Elvain's dev diary #1 - Egypt
As I promised, here I go with the dev diary.
Kingdom of Egypt have expanded to the south and the west, at least visualy. The provinces now copy the Nile walley and the kingdom of Egypt will consist of 6 quite large duchies:
I hope I won't reveal much if I also confess that the shiite Fatimid caliphs will have it little harder, as the population of Egypt won't be shiite as in vanilla, but will reflect the medieval reality: there will be large miaphysite minority as well as sunni majority.
One of the things which are not generally known is, that the mother of caliph al-Mustansir was black slave. I will introduce this lady to the game and to add some more flavour, there will also be her black son, whom I made playable... so you will be able to play as a black son of caliph az-Zahir, brother of caliph al-Mustansir... so for a skilled player there is nice possibility of having black shiite caliphs
As I already announced some time ago, there will be few more black characters in Egypt. During the time of al-Mustansir and his influental mother Sayyida Rasad the blacks gained much influence not only among caliph's guards, but also in administration and some of them even become emirs.
Many of us complain that the Fatimids are overpowered. From what I have seen in my test games, they don't have it easy with their sunni subjects. You can expect that the capiph's position will also be weakened by the fact that many of his slave turkish vasals will be sunni, just like their population.
The multicultural Fatimid caliphate was definitely not a cradle of peace.
What can we expect from anomosity between black and turkish slaves, who managed to become emirs by the mid 1060's? Well, you will see in the next SWMH update
Now the last part of this small devdiary is short view to the west of Nile.
In the Fezzan, you will see not only Suleimid dynasty (Banu Sulaym), but also their "friends" of Banu Hilal. I don't want to reveal everything, so here you can only see how the Sahara of Fezzan and Cyrenaica will look like