Developer Diary 2: Greece on the new map

2021-10-07 · Tarnholm

Welcome to our second Developer Diary. I'm Apple and I'm once more going to take you all on a ride through our map. It's going to be exciting to fasten your seatbelts!

For those new and those who don't remember, the last DD was all about the Italian peninsula and its three major islands. This week we are going to focus on the land of the philosophers, I'm of course talking about the Greeks.

Let's start by looking at Crimea, what the ancients called the Cimmerian Bosporus and surrounding areas. On the peninsula, we find the Greek cities of Chersonesos & Pantikapaion.

Phanagoreia is situated across the small strait and further up lies Tanais. We find the city of Olbia by the west coast and Amadoca inland.

In the forefront, the Peloponnese is divided into three parts between the cities of Sparta, Aigion & Corinth.

Also seen are Attica and the mighty city of Athens as well as Boeotia and the city of Orchomenos and in the back Aetolia with the city of Thermon.

The Greek archipelago is full of islands with legendary cities like Gortyna on Crete, Rhodes & Chalkis on the island of Euboia within striking distance of Athens.

We can also spot the presence of the largest Hellenic Empires, the Seleucids at Ephesos and the Ptolemies holding Halikarnassos and the island of Mytilene.

Further up the Ionian coast lies Pergamon and further up at the Bosporus strait one can spot Nikomedia, Lysimachia & Byzantium.

We also get a first real look at the Odrysian Kingdom over at the City Orestia as well as Antigonid Kingdom's capital Pella and its naval base Amphipolis.

Further inland lie cities like Bylazora & Philippopolis and one can even spot the Getae.

A clearer picture of the Antigonid Kingdom and its core cities, among them Larissa as well as Epirus and the cities of Apollonia and Scodra.

We are now looking at the Illyrian coast, famous for its pirates. We can spot the cities of Salona and Iader on the East Adriatic coast as well as Segestica, Noreia & Aquincum further inland.

We can now show Italy from its traditional perspective without spoilers.

And the same goes for down at the boot.

Dacia is filled with cities ripe for the taking.

And now I'll leave the word over to Tone for some explanation of the Roman Cognomen and Career systems.

We've been doing a lot of work over the last month or two to work on some of the things that bring more historical realism and immersion to the Rome Total Realism: Imperium Surrectum mod. We're pretty excited about this stuff really, so thought we'd take the opportunity to share some of the latest developments with you. In focus for this update are the Romans. So, what's new? Firstly, we've implemented the Roman cognomen system and added some historical characters from the mod's start date, 270BC. Of course, no Roman faction could possibly be complete for this era without the Cornelii Scipii, and although our friend Lucius here isn't a major player at this stage, his offspring could well be! It's all up to you.

Another famous family, the Caecillii Metelli.

But of course, at this stage, our faction leader is one of the two consuls in 270BC, Gaius Genucius Clepsina.

And his partner in crime, Gaius Cornelius Blasio

If you look closely you'll see that they also have some additional traits as patricians - the fact that they are senatorial (therefore can be admitted to the senate) as well as ownership of some estates, which increase their management. Secondly, we implemented the Roman patrician leadership system from RS2 - a diagram of this is shown below, including both the cursus honorum and patrician military careers.

For the other classes, plebeian and equestrian, there are other routes to the top in the post-Marian era - it's a world of opportunity, enabling even a centurion the opportunity to climb to the top of the ladder and join the senate, through two processes - 1) Equo publico exornatus, i.e. being admitted to the equestrian class and 2) adlection to the senate. His path will be smoothed by achieving greater battle honours (see below), as well as a governorship as a procurator.

Thirdly, here are some of the Roman battle honours your hero could potentially win, and in doing so achieving lasting glory, fame and potentially launching him on the path to power:

We've also added in the Roman Provincial Governorship traits from Roma Surrectum 2, updated for the new settlement names and locations in RIS. These traits are given to a Roman governor residing in the settlement highlighted in blue if you have ownership of each of the other settlements indicated. They provide some additional management or combat bonuses, so are useful additional traits. However, if your governor leaves the settlement, these traits will be lost.

We've also added in Roman Civilian Careers for each of the classes. Patricians, being aristocrats, don't actually engage in real work, but have the opportunity to add to their estates and their clients, increasing their influence and management skills. Whilst estates are progressively added to overtime, a patrician will need to be in their settlement in order to engage with their clients effectively and add to their number. To become a consul, a patrician will have to reach the second level of estates or client network. Equestrians will take one of two paths, which are allocated at the point of coming of age: either becoming a lawyer or a publican (tax collector). Equestrians will need to reach the top of their career ladder in order to meet the requirements of joining the senate. In order to do this, they will need to spend sufficient time in settlements with the right buildings (or will need to build those). Plebeians will take one of two career paths - either a lender (negotiatores) or a merchant (mercatores). Again, they will need to reach the top of the civilian career ladder as well as gaining battle honours in order to transfer to the Equestrian class via the process known as Equo Publico Exornatus. This will then allow Adlection into the Senate and to join the ranks of the elite few who've successfully taken this journey.

I hope you all enjoyed this rather extensive preview. Now for something rather technical. We as a team are using something called GitLab to develop this mod. It allows all of our team members to work on different files and push them to each other once they are done. Last week we, unfortunately, hit a snag as we reached the storage limit on GitLab. This unfortunately created a standstill in our development. We decided to rent our own server to solve this issue and that's something we are currently waiting to get access to. However, while GitLab is free to use our own server is sadly not. With this in mind we're currently planning to start a Patreon page so that you, our fans can help contribute to the server costs. I know a lot of you have already asked for a way to contribute financially and we really appreciated that. Now the Patreon is yet to be fully set up so a link to it will come at a later stage.

We hope this delay won't impact our planned August release of 0.2.0 but it's hard for us to know at this stage. Rest assured that we are doing all we can to get it out as quickly and as polished as possible.

That's all for this week. I hope you all are having a great summer. See you all soon in another dev diary.

Apple & the whole RTR: Imperium Surrectum Team.

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