West Africa and Eastern Europe are going to be tough nuts to crack. There's woefully little information out there about either region during the 4th/5th centuries, and what little there is based on oral tradition and scant archaeological evidence, neither of which tends to do well in providing CK2-relevant info like de jure, placenames and even rulers' names. I note that the Steam Group labels Eastern Europe as 'Slavonia' (likely lightheartedly, but I'm trying to make a point here) for discussion's sake, although the Sclaveni themselves seem to have not made an appearance anywhere until c.500, give or take a few decades. Africa's even worse, because it's not clear if there's even any oral traditions that date back to then, and Classical geographers seem to have just labeled the region 'Æthiopia' or 'Nigritia' and then decided that was good enough.
For Rome and bits of other areas I have this for place names,
http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/maps/greco-roman/ , it's spare beyond Germania and Persia, but it does have some places in eastern europe (admittidly burial sites, but they may have to do), and does have a few towns in east Africa. Yeah Slavonia was because a few maps I've seen have
SLAVS written over everything to the east of Germania, which seems... unlikely to say the least :laugh:.
The one thing about SWMH is that there might not be enough ancient towns to cover all the additional counties SWMH adds to the map. Eastern Europe is going to be terrifying to work through as it is, but even
parts of Gallia (find 8 classical towns that are located within the county of Eu!) don't necessarily have enough information to provide period-appropriate baronies for every county. I had to make up some toponyms just to fill in ??? entries even for the vanilla map.
On a related note, what's the policy on localizing names and titles? I'm a horrible cultural imperialist and mostly tend to favor English translations like "Western Roman Empire" because I don't understand Latin, Old Persian or Punic, but if the team is really set to do it...
For SWMH, the reason I like it for this time period is that A) it shows the Rhine and Danube Borders much better than the vanilla map, B) Has a far superior setup in the Middle east, with regards to the Desert between Persia and Syria (It means that any wars between the two powers will be confined to the north, as is historically accurate). C) Also shows the sheer size of the Roman Empire (at the time at least). Travel was much slower in Roman times (even with the highways) than is often thought, it could take the best part of a month for troops to get from Alexandria to Antioch.
With regard to the modern Belarus or western Russia, apart from translating the names of villages and towns that seem to predate the 6th and 7th centuries, I don't think there's any other way to represent them (unless you can have provinces that have no baronies pre-built, which I don't think you can).
To be honest, I like having a bit of diversity (although I agree it can be very odd when you get the message "The Vojvoda of Hrvatska has declared war on the Książę of Polska!", so I'm not planning on going that far), perhaps just having Latin, Greek and Persian titles localised?
Of course, I could do a fully English version, with a Localisation Module, which would solve most of these problems. People who want to have the localisation can have it, and those who don't, won't.
Vandals with Old Gods DLC in late bookmarks sholuld be intressting to play
By the late stage, they'll be Arian, and won't be able to use the Pagan mechanics :laugh:.
If you want to continue to ToG you could change the end date from the defines.txt in this case there would be so much death weight after the 11th century that it would lag like hell or you could manually convert it.
Pretty much this, I would love to have a game that covers 1,000 years of European history, but it's not really practical (sadly).
BTW This is how the Cultural Groups will likely be organised (based upon language, because I don't really have a better way of organising them);
Germanic
Thraco-Dacian
Balto-Slavic
Celtic
Iranian
Hamito-Semitic
Finno-Ugric
Latin
Greek
Altaic
Can anyone think of any others?