Dev diary 46 - Great Works, artefacts, and a few other things
A bunch of things have gotten done, and I figure you probably will find some of them interesting
Great Works:
Three new historical Great Works have been added.
The first is the Seokguram Grotto and Bulguksa Temple. Located in Gyeongju, this is yet another slightly cheaper copy-paste of the Great Buddhist Temple (consistent with how vanilla handles its historical Great Works that are religious buildings). It starts at Stage 3 in 769 and is fully constructed in all other starts.
The second Great Work is Ise Grand Shrine. It is naturally located in Ise and is fully operational in all start dates. This is a copy-paste of a
new Great Shrine Great Work type available for Shinto and Japonic Buddhist rulers.
These Great Shrines have access to a few generic upgrades and some unique ones, with the most interesting new ones being Grand Shrines and Shrines dedicated to certain kami. There are twelve to choose from -- Amaterasu-Omikami, Ame-no-Uzume, Hachiman, Inari Okami, Izanagi, Izanami, Ningi-no-Mikoto, Omoikane, Ryujin, Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, and Takemikazuchi -- each with their own separate bonuses, with the Grand Shrine providing a greater bonus than the Shrine. You can only build one Grand Shrine upgrade but can build multiple lesser ones once the Grand Shrine upgrade is done (but not towards the same kami as the Grand Shrine upgrade), so you will have to decide which kami you wish to dedicate a certain Great Work towards (Ise only allows Amaterasu, even if you destroy all upgrades and start over, because Ise
is primarily dedicated to Amaterasu).
As it is a bit more interesting to have the Imperial Regalia around as artefacts we've elected not to have the Sacred Mirror actually stored in Ise Grand Shrine, and the decision to store artefacts has been altered to prevent storing the Imperial Regalia as it otherwise gets "destroyed".
The third, and final, Great Work that has been added is
unique, seeing as it is the Temple and Cemetery of Confucius (before you get overly excited, we've not added Confucianism as its own religion), and you can't very well have a second copy of him buried somewhere without digging him up and cloning him just so you can bury the clone. Located in Jining (actually Qufu, but the province is Jining), this Great Work has completely unique upgrades, and starts at different levels of completion in various starts (and is damaged for about a century from 1214).
With these three Great Works added, Tianxia has added a total of six new historical Great Works (the others being Borobudur, the Shwedagon Pagoda, and Angkor Wat). Given that we've got roughly 50 % more provinces than vanilla and that vanilla only has ten Great Works, we've already added a slightly disproportionate amount, so it is somewhat unlikely that we will add more as things currently stand.
Artefacts:
A good number of historical artefacts have been added, even if all of them are not around in every start (some of them were created rather late). They are:
- The
King of Na gold seal
-
Shaka rising from the Gold Coffin
- The
Murasaki Shikibu Diary Emaki
- The
Nishi Honganji Sanju-rokunin Kashu
- The
"Hell Scroll"
- The
Genji Monogatari Emaki
-
Extermination of Evil
- The
Ngoc Lu drum
- The
Gilt-bronze Maitreya in Meditation
- The
other Gilt-bronze Maitreya in Meditation ("We've already got one of those!")
- The
Gilt-bronze Incense Burner of Baekje
- The
Ishinpō
-
The Tale of the Heike
It's all but guaranteed that there will be more artefacts added at some point in the future, but maybe not in the next update (we'll see), and we did of course add a whole bunch of them several updates back.
Other things:
A number of other things have been done as well, and some of those relevant to China/Chinese Imperial are worth highlighting.
First off, there's a new CB available for vassals of Chinese Imperial empires when their top liege's Mandate rating drops below Average: Pacification (ignore the localization bug; it'll be fixed).
This CB allows all feudal (which includes Confucian Bureaucracy) vassals to declare a duchy-tier war against fellow vassals, targeting a duchy that's either neighbouring or within two sea zones. To the untrained eye, this might
look like the vassal trying to grow their own powerbase prior to possibly going after the emperor (or independence), but it's
surely just a case of restoring order in the emperor's name. Jokes aside, this should make life rather more exciting if someone's Mandate rating drops and should allow for regional warlords to rise, which of course is rather historical.
The second, related change is that the "Claim Liege title" plot no longer can be used against a Chinese Imperial empire by someone that's "Chinese enough" (ignoring the game rule), because a new plot has been added that has the potential to be more dangerous (again, ignore the localization issues).
This plot is available for
all "Chinese enough" (ignoring the game rule) vassals, not just king-tier vassals as would be the case for the normal plot, if the Mandate rating drops below Average (or if it is Average and they're either king-tier or a member of a Chinese Imperial bloodline (real or pretender)). Success gives you a claim on the empire title of your liege (not on China, unless the two are the same) and some prestige while potentially hurting the Mandate rating of your liege further, failure is
treason (meaning your liege gets a "Traitor" opinion modifier towards you and thus a valid imprisonment and revocation reason). This should hopefully make weaker realms a bit more likely to see a ruler -- and possibly
dynasty -- change.
Thirdly, the voting logic for Pragmatist (which is most of them) Council Eunuchs has been adjusted a bit when it comes to title granting and title revocation (some of the checkmarks in the screenshot look a bit odd and will be investigated; I suspect a stray NOT or two...).
The Council Eunuchs will now oppose granting titles to -- and approve revoking titles from (unless it's tyrannical, in which case Chinese Imperial already is blocked from doing it) -- characters that are already ruling in a different de jure structure (China didn't really do vassalgore), in line to inherit titles not part of the same de jure structure, underage, or that have a regent. This should fix a few issues regarding the AI granting titles to children, heirs, or landed rulers that have no business holding a certain title when it has other options and should slightly help the emperor correct such issues if he has a revocation reason.
That's all for now. As mentioned in the previous dev diary, it might be a while before the next one since it'll be a while before something major is done and there might not be enough minor things done to be worth a dev diary.