The official "nag snow crystal for sneak peaks" thread!

[Snow Crystal]

@Snow Crystal Are there any doctrines that give the Decadence mechanic as a negative side effect?

No. If I recall correctly, it was suggested, and promptly declined as we came to the conclusion nobody want to play with Decadence mechanics if they don't have to.

 

[Caspian Mortis]

@Snow Crystal Are female Republican rulers now possible? There was a screenshot showing a female leader of a merchant republic a while ago.

 

[es333]

I 100% agree. And what about the empire of Scandinavia in Finland? They're just splitting Finland (and Lapland, for that matter) from the rest of the Finno-Ugric areas and placing them in the same empire as the Norse, a group they have little in common with culturally or religiously. How could Paradox do this?!

Spoiler

Just to be clear, I'm being sarcastic.

Just to be clear, I'm a Swede who has a BA in history and I am working on my MA.

Finnics and Northern-Germanics/Scandinavians are quite similar. Since at least, around 2000BC, the Nordic Bronze age, people on both sides of the shores were bilingual and spoke a Germanic/Finnic language. Even the religions are similar as the influences went both ways. Meanwhile, the Balts are something quite recent in the area and in the ck2 timeframe, like the 769 and 879 starts, the majority of modern-day Latvia was still Finnic.

Regarding Estonia, there's a rather good chance that accuracy isn't the only thing looked at when determining starting de jures.


With Estonia in the Wendish Empire, that empire is much closer in size to the surrounding empires (excluding Carpathia, which of course is rather small), while Scandinavia would be much larger than its neighbours if it got Estonia (with Estonia in the Wendish Empire it loses to the HRE and is only slightly bigger than Russia and Britannia), so having Estonia in Scandinavia might have balance implications in the region.

The AI also (seems to) try to expand inside its primary de jure structure first, so if Estonia was inside Scandinavia the Norse would assault Estonia quite early and Estonia would (try to; they don't really have a good CB, particularly if Scandinavia starts to become non-pagan) expand inside Scandinavia, and rulers in the Wendish Empire would be reluctant to attack Estonia with it in another de jure, which might lead to strange behaviour.

Before 2015, when d_Livonia was in k_Lithuania there was the completely odd behaviour of that part of Estonia being attacked and taken over by Lithuania during the first year. Lithuania never ever even attacked in the CK2 time frame as they were far away and during the CK2 time frame, travel over sea was 10 times easier and also a lot faster. So the Norse attacking Estonia is completely historical, they have done it for a very long time, at least since 2000BC. The oldest sailboats in entire Northern-Europe have been found on the Estonian island of Saaremaa and they're of Scandinavian origin. There have been also older boats found but they were without sails. The thing is, 95% of people look at a map and think about it with highways and high speed trains in mind. Pre-20th century it was different.

There was a lot of both ways movement between both shores, very often it was warlike:

This happened 600AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvar

Yngvar Harra (or Ingvar) Proto-Norse *Ingu-Hariz (d. early 7th century) was the son of Östen and reclaimed the Swedish throne for the House of Yngling after the Swedes had rebelled against Sölvi.

Snorri Sturluson relates in his Ynglinga saga that King Ingvar, Östen's son, was a great warrior who often spent time patrolling the shores of his kingdom fighting Danes and Estonian vikings (Víkingr frá Esthland). King Ingvar finally came to a peace agreement with the Danes and could take care of the Estonian vikings.

He consequently started pillaging in Estonia in retribution, and one summer he arrived at a place called Stein (see also Sveigder). The Estonians (sýslu kind) assembled a great army in the interior and attacked King Ingvar in a great battle. The Estonian forces were too powerful and Ingvar fell and the Swedish forces retreated. Ingvar was buried in a mound at a place called Stone or Hill fort (at Steini) on the shores of Estonia (Aðalsýsla).

The Norse attacking Estonia would be extremely normal as they did it for at least 1000 years without success and vice versa. They only succeeded during the crusade in the 13th century where Denmark conquered Northern-Estonia, the Swedes landed in Western-Estonia but got killed to the last man and the Germans took over the south.

Having Estonia in Scandinavia would also create issues when coupled with the possibility of the new exclave rules, which on the harshest setting would make Estonia independent of Scandinavia unless you create an overland connection (which isn't guaranteed to be feasible, since there's no guarantee that you'll have a CB for it) and thus could get the AI stuck in a loop of "Conquer Estonia" -> "Lose Estonia upon succession" -> "Conquer Estonia", which seems potentially problematic (and "Who cares about the AI?" is not a sentiment I think is good for the game).

The Wendish Empire also looks fairly nice when it reaches the Gulf of Finland, while a disconnected part of Scandinavia in that area would look rather weird, though aesthetics probably is rather far down the list when it comes to priorities. However, securing most of the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland would also seem like a sensible move for a Wendish Empire and something that could be part of their initial terretorial claims, and an Estonia that's getting powerful could would possibly find expanding to its south to be rather appealing due to the proximity and having decent CBs, and, while that's not moving into an area held by the same culture group, there are other empires where different culture groups fight it out, e.g. Britannia (Norman/Anglo-Saxon/English vs. Celtic) and Hispania (Bedouin/Andalusian vs. Iberian + Central Germanic).

Well, that exclave thing wouldn't make sense as purely geographically looking, the area of Tallinn would be the closest capital to Sigtuna, closer than Copenhagen or any other one.
Already during 2000BC, the coastal areas of Estonia, meaning entire Western-Estonia with all the islands and Northern-Estonia, had the same culture (Nordic Bronze age), as the Swedish and Danish coastline, while the inland areas had a slightly different one. In the CK2 time frame, the sea is an uniting factor while inland distances are the dividing factor.

Also "the Wendish empire looks nice" is just dumb. As I said, it is an artificial entity which Estonia has very little to do with. Considering the name, "Wendish", it has a very strong Balto-Slavic ring to it, so it makes sense that Balto-Slavs are in it, but not Northerners, like the Finnics.

Also, there are Finnic/Suomenusko kingdoms in Volga-Ural (and Russia, which wasn't an empire in the era), which also is a fictional empire (and Scandinavia is only accurate in the first place if you count the Kalmar Union, which didn't come around until over half a century after the last start date), Tengri rulers scattered throughout a bunch of fictional empires, Slavic (both culturally and when it comes to religion) rulers in a lot of different empires (with the ERE being the only one existing in the era and not really being in control of the land where those Slavic rulers actually live), and so on, so it isn't like the devs have singled out Estonia for "incorrect" placement.

There are no Finnics in the Volga-Ural region, please get your basic facts straight before you make a lengthy post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnic_peoples

 

[es333]

Well, nothing stops you from creating your own Estonian Empire. That is if you bought the customization DLC.

It's not about that, I'm not even Estonian. It just completely ruins immersion if you have one Finnic/Suomenusko area lumped into a Balto-Slavic Wendish empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wends

In the Middle Ages the term "Wends" often referred to West Slavs and Slovenes living within the Holy Roman Empire, though not always. The name has possibly survived in Finnic languages (Finnish: Venäjä, Estonian: Vene, Karelian: Veneä) denoting Russia.

I get it that Estonia was occupied by the USSR in 1940 but that doesn't mean that in the ck2 timeframe, you can lump Finnic/Suomenusko Estonia into the Balto-Slavic Wendish empire.

 

[es333]

I created a separate thread for the issue of k_Estonia being lumped into the Wendish empire, as this is getting too off-topic here:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ng-k_estonia-into-the-wendish-empire.1121672/

 

[Al Davoodi]

Too bad @Snow Crystal is not on twitter or maybe i have no clue which account it is :/

 

[Snow Crystal]

Too bad @Snow Crystal is not on twitter or maybe i have no clue which account it is :/

I am not. Why?

 

[Al Davoodi]

just looking for nice and funny tweets ) by game devs ^^ and i have still no clue why one person from pdx is following me on twitter most of my tweets are about foreign and security policy and some stuff about politics in the digital era..... Oo

 

[raistlin_wizard]

No. If I recall correctly, it was suggested, and promptly declined as we came to the conclusion nobody want to play with Decadence mechanics if they don't have to.

Maybe as a counterbalance of something really good could have worked.

Not related question, is there something planned for Shia Islam?

 

[DmUa]

It's not about that, I'm not even Estonian. It just completely ruins immersion if you have one Finnic/Suomenusko area lumped into a Balto-Slavic Wendish empire.

- how fantasy empire can ruin immersion?

I get it that Estonia was occupied by the USSR in 1940 but that doesn't mean that in the ck2 timeframe, you can lump Finnic/Suomenusko Estonia into the Balto-Slavic Wendish empire.

- what wends have to do with USSR? Are you sane?

Do other fantasy empires trigger you the same or only wendish one? You do realize that fantasy empires borders are drawn to be pretty and that they dont have anything to do with religion or ethnicity?

 

[es333]

- how fantasy empire can ruin immersion?

- what wends have to do with USSR? Are you sane?

Do other fantasy empires trigger you the same or only wendish one? You do realize that fantasy empires borders are drawn to be pretty and that they dont have anything to do with religion or ethnicity?

Some other people have pointed out that some provinces in Finland follow borders of 1941. Same thing with actually k_Estonia following year 2018 borders (Finnic/Suomenusko areas being inside k_Lithuania) + border with Russia is just like the modern-day. Just leaves the impression that not much work has been put into it.

 

[DmUa]

Some other people have pointed out that some provinces in Finland follow borders of 1941. Same thing with actually k_Estonia following year 2018 borders (Finnic/Suomenusko areas being inside k_Lithuania) + border with Russia is just like the modern-day. Just leaves the impression that not much work has been put into it.

- what work? Majority of de jure borders in game are fantasy what de jure you want for your estonian fantasy kingdom? What de jure borders you expect from tribal territories? I can get outrage of wrong geographic landmarks, i can get outrage of wrongly assigned provincial culture, but an outrage over wrong fantasy borders...

 

[es333]

- what work? Majority of de jure borders in game are fantasy what de jure you want for your estonian fantasy kingdom? What de jure borders you expect from tribal territories? I can get outrage of wrong geographic landmarks, i can get outrage of wrongly assigned provincial culture, but an outrage over wrong fantasy borders...

Are you okay?

It is not "my Estonian fantasy kingdom". I am Swedish and I just don't like like to see things that ruin immersion, which is bad for me as I actually studied Northern-European history in university.

The cultural boundaries between people around the year 1000AD in Northern-Europe aren't that hard to pinpoint, of course not with a 1 km accuracy. Like it is known that before the Great People's Migration, there were practically no Balts living north of the Daugava/Väina river line in Latvia.

 

[treb]

ill try an steer this back on topic @Snow Crystal Is Britain finished and if so can we have some pics?

 

[moscal]

Simple solution "estotnian problem" - we can say that Estonia has never existed. This is fake-state like a Atlantis, therefore can not-existed in game.

 

[Wenceslaus II.]

Simple solution "estotnian problem" - we can say that Estonia has never existed. This is fake-state like a Atlantis, therefore can not-existed in game.

You mean, like Finland and Belgium?

 

[moscal]

You mean, like Finland and Belgium?

Sure!

 

[Guthix]

@Snow Crystal I don't even know your PDX forums account name tbh. Is it something like Frost Gemstone or solidified water molecule raw gypsum?

 

[DmUa]

Are you okay?

- yes i am, thank you for caring.

It is not "my Estonian fantasy kingdom". I am Swedish and I just don't like like to see things that ruin immersion, which is bad for me as I actually studied Northern-European history in university.

- and im Ukrainian. Ingame Estonia is fantasy kingdom that is a part of fantasy empire that for some reason bothers a person that studied history. Am i getting it right? Or you actually will now tell us about some unknown history of kingdom of Estonia and Wendish empire? For some reason i doubt so. All you will do is again and again post same useless wikipedia info on local tribes. An info that have zero relation toward ingame de jure borders "issue" of yours, because ingame de jure borders are mostly fantasy anyway.

The cultural boundaries between people around the year 1000AD in Northern-Europe aren't that hard to pinpoint, of course not with a 1 km accuracy. Like it is known that before the Great People's Migration, there were practically no Balts living north of the Daugava/Väina river line in Latvia.

- what boundaries? What those tribal "boundaries" would have to do with de jure borders? Should we slap all slavs in to one culture group and than grant them some super empire because around 1000AD all slavs were using more or less same language? Or maybe we should actually split Wendish empire because oh the horror slavs and balts are together in it!

 

[es333]

Simple solution "estotnian problem" - we can say that Estonia has never existed. This is fake-state like a Atlantis, therefore can not-existed in game.

Well, as most other kingdoms in the game, it should at least follow cultural borders. Right now with the new map, Estonian/Suomenusko counties in modern-day Latvia are inside k_Lithuania although both of them were like Atlantis in the CK2 start dates, like most other Northern-European kingdoms. So what do you think about that?