidly spread through the region about what your leader is up to, and as you consolidate more and more tribes under your own banner, you will be visited by a local hero that wishes to fight in your name. And yes, it is exactly who you think it is.

There will be no respite from the wars if that's what you wish, but there are incentives for you to rest for a campaign season and build up your new territories. Do be mindful of some of the side tasks that require peace so that your workers might labor unhindered by the threat of battle.

Investments at home leads to growth abroad, and as you build up trade opportunities, particularly with your Britannic neighbors across the sea, you will lead your people out of the forests and into a new era as you claim a new area on the coasts - your new international connections necessitate these changes in circumstance, after all. Don’t fret, though, because you won’t abandon your traditional home entirely, but will instead pour the resources of the Eburonian state into making it a proper city.

As your people get more comfortable with their new life at sea, you could learn a thing or two from the established pirates that live nearby - there are benefits if the both of you can work together.

Please keep in mind that an effective leader of the Belgic tribes will have to demonstrate their skill with arms, especially when it comes to their enemies - there are many scores to settle among these contentious people, and blood feuds are no rarity.

War will inevitably resume, but you will have a new capital to take care of, as well as specialized goods in your local workshops that you should focus on making. Britannic trade will thrive under your careful stewardship, increasing your tax incomes and expanding your influence at home.

If you are expecting a conquest tree without twists and turns towards the end, however, then you will be disappointed - needless to say, there remains some excitement beyond simply uniting the Belgae, but you will have to wait and see exactly what happens for yourself. No spoilers yet! Time to redact some localization, as a matter of fact…

So, as we are traveling south to the land of the next tree(s), let me ask you - in addition to the brand new missions that we have been working on, were you expecting completely reworked content on top of this? Because that’s what you are going to get with the brand new Fezzani trees, all thanks to the most excellent and hardworking dev Aerozona.
There are SIX countries that now have access to the amazing “A Desert Paradise” tree, and while they will share some tasks, each one of the tags - Phazania, Makae, Garamantia, Machyllia, Nasamonia and Psyllia - will have their own unique missions to complete. Let’s take a look at a few of the trees to see the variety available, and keep in mind that each task has an event/event chain.

Let’s poke around the first tree shown, which is for Garamantia, so you can have an idea of what sort of tasks await. You will have to contend with the other Fezzani tribes as you each strive towards the same thing - creating the formable nation of Fezzan - but there are many avenues to explore as you get working on this admirable goal. As an initial step, the ambitious Garamantic Tribal Chief will have to consolidate power before beginning to plot and plan.

An experienced ruler like Mastanabal will make sure that all strategic territories are properly fortified, as the idea is to sack the city of your enemies and not have the same happen to you.

If you decide to keep a defeated tribe as a subject, there will be military benefits to the both of you, so maybe think twice before you annex every one of your neighbors.

Considering that these tribes dwell in difficult desert terrain, it should come as no surprise that the most valuable territories in the entire region, like the productive Mines of Phazania and Makae, will be hotly contested. Much tribal blood will be shed over determining who owns the gold and silver buried within the mountains.

If you think that your established neighbors, like the mighty Carthaginians to the west and the Greek settlers on the coasts, are going to ignore you while you slowly consolidate power, then you are in for a rude awakening. Tread carefully with how you deal with these event chains, but don’t be afraid to strike when the time is right, if that’s what it comes to.

Once you created Fezzan, there are a few exciting rewards waiting for you, including some powerful modifiers that will underscore your reputation as being the fiercest desert fighters in the region. Woe betide the enemy army that encounters your roving warriors in the wastelands that you call home!

Speaking of deserts, why don’t we head over to the brilliant extension of Arabia that Shocky27 has worked on and take a look at the two mission trees for the new tag of Tasm? During the game’s time period, the tribes of Tasm and Jadis were utterly destroyed by their neighbors, but you have a chance to change history and save your nation.

The coasts of the Arabian Peninsula belong to powerful monarchies and squabbling Republics, but the vast expanses of the interior are the plaything of the tribes that live there. When your leader has decided that the time for expansion has arrived, “A Call From The Desert” will go out to your kinsmen, asking them to gather in your capital for the long days to come.

There are plenty of conquest tasks and beneficial province modifiers you will accumulate, so let’s look at some of the more unique tasks for your Arabian adventure. Your resources are limited, so be careful with how you decide to move forward - should your precious manpower be used for the erupting conflict with Gerrha, who is resisting your efforts to spread into a province that you both share, or should you send your fighting men into the uncolonized wastelands to your north so that they can claim the land? Not everyone in the tribe can agree to the same thing, so it will remain for your leader to make the final decision. Your enemies are strong, but no one knows the deserts like your tribesmen, and you have just enough gumption in you to accomplish great things as long as you can work together.

Tasm has few friends at game start, but there is a connection with the tribe of Jadis to your south that will play out in a portentous event chain. All that I am willing to say is that you will have a meeting with the famous ruler of the Jadis tribe, the legendary blue-eyed seeress Zarqa al-Yamama, whose kohl-streaked eyelids are said to be able to peer into the future…

Over time, you can expect to conquer the routes leading into the heart of your territory, making sure that any invading army hoping to siege down your capital will have a long, difficult slog ahead of them.

Your armies will eventually achieve the impossible - evicting the powerful Gerrhans from their fortified towns - and there will be some in your nation that will seek to move your capital to one of the recently-conquered cities that you have taken. There are certainly benefits to moving the seat of power, but your tribesmen will be unhappy if you abandon the hills where their grandfathers are buried.

If you are somehow able to capture the wealthy island of Tylos, you will be able to use its resources to build a luxurious new section of the city.

Before long, you will have spread from the center of the peninsula to encompass everyone around you; here’s a look at the territory that you will conquer by the end of the first tree.

The second tree for Tasm is smaller but has some fun tasks, so here we go!

Your ruler, obsessed with the quest for security due to events that happen in the first tree, will open up the second by establishing the “Three Fists” - fortified cities that will ensure complete control leading into Arabia proper. Luckily for you, the renowned architects that have been busy working on your capital will become available to send throughout your nation...that is, if you can afford them.

At this point, Tasm is large enough to demand things from its neighbors, like the submission of the island of Soqotra.

If you are able to increase the production of the rare trade goods that you have been blessed with, your friends in Soqotra will help you establish economic contacts with India.

You can expect conflicts in all directions, because naturally your neighbors the Seleukids and the Ptolemies will not appreciate any funny business going on in their backyards.

If you are lucky, then the mission task “Steppe Horses In The Desert” will see you successfully breed a local variety that will be of great use to your Nubian Military traditions! The outcome is random however, so best of luck - nothing is guaranteed in the land of Tasm.

The last event chain that we will look at is one of my personal favorites, as well as a salute to an Invictus dev (Olivenkranz) who has also put in a tremendous amount of work on the Bronze Age Reborn mod for Imperator. He has also added a hefty amount of new missions and tasks for the Antigonid Kingdom and the Hellenistic Empire (more on those below) - can you believe how many missions we’ve added?! But I digress...

Under the right circumstances, your ruler will be able to investigate a rumored archaeological site on a small island and maybe even discover a treasure from the Bronze Age?!

Oh, and special thanks to Shinymewtwo99 for the new flags and new formables you'll get to have fun creating. And if a Scandian nation forms Germania, you'll have a slightly different color, so that's pretty cool.

Well, that's about it as far as mission tree content goes, so that’s it from me…just kidding, we have only scratched the surface of what you're getting in 1.6 from the Invictus team. Do you want to see what the exciting new tree for CAPPADOCIA that OmegaCorps designed and that Olivenkranz scripted, with help from multiple devs for loc? Of course you do.

This tree is expansive and diverse, with four different paths that you can choose to go down to ensure that each playthrough is wildly different. The chunk of missions on the left will allow you to focus on your economic standing, regardless of who you decide to play as(!) on the right. You'll earn some powerful modifiers that will help your nation stay afloat in the turbulent situation that you find yourself in. Since this chonky tree is impossible to read zoomed out, here’s a look at the left.

The right side of the tree will offer you a variety of play styles; do you want to stay a loyal Antigonid vassal and build up your strength over a long time? There’s no shame in being “Content In One’s Place”, although you might eventually become strong enough to replace the Antigonids entirely…

You also have the option to start a civil war as one of two characters; Eumenes, son of Eumenes of Cardia, and you'll even get a shot at restoring the Ariarathids to power (with the help of the Armenians, who might ask for a favor in return). These mutually exclusive playstyles each have their own twists and turns, and you ultimately have the option of forming something like four different tags in this tree, including Greater Cappadocia, Eumenid Empire, and even Persia. You are guaranteed to see something different happen practically every time, thanks to the shifting alliances of the Antigonid world.

So many choices, so many outcomes for Cappadocia…enjoy! And now, speaking of the Antigonids, they get a mission tree expansion. Since the very first tree for the Antigonids is the only one the player gets if he wins the Diadochi War, it felt a little bit sad all alone, so we expanded it.
We added two branches: one for dealing with the conquered cultures and stabilization (below) and one for building up your starting areas, especially Anatolia that has been in Antigonos’ hands for up to 30 years. In total, this tree has gotten 12 new tasks.
The Hellenistic Empire Tree has also gotten a small expansion with an additional tree focusing on Alexander’s trail through the world and a handful of additional tasks. To see that one, you’ll have to reach it yourself Obviously, you still need the DLC that unlocks these trees in the first place!

Let me pass the baton to Izn so he can introduce his very first tree.
Thanks Zorgo! And hello again to everyone. I’ve been really hard at work on my first mission tree for the mod. It’s for the place of my birth at game start (province of Nokhar, later Lahore, if you're curious), the Kingdom of Porus itself: Paurava.

Paurava has a pretty tough start when it comes to military expansion, so instead, the left side of the tree focuses on playing tall and diplomatic. First I’ll talk about the far left side. Develop the ancient city of Sakala into a base of operations for the growing Kingdom. I recommend you pump all your resources into building the province up as much as possible as the following mission tasks on the left side involve Sakala. Going down this side of the tree will affect more than just one province though, as Sakala is situated at the perfect place to influence all the massive populations in the Indus Valley.

Although, you might find yourself eventually owning another important historical city in the region, a little known place called Taxila. You can either choose to treat Taxila with respect upon capturing it… or you might just destroy it in favor of your own capital.

Although, it would be a shame if that wonderful University of Taxila was gone forever wouldn’t it?

Going even further down the left side of the tree, you can start to use Sakala as a religious center as it historically was. Sakala was a major spreader of the Buddhist faith, however, you can choose between any major religion of the area. Of course, since I added Ajivika, it’s my personal favorite to map paint the religious mode in an Emerald green. These tasks can help you not only convert to your religion of choice quickly, but also influence surrounding people and countries of the Indus Valley as well.

Now, despite the left side mainly revolving around Sakala, there’s a significant and important stem off this side that has to do with expansion instead. You’re going to be fighting against the Mauryans for influence in the area, so you have to use everything at your disposal. Diplomacy, military, and a mix of the two.

You can peacefully be granted lands from the Mauryans, provided you marry and maintain a healthy relationship with them. Next, you can be allowed to expand in a limited way to through the Dardic tribes to your north. Finally, you can proclaim yourself the true Raja of Gandhara, calling your alliance with the Mauryan Empire into question. If you’re feeling particularly cocky, you might be able to battle the Empire yourself. After all, King Porus was famous for his battle against the mightiest Empire of the time, perhaps you should do the same.

Your timing will be integral, but this is very much a winnable war. Just… don’t wait too long otherwise you might end up in a situation like this.

Now, the right side of the tree opens up to you after the Indo-Greek Kingdoms arrive at your doorstep. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will tease a formable you can get if you go a particularly campaign and rp altering path in the tree.

While I’d love to talk about the right side of the tree more, and while I’m sure the promises of conquests and Reverse-Okeanos and such is interesting, I’d much rather hijack your attention for more religion!

That’s right, there’s a brand new Armenian religion. Now, you might say, Izn is this not just Khaldic. Well, it actually isn’t at all! Khaldic is still in the game files, but you’ll have to wait to see what we do with it in the future. For now, you can enjoy this new faith in its place.

Armenian religion at this point was not Khaldic, nor Zoroastrian, but a strange mix of both and more. Thus, a new religion and pantheon is applicable. Forged from taking Armenian exclusive Khaldic deities (that really never belonged in Khaldic) and a host of brand new deities, the worshipers of Anahit and more are revered primarily in Armenia.

I will also note that it took me ages to have that religious circle be jussst right. You can tell from the names of these deities all the Zoroastrian influences, but don’t think these are just reskins. Anahitic deities are distinctly brewed with heavy Hellenic and native Armenian influences. Here’s an example of one deity that’s very clearly from indigenous Armenic beliefs.

There is one more country that adopts this new faith. Starting as a tributary to the Antigonids, Commagene has one of the most mixed starts in terms of culture and religion. Thus, it makes sense to include it in Anahitic, which is one of the more syncretic religions of the game. They will also sport their own exclusive deities. You can access these as a different nation if you manage to capture their region as an Anahitic country. They have rather unique modifiers since they’re very niche deities.

I have to shoutout the excellent work of Samitte. They had a fantastic forum post that inspired many of these changes and deities for the new Armenic faith, and they were sourced super well! Also shoutouts to Omega for giving me the resources to implement it.

Welp, that’s all for religion… is what I would say if it was. But there’s actually another religion added! I introduce to you the faith of the Austro-Asiatic settlers of Burma, Natic!

Honestly, the bigger reveal is that Bon is pink again, crazy right? Anyhow, Natic is named as such for the belief of ‘Nats’ or spirits in the pre-pantheonic beliefs of the people.

Nat is effectively an Animist belief system, however, during this time period, the Bon beliefs of the Pyu people would undergo heavy syncretism with the Nat believers who were there before. This syncretism lead to a proto-pantheon. The cult of 37 Nats were the most revered spirits among an innumerable amount of spirits. These 37 Nats would eventually become a pantheon of 37 gods. It’s important to note that this does not happen during this time period, and thus should be thought of not as gods, but as Nats. (I guess you could say they’re nat gods!)

To further emphasize the animist nature of the Natic belief, a set of deities is added purely based on the terrain of your capital.

There is a Nat for every type of terrain, including ones that are no where near where the Natic beliefs are. Some are pretty strong, so it might be a fun campaign to find a particularly strong terrain Nat on the other side of the world and dominate!

Including the last DD, that makes half a dozen new religions to play with! Hope you have as much fun trying out the new religions as I had making them! Time for me to pass the baton to Dementive.

Howdy, it’s Dementive to show off some new random events that I have worked on that are different than the ones that Zorgo made, although he did add the localization for these new ones. In this next update, there will be over 50+ repeating events that based off of specialized triggers that check for pop types and building types in a province, such as…

The amount of nobles in a region - the more there are, the more trouble there might be between them.

Your large slave estates might attract the wrong kind of attention.

Your troublesome citizens are always going to be a pain in the neck, aren’t they?

But they are certainly better than your freemen, who are always causing problems.

Your military infrastructure, as important as it is, will occasionally have issues that need to be addressed.

Hopefully your countrymen will do a decent job of managing their holdings…

Don’t worry, as there are plenty of good things that can happen as well…it’s just that people always seem to remember the bad times.

Between these events and the ones Zorgo added, we have effectively doubled the amount of events when compared to vanilla, so enjoy!

 

[Snowlet]

The 1.6 - Pantheion (new save needed) update is out, now also compatible with Mac!
Go check it out on the workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532715348
Or on the PDX store: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/27170/Any

To continue old saves, use: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2971810224
We also have a wiki: https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Imperator_Invictus

Patch notes can be found below.
New/expanded mission trees:
- 2 mission trees for Tasm
- Large tree for Cappadocia with many paths
- Large tree for Paurava
- Large tree for Nabatea
- Regional tree for Odrysia
- Regional tree for Dumnonia
- Regional tree for Iberia (the Caucasian country)
- Regional tree for Eburonia
- Regional piracy tree for Illyrians
- Expanded Antigonid's first mission tree
- Expanded Hellenistic empire mission tree
- Expanded later Macedonian mission trees
- Reworked Fezzani missions
- Reworked Numidian missions
- Minor rework to Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdom missions
- Slightly reworked most of the Germanic mission trees

Map changes:
- Reworked and Expanded Arabia: new South Arabian culture group, interior passage and more
- Reworked and Expanded the Steppes: new cultures, tags and a larger map
- Reworked and Expanded India: 3 new areas, 3 new religions and a new tag setup in Central-India
- Added minority and enslaved pops around the world
- Added many new impassables to Iberia, North-Africa and India
- Added several new navigable rivers
- Added Steppes terrain type (increased movement speed, decreased population capacity)
- Added 150+ deities to every religion around the world
- Added 5 new religions, Illyric, Natic, Agamic, Ajivika and Anahitic
- Hindu has been split up into Agamic and Vedic
- Added new map models to Burma
- Reworked terrain in Arabia and the Steppes (thanks to MattTheLegoman)
- Updated regions setup

Added content:
- Added 200~ generic events
- Added 30~ events for specific religions
- Regional rebellions will no longer cost more than 100 warscore to retake, they'll have larger levies and be consolidated into one country
- Tribes will no longer just collapse, instead they'll turn very aggressive for several decades before finally collapsing into Regions instead of Areas
- Reworked all levy templates to make historical sense, account for military traditions and make AI more intelligent in their usage
- Implemented Crownsteler's Coat of Arms
- Added a number of new Coat of Arm's for formables like Fezzan
- Added dozens of new event pictures
- Added dozens of new icons
- Added a dozen heritages mainly in Illyria
- Added new gamerules: toggleable Galatian invasion/regional rebellions/Mauryan Collapse and Seasonal food, also option for extremely aggresive meme-ai
- Integrated and adapted More Character Traits mod
- Added Alania, Arabia, Odrysian Kingdom and Germania as formables
- Added Gallus decision to Cybelene countries
- Added Persian decision to rebuild Persepolis
- Added cult decision to Illyrians
- Added predefined characters to a number of countries
- Added the new Great work components from Julianos' Great Wonders Refined mod

Changes:
- Improved performance due to new 2.0.4 debugging tools
- Deity GUI now shows deity description when hovering
- Removed custom achievement system since 2.0.4 will allow vanilla achievements
- Aqueducts now additionally give 1 civ cap
- Indian caste laws disabled for AI as they can't handle it
- Nerfed a lot of broken modifiers
- Made Parthia more likely to form
- Dahae is now a tier 2 formable instead of tier 3
- Archers have slightly lower maneouver than cavalry now
- Chariots have higher maneouver than infantry now
- Heavy infantry do less damage to spearmen, but take 5% less damage in general
- Light Infantry have a lesser penalty against Heavy Cavalry and Horse Archers
- Spearmen do slightly more damage against Light Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Horse Archers and Chariots
- Improved AI's budgeting skills
- Tweaked AI's diplomatic acceptance values
- AI now accounts for the Levy size modifier
- Improved general AI's ability to declare war
- AI won't go bankrupt when they get spawned units
- AI is slightly better at choosing governor policies
- Improved Carthaginian's AI ability to navigate its missions
- Improved Rome's ability to expand into Gaul
- Made Roman/Dictatorial civil war less likely to crash the game
- New traits are now accounted for in AI decision making
- Improved religious holy site triggers in generic missions
- Added centralization to Steppe Horde government type
- Caucasian culture group now has access to Anatolian/Armenian traditions
- Greek traditions now give more Spearmen bonuses instead of boosting Archers
- Iberian traditions now give Light Infantry bonuses instead of boosting Archers
- Iberian traditions now have bigger Heavy Cavalry bonuses
- Celtic traditions now give Spearmen instead of Heavy infantry bonuses
- Nabatea now has access to Arabian traditions
- Nerfed Nubian archer traditions
- Occidental culture group now has custom Graphics group (combining several models)
- Egyptian AI now accounts for new Cyrenaican content if a player is on it
- Updated tooltips and minor effects in Judean tree
- Ashoka dying should now trigger the collapse instantly instead of having to wait for a yearly tick
- Ptolemaic Kingdom now has access to Pharoah trait
- Updated tradegood triggers so valuable goods now won't get replaced, and all food tradegoods now actually are ones that give food
- Updated a number of province names
- Updated console GUI with QOL features
- Updated Government GUI with QOL features
- Updated Portrait Editor with QOL features
- Updated techonology view GUI to show relevant traits
- Updated localization files
- Expanded French, Spanish and German translations

Bugfixes:
- Cleared the error log
- Made boar actually trigger, no I will not clarify
- In doing the above, fixed many tiny errors not worth noting
- Fixed naval raiding not being unlocked for various countries
- Fixed broken treasure icons
- Fixed a dozen of broken unit models
- Spreading tradegoods by decision no longer replaces other high-value trade goods
- Switching countries using scripted effect will now account for the Noble levies law
- Fixed custom distinctions being untriggerable
- Fixed several broken Macedonian mission tasks
- Fixed several broken Cyrenaican mission tasks
- Fixed several broken Gymnaesian mission tasks
- Fixed a number of small bugs with Cyrenaican mission trees
- Pu culture group now has access to Indian traditions
- Fixed a broken Berber tradition
- Bactria no longer has access to Scythian traditions
- Slave wonder effect now properly gives 20% slave output
- Pyramids now properly give political influence modifier
- Fixed a broken foundry check in Atropatene missions
- Updated Atropatene localization file to be more readable
- Removed duplicate manpower entry in Barracks building
- Fixed broken sogdian emporium modifier
- Consolidated some NOT OR triggers into NOR
- Properly indented a bunch of files
- Scythia region is now in Scythia

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 71: Nhialic and Swanco religions

Salvete!
Today we’ll be: talking about the Nhialic and Swanco religions, announcing another Discord AAR-challenge and show some amazing models made by MattTheLegoman.

But first, a much requested feature, here’s a map showing every mission tree in the mod.

Now onto the challenge - and its reward. Some of you might remember the AAR contest that we had to celebrate 10,000 subscribers - the winner then suggested ideas for a mission tree, which resulted in the “Pirate Illyria” campaign that you can now play. Well, we are reviving this idea for the next month or so while we wait for the next update! Make an AAR about your Invictus campaign. Our favourite AAR will be chosen, and the winner of it will get to choose a region or country that will receive a mission tree. There will be more info, prizes, and challenges on the Discord in the ‘challenges-aars’ forum which you can here: https://discord.gg/eaPhRbSq73

As for the amazing models by MattTheLegoman for the Insular (British) Celts. Here’s some screenshots, all of these were added in the hotfix which released yesterday.

With that being said, time to hand you over to Izn and his religious reworks.
Hello i’m Izn, and I’d like to pull your attention to, beyond the bounds of Egypt and Nubia, the Nilotic people and their Nhialic religion!

The Nhialic religion is very distinct from its surrounding faiths. The Nilo-Saharan pantheon includes a strikingly Abrahamic-God like supreme being in Kowth Nhial. With him are lower spirits called Cowlics, or Sky spirits, and below them are the Earthly spirits. They currently have 8 new deities that I will briefly go over.

War
Macardit, a powerful spirit of lightning. He would be seen as an evil figure later in the Nhialic mythos for some Nilotic peoples. It is said that those who he smites with his lightning were deservedly killed.
Tutgar, the great Kowth Nhial in his powerful Ox form. The supreme being can more easily interact with mortals in this mighty form.
Economy
The Cowlic Deng, the strongest of all the Cowlics, this sky god can help build civilizations from the ground up.
And his son Garang, the god of the Sun, his powerful nature is similar to that of his father.
Culture
Kowth Nhial himself, the supreme being, the Kowth spirit of the faith. This god of gods is sometimes compared to Abrahamic God in his supremeness over the Nilotic peoples.
Nyikang, the legendary founder of the Nilotic peoples. Though a mere mortal, his legendary spirit is sure to attract followers in his reverence.
Fertility
The great goddess Buk reigns as both a Sky and Earth spirit. She is the mother of the strongest Cowlic, Deng, thus it’s only natural for her to have a reverent place among the people.
And the mysterious goddess, the Colwic of Abany. This goddess’ name is lost to time, but her legacy continues in the goddess Hathor of the Egyptians, for the Colwic Abany the Proto-Hathor.
Nhialic comes with spread teetering down from the lower Nile, and holy sites sitting at the upper end of it.

NOW, another religion at the edge of the map, this one I’m super excited about. Replacing the worst religion in the game, in the depths of the Tarim Basin, the Indo-European isolate faith, enter Swanco!

Yep, that’s right, Ritualistic is no more! It was split up into a few other religions, including this Tarim Basin religion. The Tocharians and their religion was quite interesting to piece together. Along with the Hittites, they were one of the earliest branch offs from the Indo-Europeans. This means their faith and language is most comparable to the ancient Anatolians, oh how the world works in strange ways. The deities for Swanco are quite interesting in my opinion, so let’s talk about them!

War
Witerhu, the god of war. While there’s no direct naming of the god of war, this is a reconstructed name based upon the Hittite god Terhu and the Tocharian word witare, which means ‘to fight.’
Yakwi, the twin horse gods. In many Indo-European faiths, there is the presence of the twin horse gods, as such, the name ‘Yakwi’ literally means ‘two horses.’
Economy
The second most important deity of the Tocharians, the goddess Menya. Menya was, in fact, important to the point that she may have held equal importance as the head of the pantheon, who we will get to later.
Now, Swese, the goddess of weather. A rather fun reconstruction, Swese comes from the Tocharian word for rain. Her presence in the pantheon here can be credited to the Hitties and their rain god with very similar roots.
Culture
The goddess Kem, another Tocharian goddess of high importance. Kem follows the Indo-European trope of an Earth-Mama goddess.
The god Iprer, which comes from the Tocharian word for Sky. Since there is an Earth-Mama, there is reason to believe there was a Sky-Daddy too. Iprer probably existed as a lesser deity for the Tocharians who seem to prefer their goddesses.
Fertility
Kaum, the goddess of the Sun… although not the goddess of the Sun. It’s hard to know how Kaum fits into the pantheon. Her name may be of foreign origin, however, she seems to be a Tocharian goddess nonetheless; perhaps important too, given her similar theme to the head of the pantheon.
And finally, the greatest of the Tocharian deities, the goddess of the Sun, Swancho! She is the most widespread and best attested deity of the Tocharians. Her name comes from the original Tocharian word for the Sun, and it’s clear she held great importance for the Tocharians.

And of course, there’re holy sites spread throughout the Tarim Basin.

You might be wondering what replaces the rest of the Ritualistic religion. The religious rework in that region, however, will have to be saved for another time!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 72: Icenian Mission Tree and Nuragic tweaks
Salvete!
Today we’ll be presenting the Icenia mission tree, some tweaks that have been made to the Nuragic lands and some QOL features for the GUI.
For the Icenia tree, i’ll hand you over to Zorgoball.

Hello everyone, Zorgoball here to introduce and show off the latest tree for the tribes of Britannia - in the 1.7 update of Invictus, there will be a mission for Icenia. Twenty tasks await you as you personally guide the “Ascent of the Cenimagni”.

The Iceni were a tribe that lived in southeastern England, and are perhaps mostly known for the rebellion that was led by their queen Boudicca about sixty years after the game’s end. While this famous incident is well beyond our time frame, other things that the Iceni were known for - their skill at metalworking, their fondness for chariots, horses and trade - are all represented here. You will be tasked with building up your economy while fighting to form Pritania, and while there are some shared missions from the Dumnonia tree, all involving the Aquae Sulis holy site and Druid Event Chain associated with it, everything else here is completely focused on the Iceni. We will start on the left side of the tree, where the military aspect of your campaign will come into focus.
When the game starts, your people are in possession of most of your home province of Icenia, but there are three territories that the Trinovantians to the south have moved into. You won’t be able to progress any further until this mistake has been corrected.

Once you have unified your home province, you will be able to build upon this momentum by preparing claims against your neighboring tribes en masse. The promise of the glorious battles to come will inspire your levies to fight like they never have before!

The Iceni were known to be diplomats, trusting in their connections when it came to matters both domestic and international, and this is reflected in a couple of tasks. You will need to cultivate friends in your backyard as well as across the water, as there are obvious benefits for doing both.

There will be rewards for consolidating your hold on the island, which will open up even more opportunities for investing in your new territories.

In an effort to increase your holdings as you subdue your foes, you will be able to take things from them - not just their gold, but even their Elders shall be numbered amongst your possessions…

We will take a look at the right side of the tree now, which will help you build up your capital region and make your city of Venta Icenorum the most powerful seat of power in all of Britannia. Because the Iceni were said to be quite fond of gold, you will be tasked with building markets and kickstarting the economy to make sure your treasuries are filled.

If you chose to build the La Tène workshops and supply your blacksmiths with the training and the tools that they need, then there is a good chance that a masterpiece will eventually be produced.

As the reputation of Venta Icenorum grows, new opportunities for your people will make themselves available - the iron in the nearby swamps will serve useful purposes, once a mine has been built in the bogs.

As a tribe, you are unable to raise a legion per se, but the Iceni are unaware of these limitations and do as they please, and their foes tremble at the mere mention of their dread elite force known as the Chariots of Doom. Any time that there is a battle with an enemy where the forces are evenly matched, these quickly-moving chariots have often turned the tide of battle in Icenia’s favour.

In 2011, archaeologists discovered an Iron Age road in East Anglia, one that was made of wood and thought to have been built by the Iceni, so you will have a chance to do exactly that.

There are a couple of tasks that we will leave as surprises, but there will be good reasons for your ruler to invest in building up your civilization level.

A couple of other things before I go; a quick peek into Dementive’s workshop, where he has been polishing up some quality of life features that you can toggle on and off as you please. Here is a look at a compact military traditions view, where only traditions available to you are visible.

There will be a similar option for a compact mercenary menu.

The last thing I want to mention before I hang things over is that our AAR contest is still going strong over on our Discord server: https://discord.gg/5K9fd3qSjx, with many ongoing series that are a thrill to read being continuously updated. We have some excellent stories, including “Master of the Steppes”, “To The Strongest”, “Sicilian Ambitions”, “Horsing Around”, “The Hundred Year Quest for North Africa”, “450 AUC: The World After Alexandros”, and even entries written in a dev diary style! We at the Invictus team are having a blast reading about your sensational campaigns, so thanks to everyone who has submitted so far. Remember, the contest is open until June 17th, so there’s still plenty of time to enter. That’s it from me, so here is one of our newest contributors, Acult, to discuss the tremendous work he has done in Sardinia.


Saludi a totus, I’m Acult and today we talk about Sardinia.
The bulk of my work consists in adjusting the majestic work previously done by Zorgoball and the Invictus team, bringing a bit of historical accuracy where the unavailability of creditable English sources had the upper hand on the content integrated for the island.
At this time, the Invictus mod currently contains five playable Nuragic tags: Coracensia, Luguidonensia, Tibulatia, Celesitania and Rubrinsia, as well two mission branches entirely dedicated to the Nuragic culture.
The nations of Celesitania and Rubrinsia got respectively changed to “Kelsitania” and “Rubrensia”, to better suit the historical record available from Ptolemy (Kelsitanoi and Roubrensoi), while instead the nation of Tibulatia has been renamed to “Longonensia”, as the Tibulati were a Roman incolae from Republic time, while the “Longonenses” are an historically attested Corso-Nuragic tribe of north-east Sardinia.

All provinces names of Sardinia have been revisited, correctly assessing each one to the name of the relevant settlement in the area used at the time:

–Province number - Previous name -> New name
3486 - Ferraria -> Sarcapos
Ferraria was an irrelevant minerary settlement on late Roman Republic, the name has been changed to Sarcapos as the latter was an important Sardo-Punic city-state in the area.
3484 - Karli -> Karali
Karali (punic KRL), was a Sardo-Punic city state of a certain size which would later become the center of power in the island during Roman era (Carales/Caralis). The toponym is Proto-Sardinian and related to Carallai (yellow rock)
3483 - Tarshish -> Nura
Misplaced toponym, Nura instead was the center of power during the Carthaginian rule.
3481 - Slahi -> Sulki
The previous name was invented, now replaced with the historical one. A Sardo-Punic city, destroyed by Carthage during the wars to submit the coasts and quickly rebuilt, Sulki would never renounce to antagonise the Tyrean colony, siding with Rome since the very beginning.
3485 (Roman) - Sardopatoris -> Metalla
Only for the Roman culture, the place was also known as Metalla
3493 - Tarrot -> Tarshish
Replaced the invented toponym with the correct one. A city of relevant importance which would have lost most of its former glory after the war against Carthage in 500BC.
3494 - Cornus -> Sanaphar
Replaced a Roman-era name with the local toponym (both mean Horns), Sanaphar was a relevant city state in this area ruled by Hampsicora. It would lately lead a Sardinian revolt against the Roman rule during 215 BC
3497 - Hermaion Akron -> Carbia
The previous name was misplaced and incorrect for the area
3499 - Nymphaios Limen -> Nure
Nure was yet another settlement in north-west Sardinia, it would give the name to the Nurrenses (a Nuragic tribe) and Nurra (the name used nowdays to define such region)
3500 - Mighdal Shradhnin -> Libisonis
The previous name was invented, it’s better to stick with the historical one. This settlement would lately turn to a Roman colony during Caesar era, one of the two only Roman colonies ever founded in Sardinia (the other is Usellis, still during Caesar)
3495 - Aquae Hypsitanae -> Hydata
No need to name a city after an aqueduct if we know the name of the city
3491 - Lesa -> Lacon
Misplaced toponym, switched to the historically attested Lacon (home of the Lakonites, an Iliensian tribe)
3502 - Sorabile -> Lesa
Misplaced toponym, this was the correct Lesa (home of the Lesitani, an Iliensian tribe)
3501 - Ercynum -> Luguido
The previous name was a misplaced irrelevant town of Roman era, switched with Luguido, the historically attested capital of the Luguidonenses, which would lately give the name to a wider region nowadays knows as “Logudoro”
3505 - Portus Tibulae -> Tibula
The city was named Tibula
3506 - Viniolae (missplaced) -> Longones
Very misplaced and irrelevant Roman settlement, switched to Longones, the capital of the Longonenses.
3504 - Qart 'Onim -> Phausiane
A curious toponym invented by the PDX team in the effort to translate the ancient greek “Olbia”, although being the solely Greek colony ever founded in Sardinia, the Phoceans would abandon the area within 20 years of the foundation after a war against Carthage and the Etruscans of Caisra. The settlement became a periferic Carthaginian outpost, locally known as Phausiane (source M. Pittau)
3489 - Fanum Carisi -> Kares
Replaced with a suitable indigenous name, Kares was the capital of the Karenses (an Iliensian tribe)
3487 - Porticenses -> Tyrsenia
Replaced with a locally attested settlement name, Tyrsenia would take the name from Tyrsis, the pan-Mediterranean word to identify Towers, on this case the Nuraghes. The use of this word was attested among Sardinians, Etruscans and ancient Greeks.

About the distribution of cultures in the island, the Nuragic culture has been added to the three missing provinces in the north-east. The punic culture is no longer the majority at Tarshish, Sulki and Sanaphar, while it has been added to Sarcapos.
The ahistorical overpopulation of the cities of Sulki and Phausiane has been distributed among the other equally relevant Sardo-Punic city-states of the time, which were previously severely depopulated.
Phausiane has lost its city status, while Tarshish, Nura and Sanaphar are now cities.

Concerning the “Nuragic Homeland” mission tree, the localization has been tweaked to better fit historical data, for example the “human sacrifice” task (not attested among Sardinians) has been changed to something else.

In regard to the country-specific heritages of the Nuragic tribes in the game, we have a plan to rewrite the localisation of those who do not correctly attain historical data.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 73: Tibet, Hibernia, Caledonia and the split of Zoroastrianism

Salvete!
Today we'll be presenting a new Tibetan tree, a mission tree for Hibernia and one for the Caledonians.
We'll also be talking about a religious rework in Central-Asia and the split of Zoroastrianism in many other faiths.
To begin i'll hand you over to Zorgoball for the Tibetan tree.

Hello everyone, it is I, Zorgoball, and I am here to show off three new mission trees for the update. The first one we are going to look at today, “The Mountain Fortress”, will be available to any monarchy that forms Tibet and also serves as a second tree for Zhangzhung, following up their “The Mountain Kingdom” mission quite nicely. A tall tree for a nation already in the highest mountains…your enemies are never going to break through your defenses when all is said and done.

The first few tasks focus on building an interior highway, one that will reduce the amount of time it takes for your people to travel through your country. Coming from a tribal background, it would otherwise take ages for your nation to reach the civic level required to build roads, so this tree will help your industrious Tibetans achieve this goal as quickly as they can. Here is the final extent of the highway, which could connect Lhasa to the Ferghana Valley;

Although the costs will be great, once this massive infrastructural achievement has been accomplished, your ruler will be (rightfully) celebrated throughout the nation - life in your country will change forever!

The Grand Tibetan Highway will soon become an important part of daily life in your nation, even serving as a training ground for your military. As more sections of the road are upgraded and your Legion becomes better trained, your entire army will receive the benefits of their expertise and knowledge.

Of course, playing tall requires considerable resources, and there will be those in your nation that will attempt to stop your leader from spending so much of your wealth on what they consider to be vanity projects. If you are able to overcome this bickering, however, the rewards will be worth it.

Because this tree is focused on internal affairs, there won’t be much interaction with the outside world, but your ruler could start an event chain involving Buddhist scholars from India.

Once everything inside of your country has been taken care of and your borders are secured, you will then be free to decide what you do next - there’s even a reward waiting for you if you are able to achieve Great Power status. A peek at the final task before we head to the western edge of the map to look at the other two missions.

We hope that you will enjoy playing Tibet - we know that your armies will love the reduced travel times. But now, something completely different! In the 1.6.1 update of Invictus, there will be a mission available to any tag in Ireland that will assist in the formation of Hibernia.

This tree is fairly simple but gets the job done; unite the island, gain a few permanent modifiers, choose a new capital city. The first four missions give you claims on the various provinces around you so that no matter where you are, you can begin consolidating your region. We are also re-using the war mechanic that was debuted in the Eburones “Bravest of the Gauls!” tree here, so you will be able to send ultimatums to those around you - they will have to submit or die!

If you are able to unite the island under your banner, there will be rewards and rejoicing throughout your nation.

There will be discussions as to where the capital of a united Hibernia shall be, with
your ruler ultimately deciding where the heart of the nation, its first city, shall be built.

If all goes according to plan, you will even be able to prepare claims on your enemies across the water.

Unfortunately for you, you might find the Caledonians aren’t pushovers…the “Land of the Painted People” will not be the easiest place to conquer.

Before we look at the tree, which is available to the three Caledonian tags, I’d like to give a special thanks to our tester and contributor Mateusz for helping me fine tune this mission - it would not exist in its current state if not for his help, so a massive thanks for all of his work! The top two tasks start with your tribes preparing claims, some against your kinsmen and some against the Taexalians to the south.

Once you have conquered your neighbors, colonizing the uninhabited territories that surround you will become a national priority.

While both sides of the mission tree open up with conquering tasks, the left side eventually focuses on building up your capital region. The Caledonian tribes might be poor in technology, but there are valuable natural resources in their homelands that you will be able to develop in an attempt to jump start your economy. Precious and base metals, salt on the coasts, stone in the mountains - you will have need of it all.

Once you colonize the Orcades, there will be an opportunity to explore some of the strange ruins on the island.

In addition to conquering your enemies on the road to forming the Caledonian Confederacy, there will be optional tasks that your ruler can decide to do, for life as a tribesman at the ends of the Earth is colorful, dangerous, and filled with all sorts of excitement.

Once you have formed the Confederacy, which happens about halfway through the right side of the tree, you will continue to conquer south - Britannia and Hibernia will both be attractive raiding targets.

If your raiders are successful, you might even find treasure in a plundered grave, preventing our real life archaeologists from discovering it in 1856.

You can expect some more surprises when the update drops! Let me hand things over to the Master of Religions, Izn.

Surprise, surprise, it’s me Izn and I’m here to kidnap your attention for more religion! If you remember the last time I talked about religion, I talked about the replacement to Ritualistic: Swanco. However, a few of you may have noticed that Swanco’s spread was smaller than the spread of Ritualistic. So, it’s time to show you the religion just west of the Tarim Basin in central Asia.

This religion is dubbed as ‘Voxite,’ named for the river that runs to the Aral Sea. Locals know it as the Vakhsh and Greeks call it the Oxus. Hence, Voxite for an easier to pronounce alternative. This religion is truly a crossroads of religion. It is primarily based upon the Bactrian faith, which by this era was still strong and surviving. The Bactrian faith was best attested to have a deity of the very same river Vakhsh mentioned earlier. However, the pantheon has been subject to a myriad of influences. You’ll first notice the large Zoroastrian pockets. Voxite is heavily influenced by it, with some historians claiming Sogdia itself was Zoroastrian. However, upon closer research, it seems that most every god adopted from Zoroastrian in the Sogdian and Bactrian faiths were Indo-Iranic pre-Zoroastrian. This is very likely because of the other Indo-Iranic religion’s influence in the area, Heptadic. It’s quite a mess of religions, and very hard to define, but the easiest way to put it is that it is the Bactrian faith with heavy external Indo-Iranic influences. Despite the origins, you certainly can claim this faith as your own and begin your Voxinations-er…I mean Voxite conversions.

Speaking of Indo-Iranic faiths, I’m sure you have noticed the new pinkish color. I like to think that the color just oozes the idea of ‘Magic,’ quite fitting for this faith, known for its Magi priests, and where we get the word Magic from, in fact. Once the popular faith of the Iranian plateau, the religion of the Medes, it’s Mithraic !

Mithraic is the popular religion of the Medes people, and by this point it has shrunk considerably in favor of Zoroastrianism, which can be seen as ‘Newer’ Iranian faith. However, despite some conflicting sources, I was able to conclude that ‘Zoroastrian’ during this time is a bit of an umbrella term. Mithraic is distinguishable from Zoroastrianism (or more accurately Mazdaeism) for its head god of Mithra. While Mithra was relevant certainly in Zoroastrianism by this point in time, in Mithraic, Mithra stands above all other deities. Zoroastrian elites would be appalled by this reverence for a ‘lesser’ deity and their barbaric Bull rituals, but the people of Medes’ legacy continues strongly in this faith. It also became quite popular in a very different, but similarly named Roman faith. In fact, it is because the Roman faith was influenced, at least slightly, by the Mithraic kings of Commagene that I decided to change the religion of Commagene again. Commagene never really fit in Anahitic, as they had Armenian influences, however they are just a massive mix of religions. And Mithraic was certainly one of these religions. Commagene, in fact, is now the only nation in the game that starts with this unique religion.

Oh, and I’m sure some of you may have noticed that Chaldean is looking rather… large.

Hmm, in fact, that seems to be right where the Elamites, Uxians, and even Cossians are! The Elamite subfaith, as well as a Kassite subfaith, have been added! They each have access to a whopping 25 unique deities. I won’t go into too much detail as this… is pretty much adding 50 deities for the AI to use, HOWEVER, I will highlight the importance of Humban–who will be accessible to Zoroastrians, especially those in the Iranian plateau. Humban is the single most mentioned deity in the Persepolis fortification archive. A whopping 26 times, more than double than Ahura Mazda’s 10 mentions. Humban was such a popular god, it was sometimes argued that he became more of a Persian god than an Elamite one! This said, he will remain in the Elamite subfaith with his Elamite brethren. Perhaps someday, the Elamites will get some more playable options to fully explore this subfaith.

Ahh, completely reworking Zoroastrianism. I sure do love ruining these umbrella faiths and wetting these regions with religious diversity, butl, that’ll be all… for the Persians at least. There’s still one more religion I’d like to show off, but I must mention that the majority of this religion was made before I was even on the team. While I’m presenting it, I’ve mainly just ported this over from a more secret internal branch. So big shoutouts to Omegacorps for making the religion happen, and also Acult for leading me in making the deities of this religion.

The Nuragics receive their very own religion! The Nuragic people have inhabited these isles since the Age of Bronze and their religion is a truly unique one. Centered around their main god of many names, this faith is either a Henotheist or Monolatrist faith, meaning it’s a faith which worships only one god while acknowledging the existence of others. Because of this, the deities are primarily made up of different Epithets of the main god from different interpretations and peoples. However, you’ll also find syncretism in this religion from places as far as Egypt, as close as Carthage, and of course some Hellenic.

SO THEN, there you have it. This patch will have 5 new religions, 2 new subreligions, and over a hundred new deities. Not so shabby if I do say so myself! With all of this stated, I have really started to feel the boundaries of reality come crashing in on adding more new religions. There certainly are more religions to work on, however, there likely won’t be many more major religious upheavals like the split up of Indic religions, Zoroastrian religions, et cetera. I do hope you enjoy the new religions that have been added to the game, be sure to give them a shot and check out all the unique deities from all over the world.

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 74: Tylos, Vasconia and 1.6.1 release date

Salvete! Today we'll be talking about 2 new mission trees, one for Tylos and one for Vasconia coming in the 1.6.1 update.
But first, we have an announcement: the 1.6.1 update containing various minor changes and mission trees that will be mostly save-compatible will release on or around the 1st of August.
That being said, i'll hand you over to Zorgoball.

Hello, it’s Zorgoball, and I am here to do one of my favorite things in these dev diaries - reveal brand new missions for 1.6.1! The incomparable Aerozona has given us all another magnificent tree, this time bringing his considerable talents to the Iberian peninsula. Will you be able to lead the settled tribe of Vasconia to an illustrious future, one where they dominate the mountains around them and control a thriving confederation that is centered around the Vasconian heartlands? Only time will tell if you will ultimately become the “Master of the Pyrenees”, but there will be sixteen tasks and a couple of event chains to help you along your way.

The Vasconian tribes control the only land route through the Pyrenees, making their province of Iacca one of the most important places in all of Tarraconensis, and a highly contested one at that. Making sure that this strategic region is properly fortified is something that you will need to do right away, lest you find impudent armies from the north marching straight to your capital.

The mountains are fine and dandy, but everyone with half of a brain knows that the ocean is where the real action is, and although the waters of the Mare Cantrabrum are tantalizingly close to your borders, the tribes of Vardulia to your west are currently in the way. Instead of just beating them up immediately, however, you will have the chance to explore some options that will make this more than just your run-of-the-mill conquest task - maybe there are diplomatic solutions that your emissaries can figure out?

Instead of going for the immediate claims with the second option, I’m going to see what happens if I push for a peaceful solution.

No one can’t say that we didn’t try. Hopefully, your outcome will be different than mine! Another sticky issue that your Tribal Chief will have to deal with is your own semi-independent kinsmen - the mountain people that live far away from the capital.

I’ll leave the rest of this event chain to your own playthroughs, but you can see that there are some unique problems that your ruler will have to contend with from the very beginning of the game. But once you have determined what you are doing with your brethren in the north, you will then have the wherewithal to turn your attention to your capital of Calagurris in the south.

There are a good number of tasks that focus on improving the countryside; constructing farms, training camps and tribal settlements will become a task that is all too familiar to your hard-working laborers. Thankfully, the rewards for their efforts are worth every drop of sweat and every hour spent toiling until the cruel Iberian sun.

There will be some neat interactions that you will have with the people north of the Pyrenees as well; you will raid some tribes and become fast friends with others, with unknown rewards for these strange alliances.

Here’s a quick look at a couple of other things that you will be able to do;

There is also a really fun event chain where you ruler goes incognito to observe some of the people that have moved into your capital, but I want to leave the other events as surprises…and there are more than a couple of them waiting for you in Vasconia.
Let’s switch gears a little bit, and take a look at mission that had *four* different Invictus devs work on it, combining their powers to create a mission tree for Tylos. OmegaCorps, Typhion, Dementive and yours truly all worked together to bring you the “Revival of Bablyon” - let’s take a look.

Your starting situation might seem dire - you are, after all, a tributary of the mighty Seleukid Empire, and they are very interested in your fortified harbor and gemstones - but with hard work (and a bit of luck), you will be able to restore a Babylonian Age that many believe had passed from the face of the Earth forever.
Before you do anything, it would be wise to attend to matters at home, and seeking the blessing of the traditional shark god Awal is a high priority for your ruler, the Marya. Let’s go down the left side of the tree and look at some of the tasks that focus on improving Tylos and its already humming economy.

Your ruler will have the chance to interact with all sorts of interesting characters that live on Tylos. There are many businessmen who have their shops set up on your island, including a gentleman that is a purveyor of the finest luxuries for the many nobles that live in your city. If you build the infrastructure that is necessary to expand operations to distant markets, then perhaps you two will have an opportunity to make money together?

In fact, there will be a time when your Marya focuses exclusively on making money, for launching wars of independence and aggression are very expensive endeavors.

The growth of your economy will result in changes being made to the city of Tylos itself, with new buildings sprouting up overnight like mushrooms and causing some interesting events to happen right in your backyard.

Of course, you will have to wait and see what happens next.
Ever the skilled diplomat, your ruler knows that not every victory is won on the battlefield - there are other ways to skillfully obtain one’s objectives, like bribing governors to switch sides. And perhaps the mere threat of invasion will be enough to persuade minds? And surely the Marya of Tylos knows how to gladhand, spreading money around while making sales inquiries? There are undoubtedly a few islands or coastal regions that your neighbors would be willing to sell to you.

While restoring Babylon itself is a lofty goal, there are smaller stepping stones along the way that will be of assistance. Your neighbors will certainly notice when you reform Tilmun, that ancient trading power whose name still commands respect along the coasts of the Sinus Persicus.

As you continue to build your kingdom around the isle of Tylos, the right side of the tree will assist your expansive trade network in its growth, and before you know it, your ships will be heading far east.

Restoring the rites of a long-abandoned god will be something else that your citizens will be happy to witness.

You might even have the opportunity to research the origins of your people…

Yeah…definitely not spoiling this event chain. All of this and so much more awaits you in the Tylos tree!

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 75: Saba, Qataba and Nabhapakti missions
Salvete!
Today we'll be presenting a number of missions including ones for: Saba, Qataba and Nabhapakti.

But first, a small announcement; congratulations to Gladius for winning our AAR contest! While it was a close competition between the many outstanding contributions, “Master of the Steppes, a Yancai AAR” had just enough votes to come out on top. We look forward to working with Gladius on designing a special mission tree for a region of their choice in the future!

Nepal:
Hi, it’s Izn, and I’m here to talk about religion… er… force of habit. I am actually here to talk about a tree for the remnants of an independent Nepalese state: Nabhapakti.

And let’s see an overview of the tree too.

Please be aware that none of these tasks are final, and you may see many name changes and certainly icon changes for these tasks. The tree is divided on two sides. First, let’s take a look at that left side.

This side has you willingly give up autonomy to the Mauryans rather than fight an impossible war against the great Empire. Those familiar with my Paurava tree might see some similar inspirations here, with the objective being to expand through tricky diplomacy, carefully growing like a tumor from the Mauryan Empire. However, things are a bit different here. You exist right next to the Mauryan heartland, no matter how high your relations and friendships with Chandragupta and his descendants are, they aren’t going to give you land that has been part of their domain for hundreds of years now, rightful Nepali clay or not.

There are four main avenues of diplomatic influence here. Nepal, in the past, was home to a collection of city states Nepalese, Vrji, and Mallan cultures. In the Matter of Malla, you will dispute the Mauryan rule in the region, however, that’s best left for when you’re ready to shed the Mauryan yoke. So then, let’s talk about the task to the right. Claiming Kamata to the east is more of a recent Nepalese development in comparison to the legacy of old. Being driven back to the mountains, the Nepalese of Nabhapakti are a tribal people, and so, tribal land disputes naturally occur. One such dispute over the province of Kamata.

Well, culturally it remains Kamarupi, who is to say it shouldn’t become part of your homeland? Even the Mauryans won’t refuse you the claim… given a price.

Of course, if the Mauryans are alright with your claim over the region, they won’t stop you from invading Kamarupa directly to take your rightful land. There are even more benefits for being an obedient subject state. For example, in the task right next to Claim Kamata, the empire will be happy to reward you for loyalty.

Finally, the last task of these four is a bit special. The ‘Poison Pill,’ though rather ominous, is a task that will unlock a series of decisions you can take. You see, the Mauryan Empire stretches vast swathes of land. From the great Ganges River, the isolated jungles just south, the Indus Valley, and even as far as the Greeks just over the mountains, they all fall under one sphere of influence. And you can make use of this sphere by sending envoys to every corner of the empire to preach the greatness of Buddhism. That’s right, I managed to make this about religion again! The ‘Poison Pill’ decisions can spread Buddhism across India, going so far as to even convert other fellow vassals and tributaries, though it should be noted, it’s not exactly cheap to do so. Maurya has up to 8 vassals, including yourself of course, and it’s incredibly difficult to convert everyone. So maybe pick and choose where to spread your influence carefully. While a place like Paurava seems like a good target, the high population density over two half-regions may take all your resources. Meanwhile Atavia has a much lower density and mainly in one region. They may be much easier to convince. This side of the tree comes to an end with a task named ‘Sword of Siddhartha.’ But, let’s go on to the right tree since I’ve talked about this side enough.

The right tree is more about discovering the cultural legacy and history of the Nepalese and surrounding peoples. The way you explore this cultural legacy is up to you. First we start with the task ‘Made of Hundreds of Flowers,’ a reference to the Nepalese national saying.

Immediately after, you’re presented with two choices. Will you trend towards monarchy, establishing a Kingdom where the old and mythical Kirata Kingdom once lay?

Or will you civilize and return to a democratic system based in the very same league of states that Sidhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself, was from?

Please note that the colors will absolutely be changed in the final version. Regardless, there is one thing that’s clear. There… isn’t much expansion is there? Well, you can always take the hard road, expand manually, and show people the power an enlightened Buddhist state can wield through sword… or you can become a beacon of civilization, a mountain of gold, influence states to join you peacefully while they accept Buddha’s wise teachings, and even become an empire… albeit a very different kind of ‘informal’ empire.

In order to do so, there are many interesting and interactive tasks to complete that I worked really hard on... and I’ll let you figure those out on your own time. I gotta get back to work on this tree to get it ready for the update after all!

Hello, it's Zorgoball here to debut some of the outstanding missions that our very own Olivenkranz has finished for 1.6.1. Soon, you will be returning to the sunscorched Arabian Peninsula, where some brand new trees await you as you attempt to conquer the various tribes and kingdoms of the desert. Let us start by examining Saba and the twenty-seven tasks that they have, where you will be tasked with restoring the dwindling fortunes of the once-mighty kingdom.

There are not many who believe in the dream of Sabaean greatness, but thankfully, your leader, the Murakkid, has not lost all hope. Hundreds of years ago, the Sabaeans were in a much different position than the one they find themselves in now. They once controlled trade routes along the coast of Africa and southern Arabia, selling incense and other luxurious goods, and their borders extended far to the north and the south of their own traditional homelands - but all of this is no more. Your economic strength has atrophied, for Qataba and Ma’in, once Sabaean vassals, liberated themselves hundreds of years ago and have quickly become your rivals in the region. You will have to fight against the tides of history if you want to turn things around for your people.

While Saba starts with a negative modifier that represents the state of paralysis that the kingdom is wallowing in, there are a series of tasks that you will be able to do that will mitigate the damaging effects. Over time, when you have succeeded in your attempts at reforming the nation, this negative modifier will disappear entirely, leaving you in control of a nation that is ready to lead its people to the pinnacle of success!

One of the most important things that the Sabaeans will be charged with doing is restoring their capital to its former state - the Marib Dam, with its life-sustaining waters that make your agriculture possible, is in dire need of repair.

Once preliminary repairs have been completed at the Marib Dam, your engineers will want to extend the irrigation canals around the capital.

While there are a good amount of tasks that concentrate on replenishing your heartlands, you will have other types of decisions to make - will you protect the status of smaller communities that live within your borders, or will you force them to try to assimilate? Your ruler will often be called upon to settle domestic disputes, and pleasing everyone will be impossible.

Domestic troubles aside, if you are able to reassert your authority over the trade routes, the rewards will be worth the effort.

Once the situation at home has stabilized to your liking, you will begin the process of conquering the breakaway regions that once acknowledged your authority.

Naturally, you will start your foreign escapades by fighting with the breakaway territories of Qataba and Ma’in, and hopefully the gods will see you avenge the mistakes of your forefathers by allowing you to conquer these rebels once and for all.

There are many people that you will encounter throughout Arabia…

And once you have solidified your hold on the peninsula, you will absolutely reassert your power in Africa - the Horn will one day be yours!

With a little bit of luck and hard work, you will restore your old strength…but not everyone is rooting for you to succeed. Qataba, in fact, might surprise you - here is a tiny sneak peek at their tree, which shares a few missions with Saba but also has plenty of unique tasks. Yes, that’s right - Qataba will get a tree of their own, but I am only going to show you a little of it right now.

Since I am feeling generous today, here’s something else to whet your appetites; a second tree for Saba and Qataba once you finish the first! A quick whirlwind tour through some tasks before I let you go…

Needless to say, things will be heating up in Arabia for the 1.6.1 update of Invictus! Before I go, I have ONE FINAL TEASER for you. Very soon, you will meet one of our brand new devs who has been putting the final touches on an absolutely epic mission. Here are four flags from this mystery tree…

 

[Snowlet]

The 1.6.1 - Pantheion (can break saves) update is out.
Go check it out on the workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532715348.
Or on the Paradox store: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/27170/Any.
You can also join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/5K9fd3qSjx.

If you're in need of some basic tutorials and tips, I made a series showing some of the most effective strategies and common mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxHsw6AGh_O5D-82ZTg4S567F0srO3xIQ.

To continue old saves, use: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3014203278
We also have a wiki: https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Imperator_Invictus

Patch notes can be found below:
New/expanded mission trees:
- 2 Large trees for Heraclea Pontica (Persian path)
- Large tree for Yamnat
- Large tree for Nabhapakti
- Large tree for after forming Tibet
- Large tree for Vasconia
- Large tree for [REDACTED]
- Reworked Sea-Peoples tree to be much larger
- Regional tree for Caledonia
- Regional tree for Hibernians
- Regional tree for Icenia
- Regional tree for Saba
- Regional tree for Qataba
- Regional tree for Tylos


Added content:
- Added African, Nuragic, Southeast Asian and Indian port models - Thanks to MattTheLegoman
- Added a dozen new flags
- Integrated CK3 Apotheosis Coat of Arms (big thanks to them)
- Reworked Chaldean/Celtic/Elamite/Heptadic/Zoroastrian deities
- Added Mithraic/Nhialic/Nuragic/Voxite religions
- Added 4 new heritages as mission rewards
- Added a new culture to Burma
- Added decision to fix the Marib Dam
- Added decision to rebuild the giants of Tarshish
- Added decisions to form Piaoyue and Tilmun
- Added Akitu festival

Changes:
- River, Port and Terrain fixes - Thanks to MattTheLegoman
- Reworked succession code thanks to Paulus
- Lowered Parthian aggression
- Changed Governor policies triggers a bit for better AI
- Made the dictatorship civil war slightly easier and less prone to crashing
- AI should now rush the assimilation techs
- Moved Proto-Europeans to the Iberian traditions from Celtic
- Added slave raiding to the Germanic tree
- Changed Latin HI/LI movement speed bonus to a general movement speed bonus
- Argos coup can now only happen if you have more than 8 cities
- Tweaked Bactrian triggers to make the missions more playable, requiring less Political influence and money
- Added some highlights to various missions
- Removed instant assimilation of pops from Dictatorship civil war
- Changed maximum amount of required pops for unlocking military traditions from 350 to 300
- Added some QOL changes to the Fezzan tree
- Slightly reduced the assimilation debuff from unrest
- Added some historical modifiers to Sardinia
- Reworked some formables colours
- Added some flavour events around the world
- Added Blood of Shaushtatar as a functional bloodline
- Ritual sacrifice is no longer infinitely repeatable
- Rebalanced a lot of random modifiers, mainly reworking general Discipline buffs

Bugfixes:
- Renamed new_armenian_religion internally to anahitic_religion
- Changed the rarity on a dozen deities
- Fixed Indo-Greek invasions and the ability to tagswitch to them as Maurya
- Fixed Ishara deity not appearing
- Simplified special government types temporarily
- Fixed a dozen of broken heritage modifiers
- Fixed a number of broken invention triggers
- Fixed Bloomeries giving base tax instead of tax modifier
- Fixed released puppet Sicilies forming Sicily again
- Fixed broken regional claims for Roman and Greek trees
- Removed unneeded Political Influence cost to some missions
- Fixed double Belgae civil war
- Fixed Punic puppet events
- Fixed a number of bugs related to the new generic events
- Added the correct characters to Cyrenaican events
- Fixed Cappadocian events being prone to breaking
- Fixed duplicate province names
- Fixed heirs getting too many friends
- Fixed Diadochi ultimatum not accounting for Antigonus dying early
- Reworked the military traditions bypass for revolts
- Fixed Eburonian missions not increasing a local modifier
- Fixed a lot of broken tooltips throughout the mod
- Fixed a lot of modifiers not being obtainable
- Added a lot of useful bypasses to missions
- Fixed a number of broken Mauryan, Sogdian, Tasm and Nabatean mission tasks
(Fixed every known and reported bug)
- Fixed too many localization errors to count
- Updated French/Spanish/German translations

 

[Snowlet]

Dev Diary 76: Cyrenaica, Libya and the Egyptians
Salvete!
Today Izn will be presenting more native Cyrenaican content, an Egyptian Culture Rework and a teaser for the [REDACTED] tree we released last update. And so i’ll hand you right over to him.

Hey and hey, it’s me Izn. It’s come to my attention that 2 years ago, on the 23rd of August 2021, Dev Diary 15 released. At the end of the Dev Diary, there was a certain claim made from former Invictus dev Torugu, who mysteriously vanished from the scene soon after. ‘That’s it for this Cyrenaica Dev Diary. The final Cyrenaica DD, which you can expect several weeks from now, will have the second Libya mission tree, some content for Egypt if it gets taken over by Magas, as well as a grab bag of minor features that I haven’t had the chance to show off yet.’ Well, it has indeed been several weeks to say the least, and yet there was never a final Cyrenaica DD. This was the last image we ever saw relating to this mysterious Libya tree that was never meant to be.

Although I’m quite far removed from the team two years ago, it was suggested to me that I pick up the long since abandoned work of the Cyrenaica tree. And so, I dub this little reclamation process internally as the Cyrenaica Encore trees. I wanna go over what I’ve worked on so far and my future plans with Cyrenaica Encore. Throughout this Dev Diary, I’ll be parroting the Dev Diary from 2 years ago. Without further ado, here’s the updated Libyan Resurgence tree, based largely on the scraps and crumbs I was able to find from Torugu!

Despite it being largely the same, you may notice that some of the tasks have differing durations. That’s simply because I had to look at these tasks and take a guess on what in Adaelus’ name Torogu wanted, and what I could do to put my own flavor on it. Heck, sometimes all I had to go off was the very screenshot of the tree from earlier, as well as Dev Diary 15 itself. So then, let’s break down this new interpretation of the Libyan Resurgence tree.

“Becoming Libya is initially a bit of a step backwards as Libya starts as a federated tribe. However, the large number of highly cultured Cyrenaican Greeks in your newly conquered territory means that it doesn’t have to stay that way for long: The left half of this mission tree focuses on integrating the Greek population and fast tracking you towards monarchy.”

This vision stays pretty much the same for said left side of the tree. You’ll be able to take the fast pass to the front of the ‘civilized’ line thanks to your formerly Greek owned territories.

Torugu in DD15 mentioned that his favorite task was Letter’s for the Libyan Tongue. Now, this had to be reinterpreted as several concepts don’t exist in the current version of Invictus that he outlines in Dev Diary 15. You will, of course, still have the option to adopt the Greek script, which will give you modifiers fitting for using the Greek’s help, or you can instead go for the Tifinagh script used by the Numidian (West Amazigh) peoples. Originally, the task had you entice someone to your court of Numidian culture, however, I found this to be rather awkward and strange in practice… in addition, every Numidian state is painfully outside of your diplomatic range by the time you reach that task. Instead, I’ve reinterpreted this into an event chain where you figure out how to ‘acquire’ a suitable Numidian scribe into your court. You can either use your diplomatic skills, dabble in some bribery, or straight up kidnap a poor Numidian. Regardless of how you get this Numidian scribe into your court, you’ll then be able to implement the Tifinagh script, and it’ll take around a year to actually implement it.
Unlocking the ability to write won’t just leave you with a simple modifier, but also newly available decisions tailored to the script you chose.

As for my own favorite task that I’ve designed so far, it’s Seek Common Ground. It’s another event chain, this time one that draws on the comparisons of culture and religion. It ends in an action packed narration by the legend Zorgoball, which I will tease ever so slightly.

The task will also allow for a recurring event about a game, similar to the Olympics in implementation for the game, though quite different in practice; and an associated Great Wonder to boot. May Lady Barce herself bless the players with good RNG in the coming games o7.

Though all of this may be a tad off putting… I think Torugu put it best when he talked about the hesitation you might have to actually go down this left path, so I’ll let his words speak for me.
“-having only just triumphed over the Greek invaders, you might balk at integrating them into the administrative structure of your country. If so, you will want to follow the other branch of the tree. That means that you’ll have to reform your government the old-fashioned way, but you will have the opportunity to become a true terror for the countries unfortunate enough to border you.”
Let’s get right into it then. For this right path of the tree, instead of centralizing and taking on Greek culture, you’ll enact a sweet revenge, and some cultural reclamation, to the chagrin of the Cyrenaicans. After all, those pompous Greeks never forget to remind the world of Libyan barbarism. Then, I say, why not show them how much of barbarians you can be!

Now, frankly, I don’t know how in Ammon’s name I would replicate all these ideas yet. Telugu was playing with a mechanic that doesn’t even exist in Invictus, nor will it. As such, I have less to show for this side (for now)… but, I will mention that this side will transform you into what can only be described as a desert horde! Or perhaps more fitting to call it a… camel horde? Regardless, the concept is that you’ll be adopting the strongest tribal government type, the Steppe Horde, but with a modifier that sacrifices some Steppe Horde modifiers for in exchange for some that would be better fitted to the desert instead. In addition, the Terror from the Desert is its own powerful modifier made to further highlight the feeling of becoming a true monster of the sea of sands.

I also would like to take a moment to mention that either path of this tree will lead to different trees to further establish yourself. After all, being the King of the Eastern Libyans only means so much when there are Libyans east of yourself. And then, why not become the King of all the Libyans-or better yet-of all the Amazighs?

Or if you go down the tribal path to become the Terror of the Desert, and you want to live up to your name of terrorizing ‘civilized’ people, then there is no place better to turn than to the banks of the Nile Delta. The legacy of the Meshwesh dynasties, the 22nd and 23rd dynasties of Egypt, could be reclaimed if Kemet again finds herself under the domination of the Great Chiefs of Ma.

Next, I’ll talk about the revisions and expansions to the first Cyrenaica tree. Most of you probably aren’t aware that there are sometimes ghosts hiding within the script. So, I had to delve into the realm of Hades to confront these spirits. What I found was a whopping 12 tasks waiting to be added to the fantastic first Cyrene tree.

In addition to updating the fabulous original tree with some quality of life improvements (like events firing for every mission task), you’ll get a whole new side to the tree. There’re more to these plans, and in fact, there’s a potential for even more. However, that will have to come from further motivation. I can at least promise those three Libu trees and the reclaimed expansion to the Queen’s Firstborn tree.

That’s really all I have for the Cyrene side of things, but since it’s in the area, I’d like to talk about the Egyptian culture rework I’m also working on. It took a meticulous amount of reorganizing pops across the desert to get this balanced correctly, and I do believe the result will be quite satisfactory. Here’s the new map of Egyptian cultures.

I’ll quickly go over the what-and-whys of this. Sahidic and Bohairic are horrible names for Egyptian culture in the 3rd to 1st centuries BCE. Those words refer to the dialects of Coptic spoken across the Nile. However, Coptic isn’t even prominent yet! Instead, some proto-Coptic is starting to be used, while Demotic Egyptian is the major script and tongue. In fact, Sahidic and Bohairic don’t show up till something like the 5th century CE. Faiyumic is another dialect of Coptic, but it can just as easily describe the people of the Faiyum independently of it’s later use as a term referring to the dialect. Meanwhile, Bohairic and Sahidic are much more intrinsically linked to the dialects themselves rather than the region or people of the areas they cover. Therefore, I changed Bohairic to Memphite and Sahidic to Thebaic. These names aren’t perfect, but they’re much more logical and fitting for the time period than the alternatives.

There’s also the new culture of Oasitae. Previously, the Oases of Egypt were either Sahidic or Faiyumic… which doesn’t make a lick of sense, really. While it would be accurate to split up the Oasitae into the Oases near Farafra and the Oases near Siwa, for balance reasons, they’re being grouped together into one culture for the Egyptians who inhabit the red lands of Set. This Oasitae Egyptian culture is surprisingly sizable with around 100 pops in it. There is also a buff to Upper Egypt’s population to account for these new Oasitae pops, which actually works out since Upper Egypt already had some questionably low pop counts in cities. It certainly isn’t the height of Thebes’ population anymore, but it was like a dead zone before.

Mm, I suppose since this isn’t just a Cyrenaican dev diary, I could tease one more thing. A whole hidden tree from your’s truly that’s already in the version of the mod you are playing right now. The ‘redacted’ tree. Please have some patience as I am certainly one for dramatic introductions.

A long time ago, before Alexander was great. Before there was a Persia to conquer. Before there was an Assyria to overthrow. Before the peoples of the Sea would terrorize the world of Bronze. A certain group of people would find themselves alight in the crescent of civilization itself.
Ah… but that light would be ablaze only for so long. It would be stamped out by the sons of Ashur, leaving only the ash.
Millennia have gone by, without so much of a thought of this ash. Buried under the legacies of Assyrians, Babylonians, Medians, Persians, and Macedonians. Perhaps… it takes only a certain person, or a certain people, to find that that ash is no ordinary ash. It shines to only some… a glint of a time long past. And from those brazen ashes, could it be that this long gone empire could, indeed, return?

To all those who seek to reignite the flames, have your eyes blessed by the River Indus and let fate guide your way to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, where the Generals of Alexander Brawl, and where history is waiting to be reforged. Rise… From Brazen Ashes.

That’s it for this Dev Diary. The next Cyrenaica DD, which you can expect sometime in the future, will showcase the other Libya trees, potentially more details on the expansion for The Queen’s Firstborn tree, and maybe some more treats revolving around this strange and interesting piece of the desert we call Cyrenaica.

I hope, if Torugu’s reading, that he’d be happy with the continuation of his wonderful Cyrenaica content. And to the rest, I look forward to seeing your reactions! I bid you all adieu.