Originally posted by Gnhtd:

I got to confirm that it is the exception for Britanny to not spawn a colonial empire over here. France can invade it, but often kinda late - and it's also the only country that seems to try (I have yet to see England for instance occupying land in Britanny).

Btw if it comes to colonial regions I am interested too, although I do agree eastern NA to be 'good enough' already.

Thanks for the confirmation!

I'll try to not be too arcane & mysterious with works in progress, if you're interested, then ;).

Originally posted by madiunicorn:

maybe im wrong but i feel venice gets a cypruss inheritance event, give france something like that, or the crimea one that the ottomans get if britannys doing good or france is doing bad it wont fire but if stuff is flowing close to history the event fires and bitanny goes to france...some iberian weding sh#t.

I'd like to avoid something that definite, as with that under no circumstances can Brittany survive/thrive/recover, whereas the ideal would be to Brittany survive maybe 1/10 to 1/20 times, but the current setup, where Brittany survives more often than not, is probably the worst of the three.

I'm playing around with some ideas now, hopefully I can find a middle ground.

Originally posted by reddbane:

I'm a little confused as why there is now such a high requirement for the Celtic Union decision "potential", that is the requirements for the decision to merely appear in your mission/decision menu, even if you can't fulfill it at the moment. Generally if you are of the correct culture or nation, and can eventually fulfill the province requirements, you will see the decision at the beginning of the game, so a Scandinavian player knows he can form Scandinavia, and a German player knows he can form Germany. The reason for this is that the player should generally be given a clue as to what direction their expansion strategy should take and be clued into what nations they can conceivably form in their game, and moreover the decision essentially acts as an in-game checklist for the player to track their progress to achieving their goals. "To appear, must own at least one provinces in all the major Celtic countries" means most that players will not be able to find out, moreover keep track of, how to form the Celtic nation without looking it up in the game files before starting their game session, which just seems counter-intuitive and counter-productive.

Beyond Typus 4.0 splits Celtic into Gaelic & Brythonic, and introduces two new cultural unions (one for each group), so *those* are what should be showing. Perhaps I set those potentials a bit high... you're right, I didn't think that through, though on the other hand, the goal *should* be Ireland or Scotland, respectively, first, and it should appear early on for either one, once formed. I'll look into that and try to adjust it if needed, though.

With the 2 new unions, Tír na gCelteach has been repurposed into an intentionally obscure, difficult to form, late-game-Celtic-only-GBR-alternative, almost an easter egg at this point, but I'm not sure if that is where I want to leave it.

The real problem is "Celt" as a term and as a concept, didn't really exist in our period, so I toyed with the idea of removing it entirely, but it is certainly a fan favourite, and one of the first/core parts of BtP, so I left it in, just made it very difficult to achieve.

I think I even put in the change log/patch notes that I may revisit this soon, so I am open to ideas.

Thanks for the feedback!

@Draíocht
However I always thought part of the original intention of Beyond the Pale was to offer the player an alt-history scenario in which they could unite the various "Celtic" peoples (with a strong emphasis on the Roman understanding of the term) and their descendants in manner similar to what the Danish tried with the Scandinavians, Philip II tried with the Latin Iberians, the Russians tried with the various descendants of the "Kievan Rus", Prussia with the Germans, and England with the British. All the real life examples of "culture unions" were in part developed, whether through propaganda, literature, government policies, by the rulers of those United countries/kingdoms once they held all realms under a single monarch. Even if Celtic Nationalism in our own historical context is a more recent phenomenon, I think the decision to form a Celtic Empire is supposed to represent that kind of administrative and political push towards unity (either enforced or willing) that happened in real life empires that attempted to conglomerate people of similar lingual/ancestral backgrounds; after all, what we today call a Spaniard could be a Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Leonese, each with their own language and customs (as Orwell discovered during his own time serving in the Spanish Civil War), even if we are trained to see them as one nationality and expect them to speak "Spanish" or more accurately Castilian.
For comparison look at the east Slavic group in game, even with the strong historical nationalism and friction between associated with both modern Russians and Ruthenians (modern Ukrainians), each group can still form culture of union over both groups (and the other "Rus" people), albeit under different names, Russia and Ruthenia, with Ruthenia representing an alt-history scenario. With the implementation of different "Celtic" unions for different "Celts" based on the Gaelic Brittonic split, the different unions could represent different options for a cultural union based upon which group dominates the union, similar to the Russia Ruthenia split.
I think ultimately from a gameplay/fun/flavor standpoint, being able to unite the last disparate remnants of a fading culture into a rejuvenated world power is more or less the hook of the original mod. Separating the Gaels and Britons into two separate groups, along with the prevalence of inexpensive culture conversion bonuses among the new ideas, also encourages the economic minded player to bulldoze their rival Celtic group in the same manner as they would the English or French. Also I think the idea of Gaels and Britons being united, despite a lingual gap comparable to Latins of Castilian and Tuscan dialect, is based also upon the idea of scarcity. If Tuscans and Castilians were the last Latin speakers/people on the entire continent, not to mention the world, it might be more conceivable they would find a greater commonality among each other when placed in contrast to the ubiquity of the surrounding tribes of Germanic speakers.

could you please consider remaking the philippines like this mod http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=644552325&searchtext=philippines

or just add more province to it

Originally posted by reddbane:

@Draíocht
However I always thought part of the original intention of Beyond the Pale was to offer the player an alt-history scenario in which they could unite the various "Celtic" peoples (with a strong emphasis on the Roman understanding of the term) and their descendants in manner similar to what the Danish tried with the Scandinavians, Philip II tried with the Latin Iberians, the Russians tried with the various descendants of the "Kievan Rus", Prussia with the Germans, and England with the British. All the real life examples of "culture unions" were in part developed, whether through propaganda, literature, government policies, by the rulers of those United countries/kingdoms once they held all realms under a single monarch. Even if Celtic Nationalism in our own historical context is a more recent phenomenon, I think the decision to form a Celtic Empire is supposed to represent that kind of administrative and political push towards unity (either enforced or willing) that happened in real life empires that attempted to conglomerate people of similar lingual/ancestral backgrounds; after all, what we today call a Spaniard could be a Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Leonese, each with their own language and customs (as Orwell discovered during his own time serving in the Spanish Civil War), even if we are trained to see them as one nationality and expect them to speak "Spanish" or more accurately Castilian.
For comparison look at the east Slavic group in game, even with the strong historical nationalism and friction between associated with both modern Russians and Ruthenians (modern Ukrainians), each group can still form culture of union over both groups (and the other "Rus" people), albeit under different names, Russia and Ruthenia, with Ruthenia representing an alt-history scenario. With the implementation of different "Celtic" unions for different "Celts" based on the Gaelic Brittonic split, the different unions could represent different options for a cultural union based upon which group dominates the union, similar to the Russia Ruthenia split.
I think ultimately from a gameplay/fun/flavor standpoint, being able to unite the last disparate remnants of a fading culture into a rejuvenated world power is more or less the hook of the original mod. Separating the Gaels and Britons into two separate groups, along with the prevalence of inexpensive culture conversion bonuses among the new ideas, also encourages the economic minded player to bulldoze their rival Celtic group in the same manner as they would the English or French. Also I think the idea of Gaels and Britons being united, despite a lingual gap comparable to Latins of Castilian and Tuscan dialect, is based also upon the idea of scarcity. If Tuscans and Castilians were the last Latin speakers/people on the entire continent, not to mention the world, it might be more conceivable they would find a greater commonality among each other when placed in contrast to the ubiquity of the surrounding tribes of Germanic speakers.

It is a point well made with the parallels drawn to the Kalmar Union, Spain, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain, though it is also important to remember that the "Celtic" peoples were not, in fact, people from a similar linguistic/ancestral background, at least, not to the 15th century perspective.

The Kalmar Union united the Scandinavian people, all speaking languages derived from Old Norse, spoken only a few hundred years earlier (minus Finland and the Finnish, who were indeed seen as different even in that period).

Spain united speakers of dialects of Vulgar Latin in the former Roman province of Hispania, a group of dialect/languages which evolved concurrently in an interconnected Sprachbund within the borders of a previous, well established, political (and geographical) boundry.

Russia united the various peoples of Eastern Europe, but was essentially a single Rus state (Moscow) which emerged victorious over all other powers in the region and expanded from there. "Russian"-"Ruthenian" tension aside, all the core citizens of the Russian state spoke East Slavic languages and evolved under the same network of minor princedoms going back to the Viking Age, perhaps earlier.

Prussia did not unite the German speaking minor polities, so much as it emerged as the most prominent "minor polity" in what was formerly the northern Holy Roman Empire, already united and connected by hundreds of years of history.

Great Britain, of course, is somewhat different as primarily a geographical designation -a politically convenient hegemonic union under a complex mix of Anglo-Saxon-Norse-French influences, but at its core it, too, essentially was a single polity's (England's) hegemony over the Germanic people of Britain, and the rest of Britain by default/extension.

In stark contrast, Britons and Gaels were never seen as the same "race", were never members of the same political entity, were never located in the same geographical region, and spoke language so different from one another that it wasn't until the birth of modern linguistics and philology the the two languages were recognised as members of the same family at all based on certain unique idiosyncrasies and shared core vocabulary.

The Roman understanding of the concept "Celt" was arguably minimal, and was primarily a pre-Christian designation based on a series of familiar-yet-different religious customs that differed from Italic and Hellenic equivalents in several key ways. Generally the Romans identified the Gauls, Britons, and Scoti are three distinct, different groups (with several other minor groups and some degree of overlap).

The origin of the term "Celt", of course, is itself a modern invention dating back only a couple hundred years, being revived from an old Greek term (Keltoi) first coined to refer to the people generally thought of now as "Gauls". Quite in fact, many experts on the topic would even go so far as to say that the term "Celtic" is not a valid historical designation, though most would quantify and hedge that to the point of being practically meaningless.

When I previously compared Brythonic vs. Gaelic to Portuguese vs. Venetian, or Czech vs. Russian, I fear I may have understated the differences. A more suitable comparison may have been Portuguese vs. Romanian, or perhaps an even more extreme example. I'm afraid that comparing the differences between 15th century Gaelic culture and 15th century Brythonic culture to 15th century Castillian and 15th century Tuscan just isn't accurate. The later two being under the same government, speaking the same language, and claiming the same decendance from only around a millennium earlier, as opposed to at least double that, perhaps much more, depending on one's position regarding P/Q Celtic vs. Insular/Continental Celtic.

Out of context, I have to actually say that one Celtic group bulldozing the other does actually fit with the period. The Bretons actually arrived in Brittany primarily through fleeing Irish predation in their native SW Britain, Irish colonies supplanted Brythonic/Pictish culture in settlements thoughout Britain, evolving into Scottish Gaelic culture in the north, but being largely retaken by Britons in the south. The Welsh sided with the Normans and English against the Gaels consistantly thoughout the period, and most contemporary portrayals, on both sides, depicted the other as foreign and "other", often even with animosity, sometimes even more so than towards the Vikings or the Saxons.

Long, pedantic, and (hopefully not) overly confrontational academic rant aside, you *do* make good points for the concept of cultural unions in EU4, and I think you have somewhat nailed the "hook" of the original mod, which I am trying to maintain as much as possible, despite the inevitable influence I have had upon it, as the primary developer now that HR has left.

It honestly concerns me a bit to hear that anyone is taking issue with any change I've made, though, as I've been trying to keep what made BtP great while adding to it, not overhauling things people love into some joyless history lesson.

I really appreciate the thoughtful feedback, I can't say what I'm planning to do next, but I assure you that I will consider this when deciding.

(Edit: One type-o & 2 misspelling corrected, one misspelling being mispelling...)

Originally posted by Elements08:

could you please consider remaking the philippines like this mod http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=644552325&searchtext=philippines

Originally posted by Elements08:

or just add more province to it

Unfortunately, any work in the Philippines is likely some time away, but as soon as we can, we're planning to improve the region, just as we are trying to improve the rest of the world.

Thanks for the feedback!

first i'd like to say im NOT suggesting plagerisum, but i looked at the meiou map at the 1444 start date and 90% of the reaserch i've done for the last two+ week was peresent in some form. there are things btp surpasses meiou in but alot of obsure countrys are present. i dont like the mechanic changes in meiou and i don't sugest cloneing it but it contains a lot of reaserch about the political sittuation of the world in 1444... as my first refernce point i will start with there map find a country that is not in vinilla or btp then reaserch it my self and bring you suggestions. they are missing some things present in btp so i will check other sources as well but after examination i fine meiou as a good (but not the only) start point......that is all.

@madiunicorn

Thanks. I also oppose plagerism, but in the context of EU4 modding, I like to think of it more as "inspiration" ;).

MEIOU & Taxes is indeed a formidabe and impressive display of historical knowledge, and while I haven't fired it up in around a year, I am alway consistantly impressed by it's attention to detail and historical accuracy whenever I do. My first go at modding EU4, actually, was to create a submod of MEIOU & Taxes, reverting the mechanics to vanilla while keeping the map, but I eventually gave up as it was becoming more work than simply doing everything from scratch, and I have a very personal hatred of messy, disconected borders & micro enclaves surrounded entirely by one other province.

I must say, at least the last time I downloaded & looked at it, MEIOU & Taxes did have some questionable (to my mind) work in the New World, but especially for the Old World, it is a great reference.

I'll happily welcome suggestions, though I do warn that to be done properly, quite a bit of work has to go into any one area, so if you throw too many suggestions for too many areas at me at once, only a few will likely get done in a timely manner.

It also bears mentioning that some "mistakes" in BT are more along the lines of "compromises" made in the absence of better choices because of natural limitations in the EU4 engine which MEIOU & Taxes brilliantly overhauls (With much more flair than I ever could!) but to which I, unfortunately, am bound.

(2 edits, because I spell like a two year old)

Sorry about the barrage. and thank you again for the continued life of BTP.... I was lost and confused for half a year with out it.

Originally posted by Draíocht:

Silesia, Switzerland & Serbia would all be more historical accurate, if split, and that is just the other "S"s ;).

The main challenge is finding a balance that serves history, but also fits in the EU4 engine. There are already 91 princes of the HRE at 1444, whereas vanilla has, what is it.. only under 65, I think? One can keep adding historical states almost indefinately. For example, the delightful "Voltaire's Nightmare" mod, the zoomed-in Europe-only overhaul, has I believe 367 HRE states, but such levels of detail really isn't feasible for a world map, both because of performance, as well as limitations to balance in the EU4 engine.

I'll admit that I'm only passingly familiar with more minor HRE states, though. If I may ask, what would be the argument to split Saxony before, say, the Silesian duchies, or the various autonomous states in the Swiss Confederacy?

I understand your point. In my opinion, the sophisticated HRE mechanics make the Roman-German particularism a unique core feature of the game. Therefore, it makes sense to me to "promote" it more than the particularism in states like Serbia. In the HRE, I'd devide the Thuringian / Saxon territories mainly because of balancing reasons. The Albertinian branch (Saxony) stayed united, while the Ernestinian branch (Thuringia) got devided multiple times; that makes Thuringia stronger than it should actually be. From a military aspect, it's not such a big deal, but it makes it noticeably harder to expand diplomatically. To be honest, I don't know that much about the situation in Italy. Do what you think is best ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another thing: I've noticed that since 1.18 there's an event for Brandenburg called "confiscation of the ruppiner land". It doesn't do anything but adding base points without mods, so I think it would make sense to make it an inheritance event like the Burgundian succession crises in Beyond Typus. What do you think?

http://www.eu4wiki.com/Brandenburg-Prussian_events#Confiscation_of_the_Ruppiner_Land

To answer your question regarding the split of HRE duchies, i had tried something like this in my (now private and discontinued) HRE mod, where I split AUstria into the three lines of Tirol, Austria and Styria, Pomerania into two lines, Brunswick into 3, Saxony into 2 and Bavaria into 3(from start, although some split again or reunited). The issue is that, EU4 is not real fit for such divisions as it doesn't include any kind of succession law (unlike CK2) where you can get duchies to reunite. Most of the time, such partitioned duchies are neighboring each other (seems logical so far), and thus often rival each other, making it impossible to reunite through PU or any other way than conquest. Even then, states which conquer part of another can not reunite most of the time, because they get attacked from another state and lose part of their conquest (or their former core territory). Thus, i have never been able to see Bavaria or Pomerania or Brunswick reunited in any of my games. The situation was different for Austria, as i had Austria and Tirol in "regency" (vassal) under Styria, to represent the regency of the emperor Friedrich III von Habsburg. Although not absolutely accurate, it remained stronger and was able to face challenges such as Burgundy, which it could not face as an emperor if split into 3 independant duchies (let alone against France, Poland or Hungary). By the way, it was, eventhough not absolutely historical, not more or less historical than Burgundy being split into 3 personal unions, which it was not (or at least, no more than the kingdoms of Aragon, Naples, Valencia, Sicilia and so on, which all had their own council and laws and were united only n the person of the kind itself; or no more or less than Hungary/Croatia or England/Wales, which could also be considered unions.
Regarding Switzerland howver, the situation is quite different. ALthough for the same reasons, dividing it into vassal states would completely change the balance of power, keeping states such as Wallis/St Gallen/Basel/Graubunden is much more accurate (since they were not in the Old Confederation at the time), but it also doesn't make Switzerland too weak, as it still controls more provinces than any of the still-independant states.

Originally posted by Draíocht:

@madiunicorn

Thanks. I also oppose plagerism, but in the context of EU4 modding, I like to think of it more as "inspiration" ;).

MEIOU & Taxes is indeed a formidabe and impressive display of historical knowledge, and while I haven't fired it up in around a year, I am alway consistantly impressed by it's attention to detail and historical accuracy whenever I do. My first go at modding EU4, actually, was to create a submod of MEIOU & Taxes, reverting the mechanics to vanilla while keeping the map, but I eventually gave up as it was becoming more work than simply doing everything from scratch, and I have a very personal hatred of messy, disconected borders & micro enclaves surrounded entirely by one other province.

I absolutely support your point of view, as i don't like Meiou for the same reasons (laggy, not multiplayer-friendly unless you get an optical-cable network, too event-crowded, too many mechanics), but i really like it for the new provinces; and consider just like you Beyond the Pale (and thus Beyond Typus) as a Vanilla+ with additionnal provinces.
For the same reason, although i personnally lie to see much more states in the HRE (as vanilla contains way to few, especially in MP, when every player eats every neighboring AI in just a few decades), I perfectly agree that it can not contain hundred of states (physically speaking, they would be 5 pixel wide on the provincemap), nor for gameplay reasons (too many states = too low development = low institution spread, low income and armies too small to siege a fort level 3).
I also don't like historical borders, when they do overlap (speaking about the 10 united cities in western HRE/Alsace-Lorrraine, which were conquered by France all at once during the 30 years war). It makes ugly, hardly understandable borders. and creates some strangley shaped movement "routes" from one province to another not even touching it but from a small piece of land.
Thus, i do recommand to keep the province borders as they currently are, faking some historictiy but to a reasonable point (i.e, i like rather places being in their proper place, but not getting historical borders drawn, especially as these ones usually moved from time to time, especially during ownership transfer

@Gnhtd To me, it just seems so arbitrary to have Canada and "Eastern America" be two separate colonial regions, while still keeping "Eastern America" as one colonial region. What we know today as Canada is just the bulk of British America that didn't rebel along with the other colonies. It's not like Canada was thought of as not being part of, or being separate from the rest of British America. This mod breaks Canada into different colonial regions (and in my opinion this was a very good decision) because those parts of "Canada" were never thought of as being "part of Canada" until much, much later. In the same way, there was no such thing as "Eastern America," no one thought of British colonial organization in that way. The "thirteen colonies" didn't really have a unified and separate identity until 1775. The way people thought about British colonial organization back then was essentially that the whole thing was British America, which was made up of the main regions of Florida, the Southern colonies, the Middle colonies, New England, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and the Acadian colonies of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and PEI (I'm not counting Caribbean and Central American holdings, or places that were'nt really inhabited prior to 1775). If you're gonna break Canada up into Quebec/Canada, Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay, then it would also only make sense to break "Eastern America" into its four regions.