Reworking Character Loyalty ​

Map Changes in Archimedes ​

Northern India ​

Southern India ​

Arachosia and the Mountains​

Hello and welcome to another development diary for the upcoming Archimedes update.Today I will be talking about a revamp of one of the games more integral systems, Character Loyalty, as well as some of the map changes that will be coming in the update.Character Loyalty, especially for characters with high Power Base, is one of the most important metrics that exist in the game. It is how we measure whether any given characters are likely to turn on you, as a participant in a civil war, or stand by you. If characters with high enough Power Base are disloyal this will in itself kick off a Civil War.Currently Loyalty is constantly drifting either upwards or downwards. This means that in most cases all Characters in your country are either headed towards complete blind loyalty to the state, or falling into absolute hatred of all things you do. This is obviously not very realistic, and it presents some weird situations when playing where suddenly your entire court is rapidly losing loyalty at once.Very early screenshot of how loyalty modifiers might work after the rework. Since this is work in progress no number here can be considered final.What we want instead is for Loyalty to be a more individual number, one that is not so uniform and that won’t always be in flux. Temporary issues should be able to affect it but at its base it should consist of things like traits, current ambitions, power, and memories of past slights.To this end Character Loyalty is being reworked be the sum of static modifiers that add or remove loyalty. A system not too dissimilar to Loyalty National Opinion that a foreign country have of you, or the Character Opinions that your courtiers have of you in Crusader Kings 2.Like opinions, Loyalty modifiers are not always permanent, they can have a duration or decay, but their impact on a character’s loyalty will always be static, instead of a change over time. You will at all times be able to see what the loyalty of any character is impacted by and how your actions have affected it.These changes will mean that there should be a fair number of characters that can exist with a loyalty that is not at the extreme points of the scale, and that the “normal” situation should be for characters to have a loyalty rating that is relatively stable over time (only changing when circumstances around them change).We hope that this will mean that at any given point you will have characters that are more or less loyal, for their own given reasons that you can see. Instead of having all characters trend up or down towards the extremes, and that we think will make loyalty a more enjoyable experience to deal with, even if it is still something that can break your country.As is customary for updates to our Grand Strategy Games we have taken the opportunity to revisit some areas of the map and political setup at the start of the game.One area that I have wanted to revisit ever since the original release is India.As I noted in the original development diary ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-development-diary-4th-of-march-2019.1157578/ ) on India the subcontinent has a political and religious history that is every bit as complex as the mediterrenean and Europe. India is also very relevant to the Diadochi and the Greek world since Alexander’s empire extended into the subcontinent and the newly born Mauryan Empire is in conflict with the Seleucid Successor state at the start of our game.Western India would also see the rise of another Greek state once the Mauryan influence waned towards the middle of the period covered by the game.One of the main goals when revisiting India has been to take another look at the Mauryan Empire. In 304 BCE the Mauryan Empire is a relatively young polity. Having expanded from a base in the Lower Indus region it has in short time come to usurp all the lands under the Nanda Empire, and relocated its capital to their imperial center at Pataliputra in the north east.This was not a journey that could be made while retaining total control over all regions conquered. While the Mauryan empire in time would build a strong state, with a sizable bureaucracy and administration its rapid rise was in part due to it gaining support of local powers in the regions on the border between Greek and Indian states in Punjab. Not long ago this region was ruled by a great number of powerful Indian Republics, some of which offered their support to the Mauryas and who would retain great influence within the Maurya Empire.In other cases it was more the case that Mauryan advance against greek forces led to old local magnates becoming independent until later subdued by other Mauryan emperors once the wars with the Greeks and the Nandas were over.The north will now therefore feature a number of new independent states such as the Khasa (in Kashmir) and the Nabhaka and Nabhapakti (further west into the Himalayas).In the plains of Punjab and Haryana the Paurava and Yaudheya are powerful Republican states that are subjects to the Mauryan Empire.Further south Mahisamandala and Palada are now represented as tributaries of the Mauryas in the northern Deccan rather than as directly controlled land.It is hard to say what southern India was like with the exactness that we can in the north specifically in 304 BCE. The Tamil country has always been one of the richer and more fertile parts of the subcontinent and by digging into the history of states such as the Pandyas, Cholas and Anuradhapura we have been able to give a better picture of the political realities that would have existed around the time that our game portray.This means that many of the polities which exist in Livy and before have now been broken into smaller states. The island of Lanka is not yet unified entirely under Anurudhapura at the start, and the inland beyond the Pandyas is now under various chiefdoms known from the Sangam literature such as Kosar and Parambu.The border region where Maurya and Seleucid interests meet was still contested at the start of our game. While Seleucus himself and his son Antiochus had recently spent some time getting the eastern satrapies in line their hold over the far east where this conflict takes place was less absolute.The Archimedes update introduces Syburtius of Arachosia as a playable satrap (subject state) of the Seleucids, together with the locally ruled Gandhara principality controlling the Khyber pass. Historically this region would come under Mauryan control shortly after our start, with the Syburtius becoming a greek subject ruler under the Mauryan king, a relationship that may have lasted well into Ashoka’s reign, when Greek (Yonas) are noted as subjects of the Indian emperor in this region. Even further on Arachosia is one of the regions under Indo-Greek empire.That was all for today!This was a brief look at what the Archimedes update brings to Characters as well as some of the Map and Setup updates we have planned.Next week @Arheo will be back to talk about things close to his heart.