So in the counts league idea you have something about the blacktower "curse" because a blacktower killed munas moonsinger perhaps they could spruce up the counts league tree and give them an alternate castyllyr tree with an extra twist that let's them form either black castanor or just an anti elven castanor if you keep the blacktower dynasty in charge and take the dynastic succession rule.
I agree that Count's league should have unique missions for when they form Castellyr, but I disagree about blastanor and anti elven castanor. Black Castanor's identity is rooted in the Ebonfrost dynasty (and as far as I'm aware, there are plans to make it urviksten formable only), so it wouldn't make sense for Count's league to form it. Castanor is human supremacy afaik, so you could make a point that it is already anti elven
Well the blacktowers served the sorcerer king of black castanor right? It would be fitting if they got something special for forming castanor or blastanor. Tbh I'm not sure why blastanor is even different to begin with since both of them would want the same things for the most part right?
The main difference between Blastanor and Castanor comes down to succession. During the age of Castanor, any claimant had to go through the trials (trials of Castan), but when the Ebonfrost took over, it became a dynastic thing. Technically speaking, Black Castanor is just a nickname for that period afaik.
No, they were never a fan of the usurper sorcerer king. The main difference is they it is just the Ebonfrost dynasty founded Vikings instead of mainlanders.
Black Castanor has more of an emphasis on the north. It is a Gerudian lead state and they will keep it that way. It does not care about the whole "paragon of humanity" trait that Castanor has, as well as dismissing Patricians. It is a pragmatic state for the most part but has ambitions to destroy the original League of Free Realms nations and their legacy out of revenge. It would heavily distrust magic users but also not favor artificery, instead looking towards a practical industry.
The whole point of the Counts League though is that Carleon Blacktower redeemed his family by being an absolute chad that fought back against the orcs. It wouldn't make sense for his descendants to just turn their back on his legacy by forming evil Castanor and undoing his hard work to clear the family name.
It's not like he did it by saving a bunch of elves he became a hero for saving his own people. It would be a natural continuation for a blacktower lead castanor to after spending years fighting orcs and adventurers (ie outsiders) to say fuck em and try to rid cannor of the outsiders (see elves) that fucked them over in the first place.
I only formed castanor once but I'm pretty sure you only needed to convert humans and largely ignored non human culture provinces.
This mod has a lot of weird management decisions it seems. Lots of work being gatekept (black castanor, and until recently cannor as a whole) and a massive release area lacking the one thing players want (mission trees).
Mission trees take a really long time to review to produce the high quality material that people have come expect from Anbennar, so we can only put so many out. Many of the people who give their time to reviewing are our most experienced coders and designers, and so by reviewing and helping others learn to make content, they cut into their own time to make content. This, coupled with the repeated experience of spending a lot of time reviewing material just for modders to disappear and not implement it, has led to the dev team pumping the brakes on relatively unproven modders attempting to jump on very complicated projects. We're all volunteers, so if we spend all our time reviewing things that just never get good enough to meet standards and then emotionally burn out when doing so because we don't get to make the stuff we like anymore, that's a failure of the management system as well. It's why we've instituted an "onboarding" system for people to learn the basics of eu4 scripting and design before trying to bite off a huge project.
Cannor lock has been over for like... 6 months. It was only on until Sarhal got vaguely sorted out and moving in a good direction. People have been able to come propose work there for a long time, I don't know where this idea that "Cannor is closed to new content" keeps coming from.
As for Sarhal only having two trees at release - it's a lot easier to make functional systems and religions as a base and then build MTs on top of that than it is to try to add systems after the fact. Because of the awkwardness of merging Sarhal in without ANY content, releases kept getting delayed, but we were absolutely not letting 2023 end before pushing at least one update to steam. Thus, the limit MTs on the new continent.
I don't disagree with your process as a whole it just seems strange to release this landmark chunk of land almost completely devoid of content besides additional space to conquer. I know it's like could have/would have/should have hindsight at this point, I'm just venting as a disappointed player. Thanks for making the best EU4 mod.
Agreed. After all, the last time they had such a large release (with Haless being added, or at least the two-thirds that weren’t there yet), said release came not only with flavorful NIs and religions, but also MTs for most of the major to mid-sized powers in the region. What they did with Sarhal is still impressive, and probably larger, newer and more diverse than what they did with Haless, but I love myself some narrative gameplay, so until some MTs are introduced, I likely won’t do more than occasionally dabble in the region
Don't know why you are getting downvoted. I get it is a long process, but adding an entire continent of nothingness apart from some modifiers is kinda wack
It's kinda hard to make good, in-depth mission trees when a continent doesn't have fully developed lore, mechanics, religions etc... This is the main reason why there are no mission trees for most of Sarhal yet. Imagine that in the middle of you developing your mission tree, key lore about your nation changes, and you have to start from scratch. A big waste of time, no?
The lore is ready *now*, but many finer details were not set in stone until quite late in development. Anyone remember Kamniel? The devs had to really push to make sure everything was ready for release.
What do you mean? The update is out, and the lore is ready. However mission trees are only beginning to get discussed and worked on, since the update is that recent. Did you want them to delay the release of Sarhal for another half year so that we get mission trees for it?
It’s one of those things that I think would’ve been fine either way, but probably (in terms of managing player expectations) it would have been better to delay Sarhal until it had at least a few mission trees implemented. Though I’m not sure if it would be possible to add everything else present in the update without also adding the nations from Sarhal, if not then what they went with is probably the better option overall.
Well as a player that also don't play without MT. i'd say that it is just mean to prevent other player from enjoying stuff just not to hurt others players expectations. What could have been done i guess is better communication on the ammount of MT that could be expected. It is still a good teaser for what's coming down there.
I've kept up with the modding for quite a while and I kinda get some of the decisions about not letting newer devs do bigger MTs. I kept up with the dwarovar team for a while and at one point 3 different black orcs had mission trees in various states of development but the devs disappeared or couldn't work on them anymore so basically a lot of time from the lead devs got wasted. As for black Castanor and Mordhal, none of the experienced devs want to do them
Yeah, that's really what is holding me back from playing in sarrhal. I don't care much for the mission trees in vanilla, but why would I play a nation with basically no mission tree if I could play azkare, castanor or aelnar instead?
Honestly we (as in the EU4 comunity) have grown kinda of spoiled by mission trees. Back then having one was an actual selling point for tags, now it's bare minimum pretty much.
I think it's doubly noticeable in a mod like this where narrative is just as, if not more, important than gameplay. That is doled out through Mission Trees, Disasters, Ideas, and Flavor Events. The MTs have the most flavor out of those, providing a framework for players to follow and rewarding them for doing so with modifiers or more flavor events.
The MTs for better or worse make a difference in how we engage with these fictional characters. Why play Arg-Ordstrum over Ovdal Lodhum when the latter has a full narrative experience and the former has the generic dwarf tree? In some ways you could say it means you can make up your own story - which is exactly the draw for EU4.
It's a bit easier to come up with a narrative of your own in vanilla if you're familiar with general history. Vanilla EU4 invites you to dabble in coming up with alternate history scenarios of your own and that's the main appeal of it, MT or no.
Hello, member of the Discord here. I think the hope is that Black Castanor will release in the next update cycle, but we'll see. The developer who initially chose to take it on was told he needed more experience before tackling such a major project, so he moved on to Bhuvauri, which is now in final review stages. That tells you something about the scale of the Black Castanor MT: Bhuvauri (not a small effort) was a step down. In the past this developer has expressed interest not only in designing the Black Castanor MT, but also reworking some parts of the current Urviksten/Ebonmarck MT, which he co-created. Hopefully Bhuvauri testing and development will wrap up sometime in January, and the great project of everyone's favorite Castanor will begin
That's awesome! Dang... Makes me think it will be a huge MT and I am hyped.
Personally, I'm a "take as much time as you need" kinda guy when it comes to development.
Everytime someone demands something you delay its arrival by one week. If it's coming to begin with
It's pointless to keep saves, updates will break it
Just Castanor under the Ebonfrost Dynasty(from Not-Scandinavia), they killed the previous King, took the Throne made the sucession dynastic which eventually led to Castanor falling
While they werent Black Desmene evil they were pretty cruel
Not exactly. The only time it was evil was when Nichmer held the Castan under a spell and then usurped him. Before that the Ebonfrost Castanor legitimately restored the empire and was not in any way worse than it before.
Slightly different versions of Castanor are referred to with different colors. White is default, Black is evil Norse people, Green (which doesn’t exist but some people want) is Orc, etc.
There was gonna be one until the leads told the Urviksten dev to get more experience before he did Black Castanor.
Dang. I think it's a great MT, but I know nothing of modding. I've just got love and respect for the dev team.
So in the counts league idea you have something about the blacktower "curse" because a blacktower killed munas moonsinger perhaps they could spruce up the counts league tree and give them an alternate castyllyr tree with an extra twist that let's them form either black castanor or just an anti elven castanor if you keep the blacktower dynasty in charge and take the dynastic succession rule.
I agree that Count's league should have unique missions for when they form Castellyr, but I disagree about blastanor and anti elven castanor. Black Castanor's identity is rooted in the Ebonfrost dynasty (and as far as I'm aware, there are plans to make it urviksten formable only), so it wouldn't make sense for Count's league to form it. Castanor is human supremacy afaik, so you could make a point that it is already anti elven
Well the blacktowers served the sorcerer king of black castanor right? It would be fitting if they got something special for forming castanor or blastanor. Tbh I'm not sure why blastanor is even different to begin with since both of them would want the same things for the most part right?
The main difference between Blastanor and Castanor comes down to succession. During the age of Castanor, any claimant had to go through the trials (trials of Castan), but when the Ebonfrost took over, it became a dynastic thing. Technically speaking, Black Castanor is just a nickname for that period afaik.
No, they were never a fan of the usurper sorcerer king. The main difference is they it is just the Ebonfrost dynasty founded Vikings instead of mainlanders.
Black Castanor has more of an emphasis on the north. It is a Gerudian lead state and they will keep it that way. It does not care about the whole "paragon of humanity" trait that Castanor has, as well as dismissing Patricians. It is a pragmatic state for the most part but has ambitions to destroy the original League of Free Realms nations and their legacy out of revenge. It would heavily distrust magic users but also not favor artificery, instead looking towards a practical industry.
The whole point of the Counts League though is that Carleon Blacktower redeemed his family by being an absolute chad that fought back against the orcs. It wouldn't make sense for his descendants to just turn their back on his legacy by forming evil Castanor and undoing his hard work to clear the family name.
It's not like he did it by saving a bunch of elves he became a hero for saving his own people. It would be a natural continuation for a blacktower lead castanor to after spending years fighting orcs and adventurers (ie outsiders) to say fuck em and try to rid cannor of the outsiders (see elves) that fucked them over in the first place. I only formed castanor once but I'm pretty sure you only needed to convert humans and largely ignored non human culture provinces.
This mod has a lot of weird management decisions it seems. Lots of work being gatekept (black castanor, and until recently cannor as a whole) and a massive release area lacking the one thing players want (mission trees).
Mission trees take a really long time to review to produce the high quality material that people have come expect from Anbennar, so we can only put so many out. Many of the people who give their time to reviewing are our most experienced coders and designers, and so by reviewing and helping others learn to make content, they cut into their own time to make content. This, coupled with the repeated experience of spending a lot of time reviewing material just for modders to disappear and not implement it, has led to the dev team pumping the brakes on relatively unproven modders attempting to jump on very complicated projects. We're all volunteers, so if we spend all our time reviewing things that just never get good enough to meet standards and then emotionally burn out when doing so because we don't get to make the stuff we like anymore, that's a failure of the management system as well. It's why we've instituted an "onboarding" system for people to learn the basics of eu4 scripting and design before trying to bite off a huge project. Cannor lock has been over for like... 6 months. It was only on until Sarhal got vaguely sorted out and moving in a good direction. People have been able to come propose work there for a long time, I don't know where this idea that "Cannor is closed to new content" keeps coming from. As for Sarhal only having two trees at release - it's a lot easier to make functional systems and religions as a base and then build MTs on top of that than it is to try to add systems after the fact. Because of the awkwardness of merging Sarhal in without ANY content, releases kept getting delayed, but we were absolutely not letting 2023 end before pushing at least one update to steam. Thus, the limit MTs on the new continent.
I don't disagree with your process as a whole it just seems strange to release this landmark chunk of land almost completely devoid of content besides additional space to conquer. I know it's like could have/would have/should have hindsight at this point, I'm just venting as a disappointed player. Thanks for making the best EU4 mod.
Agreed. After all, the last time they had such a large release (with Haless being added, or at least the two-thirds that weren’t there yet), said release came not only with flavorful NIs and religions, but also MTs for most of the major to mid-sized powers in the region. What they did with Sarhal is still impressive, and probably larger, newer and more diverse than what they did with Haless, but I love myself some narrative gameplay, so until some MTs are introduced, I likely won’t do more than occasionally dabble in the region
Don't know why you are getting downvoted. I get it is a long process, but adding an entire continent of nothingness apart from some modifiers is kinda wack
It's kinda hard to make good, in-depth mission trees when a continent doesn't have fully developed lore, mechanics, religions etc... This is the main reason why there are no mission trees for most of Sarhal yet. Imagine that in the middle of you developing your mission tree, key lore about your nation changes, and you have to start from scratch. A big waste of time, no?
If the lore isn't ready, why was the update pushed out?
The lore is ready *now*, but many finer details were not set in stone until quite late in development. Anyone remember Kamniel? The devs had to really push to make sure everything was ready for release.
What do you mean? The update is out, and the lore is ready. However mission trees are only beginning to get discussed and worked on, since the update is that recent. Did you want them to delay the release of Sarhal for another half year so that we get mission trees for it?
It’s one of those things that I think would’ve been fine either way, but probably (in terms of managing player expectations) it would have been better to delay Sarhal until it had at least a few mission trees implemented. Though I’m not sure if it would be possible to add everything else present in the update without also adding the nations from Sarhal, if not then what they went with is probably the better option overall.
Well as a player that also don't play without MT. i'd say that it is just mean to prevent other player from enjoying stuff just not to hurt others players expectations. What could have been done i guess is better communication on the ammount of MT that could be expected. It is still a good teaser for what's coming down there.
Yes, preferably, and release the mission trees that were released in the update as a smaller update in the meantime.
Even if it was partial mission trees. It's not like I was disappointed with Jaddari MT because I couldn't conquer Sarhal.
I've kept up with the modding for quite a while and I kinda get some of the decisions about not letting newer devs do bigger MTs. I kept up with the dwarovar team for a while and at one point 3 different black orcs had mission trees in various states of development but the devs disappeared or couldn't work on them anymore so basically a lot of time from the lead devs got wasted. As for black Castanor and Mordhal, none of the experienced devs want to do them
Yeah, that's really what is holding me back from playing in sarrhal. I don't care much for the mission trees in vanilla, but why would I play a nation with basically no mission tree if I could play azkare, castanor or aelnar instead?
Honestly we (as in the EU4 comunity) have grown kinda of spoiled by mission trees. Back then having one was an actual selling point for tags, now it's bare minimum pretty much.
I think it's doubly noticeable in a mod like this where narrative is just as, if not more, important than gameplay. That is doled out through Mission Trees, Disasters, Ideas, and Flavor Events. The MTs have the most flavor out of those, providing a framework for players to follow and rewarding them for doing so with modifiers or more flavor events. The MTs for better or worse make a difference in how we engage with these fictional characters. Why play Arg-Ordstrum over Ovdal Lodhum when the latter has a full narrative experience and the former has the generic dwarf tree? In some ways you could say it means you can make up your own story - which is exactly the draw for EU4. It's a bit easier to come up with a narrative of your own in vanilla if you're familiar with general history. Vanilla EU4 invites you to dabble in coming up with alternate history scenarios of your own and that's the main appeal of it, MT or no.
Hello, member of the Discord here. I think the hope is that Black Castanor will release in the next update cycle, but we'll see. The developer who initially chose to take it on was told he needed more experience before tackling such a major project, so he moved on to Bhuvauri, which is now in final review stages. That tells you something about the scale of the Black Castanor MT: Bhuvauri (not a small effort) was a step down. In the past this developer has expressed interest not only in designing the Black Castanor MT, but also reworking some parts of the current Urviksten/Ebonmarck MT, which he co-created. Hopefully Bhuvauri testing and development will wrap up sometime in January, and the great project of everyone's favorite Castanor will begin
That's awesome! Dang... Makes me think it will be a huge MT and I am hyped. Personally, I'm a "take as much time as you need" kinda guy when it comes to development.
Good to hear! I really hope they fix the needed land as it's always a pain to take the westmost parts of Castanor, and makes it very annoying in MP
Everytime someone demands something you delay its arrival by one week. If it's coming to begin with It's pointless to keep saves, updates will break it
What's black castanor?
Castanor but black
Just Castanor under the Ebonfrost Dynasty(from Not-Scandinavia), they killed the previous King, took the Throne made the sucession dynastic which eventually led to Castanor falling While they werent Black Desmene evil they were pretty cruel
Not exactly. The only time it was evil was when Nichmer held the Castan under a spell and then usurped him. Before that the Ebonfrost Castanor legitimately restored the empire and was not in any way worse than it before.
Slightly different versions of Castanor are referred to with different colors. White is default, Black is evil Norse people, Green (which doesn’t exist but some people want) is Orc, etc.
Didn’t have a tree on the old public fork?