Things Not Mentioned In The Patch Notes

[Trin Tragula]

Patch notes mention changes to Yapaniya religion:
- Yapaniya Jainism now has the vows of poverty tenet
- Yapaniya Jainism now no longer has the Natural Primitivism tenet, their monks will however still be naked
Although, if you choose to play Maharaja Amoghavarsha of the Rashtrakuta Kingdom in 867AD several of the starting courtiers and guests besides the monk are still naked. There are also a number of Yapaniyans in other courts or wandering that are still naked. If you demand someone conversion to Yapaniya, that person will wear clothing

It works the same way as other religions were "priests" are naked, some traits, like zealous, will still make characters take of their clothes.

 

[Meka66]

The borders between Estonian & Latvian cultures were changed to follow the modern 2022AD border between the Republic of Estonia and the Republic of Latvia.

That's not strictly true, the borders that were adjusted were barony adjustments to ensure the counties follow river borders and (finally) make sure Riga is on the right side of the river.

Since culture exists on a county-level, not a barony-level, having the county straddle the river makes sense culturally, but politically it's a bit of a nuisance to have for the entire game for what amounts to very minor cultural borders. Riga was made Latgalian in error and has already been reverted for an upcoming patch, along with numerous other Latgalian provinces.

There is new jewish culture and playeble character in 867 east to Crimea.

There's much more than that to the changes to Judaism on the steppe! It's my fault that these never ended up in the patch notes because I was new on the team at the time and didn't properly format my changes which lead to them being omitted from the patch notes so I'll go into detail here.

Kabarism is now named Kuzarite and is now more explicitly to represent the sort of ambiguity and dubious sincerity with which the Khazars were allegedly converted to Judaism. The faith now has Syncretic Folk Traditions, making it the only faith in the game with this core tenet by default, and its holy sites were adjusted to more represent what was important to the Khazars and their Radhanite traders than what is important to mainstream Judaism.

They have the usual Sinai and Jerusalem, but also have Itil to represent the importance of the city to the Khanate as a whole as a place of cultural exchange, Panticapeum in Crimea to represent its importance to the influx of Radhanite trade to the steppe, and Samarkand both for its importance to Jews on the Steppe in later eras and to represent the (alleged) Khazar ambition to spread Judaism as an alternative to Christianity and Islam across the Steppe and consolidate their power-base there.

Essentially, theories of Khazar conversion to Judaism were that converts to Christianity in the region aligned politically with Byzantium, and converts to Islam with the Abbasid Caliphate. The theory is since Tengri Shamanism was not a very easily proselytized faith, the Khazars adopted Judaism as a third option, to assert themselves as the third regional superpower with which would-be converts could align themselves with.

The changes to the holy sites were made in part because of how repetitive it made each Judaism playthrough (Forming Israel being essentially the only viable path for your religion) and also to represent Khazar ambitions. There's essentially 0 evidence to suggest that the Khazars had any desire to spread the faith in Jerusalem, but quite a bit to suggest they desired to spread it across the Steppe. Panticapeum doubles up as both a representation of Radhanite trade, and a nice reason to bring you into conflict with the Khazar rival: Byzantium.

Restoring the High Priesthood as a Kuzarite will trigger an event roughly a year later where your new Kohen Gadol will sort of raise their eyebrow at your continued syncretic pagan practices and give you the ability to make some small adjustments to the Kuzarite faith, potentially abandoning Syncretic Folk Traditions in favor of a more spiritual or warlike core tenet instead.

Adding more flavour and detail to the various Jewish faiths in the game is a bit of an ongoing passion-project of mine so next time I make any major changes, I'll make sure they end up in the patch notes haha.

Some pretty major ones which I think weren‘t mentioned:

- Vlach culture now has its own vlach heritage (a great change from their south slavic heritage which was somewhat understandable but very questionable)

Ah, Vlach was a problem to categorise and was subject to a lot of back-and-forth discussion. We generally want to avoid being offensive or enabling contentious nationalist rhetoric so we tread a fine line with the Vlach culture here. We were mostly torn between South Slavic and some form of Latin, both of which had their problems, so ultimately it was decided that their own heritage represented as a Roman-Slavic hybrid would be the least bad option, though still far from perfect.

 

[Meka66]

Nice of Paradox to remove functionality with a free patch. Chasseurs are also gone, I assume? And Desert Tactics no longer exists for people who haven't paid?
I certainly won't be buying the DLC now lmao.

Nope, that is not the way it works. Desert tactics are unlocked by forming a hybrid between a crusader culture and an Arabic culture during the age of the crusades. Outremer can still be formed with the old decisions as before, but it is now also possible to form it via the new mechanics. The main thing that's changed is Outremer is no longer pre-defined at game start.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Aside from the mega dynasties and merging of dynasties across the board, we also have a handful of broken dynasties (Chola in the Tamil Kingdom), one man was made an infant on shaky historical grounds and he still retains his daughter who is, in fact, older than him in 1066 (see charID: 33369 in Saxon character file). We also had got rid of some placeholders, it's nice to see, but some were just replaced with others.

Saw this now
Thanks for bugreporting the Cholas, it seems somehow some characters that should never have been there had slipped in, and a parent had been lost for one of the Chola daughters as well. This is now fixed internally and will be coming in an upcoming update.

I am very curious about fictional characters being removed to be replaced by new fictional characters, where are those?
As far as I am aware we have strived to remove fictional characters with the caveat that if we cannot find a historical character but do have good information on a historical dynasty, clan or group somewhere we might make up a personal name for a character to represent them.
There _should_ be no completely fictional characters coming in, those are the ones we are trying to get rid off. If there are, please let us know.

If you have time to bug report the Saxon error as well that would be very useful for the upcoming patch.

 

[Meka66]

what is a crusader culture? im there as a diverged norse now. but i went ahead of the crusades.

I don't remember the exact conditions, but it's something like you have to be a Christian after the crusades have started. If you're a norse pagan, you won't gain the benefits of being a crusader because you aren't a crusader.