[MOD] SWMH 2.0 Map, de jure and general history mod. For a superior CK2 experience

[Meneth]

@Celtichugs: This is the culture layout of Scotland in the current version of SWMH. To my knowledge it is historically accurate.
Gall-Goídel is the darker blue.

Disclaimer: I am not on the SWMH team.

 

[Meneth]

@Meneth

Thanks, mate! As I say I wasn't sure if my-long-winded-point was still the case or weather TPaT was using an older version of SWMH!

Is there a way to use the newer versions of both mods together? Or, shall we have to wait for Idib to ask you guys to use the new version and port it into TPaT?

You can probably just copy over the province history files for Scotland from SWMH. Anything beyond that and you're likely to run into compatibility issues, and even the province history files have the potential to cause some issues so back up the TPaT files first.

 

[Meneth]

CJL and Ofalaf has made an anglicised set of loaclisation that we are trying to get to work like submod, but we haven't been able to make it run smoothly yet.

Use dependencies and have the submod override the relevant SWMH localisation files, perhaps? Alternatively simply name the submod's localisation file something earlier in the alphabet; it should then override any localisation entries with the same name present in files with names later in the alphabet.

 

[Meneth]

Dosn't work Have tried everything I can think of but that bunch of localisations isn't very cooperative:glare:

That's... strange.
A moment, I'll see if I can get things working

 

[Meneth]

This should answer the question of "can Meneth override the titles?":

 

[Meneth]

@Leviathan: I don't touch SWMH's localisation files, no.
For the screenshot on the previous page I simply copied SWMH's title localisation files over to PB+SWMH, and used search and replace so replace every single title name with "Yup". As expected, it worked.
So all that needs to be done is to have a submod that has SWMH set as a dependency, and uses files with the same names as the relevant SWMH localisation files.

 

[Meneth]

I have no idea to make such upload, but neverthless I played/tested only with mod SWMH.
Furthermore I detected some other provinces in HRE with also wrong names on the map...Farör-See near Mainz etc.

Furthermore I tested also mod The Prince and the Thane....same issue...also wrong description (maybe only a problem in language german?). It is province 1025 c_reinholdsburg.

How to take a picture, assuming you're on Windows:

1. Hit Prt Scr on your keyboard while in-game
2. Open up Paint
3. Hit CTRL+V
4. Save as JPEG
5. Upload to Imgur

 

[Meneth]

@elvain & Thimorin: Looks to me like it might be an issue with SWMH not having a German translation, and the county thus instead using the localisation for whatever coastal province used to have its ID.

 

[Meneth]

I strongly against reducing the maximum number of holding of Danubian provinces or any where in the map, especially when historical accuracy is used to justify the reduction. Only the number of starting settlements need to be historically accurate, and player should be allowed to freely develop which ever province they like.

Then every single province in the world should be set to 7 holdings max. But that would just be silly.

Holding inflation can be a pretty major issue; the sheer number of holdings in SWMH is one of the reasons why things slow down so much in the last few centuries. At the current number of holdings the slowdown isn't too severe, but it wouldn't take too many more for the game to become unbearably slow on low-end computers after a century or two.

I suppose the only really "major" change to the gameplay itself is the restriction on CBs in the Baltic area, and between Fatimids/Abyssinia. The CBs really are a bit complicated, but they serve a purpose. The rest doesn't really feel like it is very different from vanilla.

I don't actually do anything to the CBs in the Baltic, though I do restrict holy war against pagans in general a bit.

 

[Meneth]

I'm not sure what is silly with 7 holding per province. Performance is a proper reason to limit the number of holding, but 3 should be the minimum for each province.

7 holdings per province would be silly as most provinces simply don't have the economy or terrain to support that kind of development.
Most provinces should probably have at least 3 holdings, yes, though some particularly undeveloped provinces (Finland, northern Russia, Africa, desert provinces in the Middle East, etc) should probably have less.

 

[Meneth]

Ireland could do with even more provinces, it's history is basically a history of constant fragmentation and weak central rule until way after the CK2 period. Even powerful rulers could at best only rule one of Ireland's five regions directly (whatever counts as "directly" in medieval ireland), and had to rely on diplomacy to rule over the remainder of the island.

I agree with almost everything else you said, but this I have to disagree with. Ireland already has a lot of provinces. Any more now and it would simply be too much. Ireland is a tiny area and doesn't have much of a population, so it shouldn't have a huge number of provinces either. 16 is plenty for Ireland. Increasing the number would mean that the number of holdings would have to be reduced, and the provinces there are currently for the most part 3 holdings which is a great base-line.

 

[Meneth]

@Leviathan: I can't quite tell, but there are what, 5 provinces there? That's not unreasonable, a king of Egypt with terrible Stewardship will have a limit of 4 or so provinces.

 

[Meneth]

@Leviathan: I agree. I don't really see any reason why SWMH should have more than a few (10-20%, perhaps) holdings than vanilla. Provinces on the other hand I see the logic in, but not holdings.
Every single new character added or generated by the game inflates the savefiles and slows the game down. This means every single new holding slows the game down, and a say, 40% increase in holdings over vanilla means ~40% more characters, and a considerably slower game.

 

[Meneth]

If I ever figure out how to "aggregate" the duchy/province/holding information into an excelfile I might even slap together an "SWMH holdings mod-mod" by myself... but that info is so spread out in the game files (landed_titles.txt, plus those 100s of province history files) that it is a chore to just get a grip on what the existing holdings distribution is :sad:

Code a parser

 

[Meneth]

@elvain: Thirty-two provinces in Ireland? That is insane.
From what I can find Ireland had a population of ~1.2 million in 1000 CE. Constantinople is estimated to have had a population of half a million or so.
Essentially, the province of Constantinople alone should historically have half as many holdings as Ireland. Doing so would obviously be silly, but it goes to show how silly 32 provinces (a minimum of 32 holdings, but probably more) is, as Constantinople only has 7 holdings.

Ireland was for the most part an irrelevant backwater during the entire Medieval age. Why are they getting such an extreme province density?
This sort of province and holding density will inevitably lead to major slowdowns, making SWMH virtually unplayable after a couple centuries.

I really hope such a massive province and holding inflation is not a direction SWMH is going to go in, as SWMH is already somewhat slower than I'd prefer.

My apologies if some of my post appears a bit hostile, but sometimes one has to be a bit frank.

Edit: A quick test of how much SWMH currently slows down the passage of time:
I compared PB to PB + SWMH, using this simple test: I started the game up, set the process to high priority, started the campaign, zoomed as far out as possible, advanced the game about one month to ensure startup events and such had no effect.
I then let the game run at max speed for 50 seconds, noting down exactly how many days passed.

For PB alone this was 674 days. In PB+SWMH only 535 days passed.
Essentially, PB+SWMH starts off at 80% of the speed of PB alone. How slowdown later in the game is affected is however unknown.
In practice this means that it'll take 25% longer to get from date A to date B. This is at the current level of provinces and holdings, which is to my knowledge about 20% or so higher in SWMH than in PB. It appears to me that the slowdown is equal or higher than the number of provinces/holdings added, and if it is the case that it is greater rather than equal it is entirely possible a 50% increase for example will lead to a considerably larger increase in time from date A to date B than 50%.
It should be quite clear from these numbers that province/holding inflation can be quite detrimental.

 

[Meneth]

Meneth:
I think it was discussed above that there are various reasons for considering how many provinces/settlements should some region have. Even though I agree that 32 is way too many provinces for Ireland, Axl, who works on Britain overhaul, has some reasons to do so.

Don't worry that you sound hostile. Sometimes if you don't like someone doing something, it is very hard not to sound harsh.
Frankly, I hope it won't sound too harsh, but SWMH is not planned to be primarily for PB. My own computer is very low end for CK2 requirements and the game with SWMH doesn't run much slower than vanila.

I understand the reasoning between 32 provinces, and it is not bad reasoning.
However, all I can say is this: 32 provinces in Ireland is something I would expect from a regional map of northern Europe or the British Isles, not from a map of all of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, where Ireland is simply a backwater of marginal importance.

The comparison to PB was simply due to that being the simplest way to test the speed difference. The difference is most likely the same or almost the same compared to vanilla.
Reductions in speed do have a significant impact, and especially on multiplayer. Keeping in sync already forces a lower speed than usual, and combine that with SWMH slowing it down further...

@Meneth:

An Ireland with 32 provinces but only 2-3 holdings per province (with only 1 built in 1066!) is actually a novel and quite intriguing idea. If you look at how Ireland was governed in the middle ages - or rather, how it had pretty much no government at all - such an extremely low density of holdings would fit the land and its historical theme VERY well. Ireland in 1066 had almost no cities and certainly no bishoprics. It's hard to imagine it if you are familiar with Ireland today but back then it was not an agricultural country at all, at least not in the sense that they raised a lot of crops. Ireland was a country mostly of pastoralists, with very little settled life going on. Whose traditional legal code referred to calfs and female slaves as the unit of measurement for the severity of a fine. Warfare revolved around the capture of cattle and slaves, and the imposition of tribute, not around territorial conquest. They didn't even have villages, instead people lived in the sort of settlements you only see in Africa nowadays: A bunch of huts around a kraal type cattle pen. One extended family per settlement, more or less. The CK2 typical castle + bishopric + city province is in this context a very weird and alien construct.

In that spirit it's actually an exciting idea to fill Ireland with lots of 1-holding provinces with at best 1 extra slot for improvement except maybe in the Dublin/Meath area where historically the social development towards settled life, agricultural lifestyle and feudalism took the most roots.

There used to be some mods for Ireland back in 1.05/1.06, made by Irish modders, and all of them focused on making the land less centralized, less feudal and more anarchic. A regular feature of those mods was that Irish duke and king titles would by default dissolve upon the death of the holder. In a country full of 1-holding provinces this actually sounds like a perfect way to represent the anarchic, thinly settled and non-feudal nature of Ireland.

Also if you only put 1-2 holdings into the provinces it is probably even less CPU load than with the SWMH map as it is now. CPU load depends on the number of courts, i.e. the number of feudal rulers in existence at any one time, since events and diplomacy revolve almost entirely around the rulers. Less holdings = less courts = less CPU load even if there are more provinces.

Lots more provinces could do with lower holding caps. I think having the Lebanon / Holy land region fractured into many provinces is cool, but I share Calahir's sentiment that this must not go together with high holding numbers. The holy land region is much too rich otherwise, and k_jerusalem definitely has to be cut down from its 80 or so holdings to a more reasonable 50.

The issue is that this is what's known as feature creep, and once feature creep sets in it can be nearly impossible to get rid of. Set reasonable limits from the very start and the end result will be better.

I agree with you that the holding numbers does need to be cut down somewhere, for the sake of Historical Accuracy mainly (Wallachia and Moldavia for instance) but until they finish the overhaul of the map i can live with a somewhat unbalanced holdings cap in some regions. The map is too much of an improvement over vanilla for me to ever leave SWMH .

Of course it is too much an improvement over vanilla for me to leave it. That's why I'm arguing so vehemently against the feature creep that has now become apparent. Feature creep is in my opinion one of the worst things that can happen to a mod; hell, my entire modding philosophy is built around avoiding it.

 

[Meneth]

Behind every part of the map, there are dozens of hours of research with clear goal: improve de iure and general history map into better gaming experience.. and to add flavour.

And behind every weekly update I release there's dozens of hours put into testing and coding. There truly isn't such a huge difference between map and balance modding, and the two are highly intertwined (hell, I've done some map-modding in PB as well, though of course nowhere near the same extent as in SWMH).

Ireland is marginal and unimportant backwater, but also very popular part of map... and its medieval reality was totally different than the one in feudal Europe. Therefore giving Ireland completely diferent setup would only make sense.

A different setup makes sense. One with tons of holdings doesn't. With 32 provinces rather than the current 16 the number of holdings will inevitably rise unless the average number of holdings is below 2. The end result is that someone with control over all of Ireland would be considerably stronger than currently is the case.
Now, if the planned number of holdings is roughly equal to the current number of holdings (~50, I believe) I'll happily shut up

I am currently working on the Africa overhaul and it also vey unique. For 90% of all those 160 provinces from Egypt to Mali and from Morocco to Songhay or Fezzan I am considering what type of holding(s) should be in many of those 1-2 holding provinces, what type of holding should Timbuktu, Sankore, Tadmekka, al-Azhar or al-Fayyum be. The goal is quite simple - add unique gaming experience.

And that number of holdings seems entirely reasonable for such a large (and populous) area

We know it might cause some complications to you with your mod, but if we would re-ballance the map after every update, we would never finnish it!

How can you know ballance issues of 32 province Ireland when you didn't test it(even we didn't test it yet!)? My biggest fear in Africa was that Fatimids will end up in conquering Mali in half of all games. But so far in the few test games I had, the Fatimids have expanded to the Sahara only once(!) and they did not even manage to keep the entire Fezzan for longer period of time!

I'm not too concerned with that; balance is relatively simple to fix.
The real issue to me is the inevitable slowdown this kind of holding and province inflation will result in. I can fix areas of the game being too strong or weak, but I can't do anything about them making the game slow.
tion.

 

[Meneth]

I think that 32x2 will give a more accurate picture for the Irish overhaul.

32x2 is still quite a bit more than the current number (50 or so)

 

[Meneth]

@axl: My biggest issue with the increase in provinces is the slowdown it will cause. SWMH is already quite a bit slower than vanilla, and further increases in provinces/holdings/characters will make it even slower. This is why I oppose such a high number of provinces in Ireland especially.

 

[Meneth]

# of holdings determines character count and thereby game speed. Not # of provinces.

127 provinces doesn't sound bad for the British isles as long as holding density is appropriately chosen.

# of provinces affects things as well. More positions have to be loaded, more pathfinding cached, more numbers stored (province levies, income, etc). It probably doesn't slow down things as much as # of holdings, but it still does affect speed to some degree.
And of course, with more provinces typically come more holdings. Ireland in the current version of SWMH has ~50 holdings. With 32 provinces the # of holdings per holding would have to be ~1.5 on average in order to keep the same # of holdings.