Hello everybody, and welcome! This week we will shift the focus from the upcoming African content, to the new Monuments that we will be introducing for Leviathan DLC owners, and that will come along with the 1.32 patch.
As this has been quite a popular feature of the last DLC, we felt that we could create a few more for the game. And when I say a few, I mean that we’ve almost doubled them, with 52 new monuments being added. So first let’s talk a bit about the creative process and the decisions that we made when choosing which ones we wanted, and then I will be showing some of them (although not all, as that would really be a long post, and we want to surprise you a bit when looking at them for the first time ingame!).
The creative process started a few months ago, just after releasing the new Monuments of 1.31.5 patch. As we pointed out back then, the thing that takes more time about this feature is the Art involved, and because of that you’ve not heard anything about them in a few months. So, we really wanted to choose some beautiful and meaningful buildings to be included.
Apart from that, we also wanted the regional distribution of the Monuments to be a bit fairer, as we felt that some regions were crowded with them, but others were a bit sparse. So here you have a sneak peak of that:
Now we have 18 monuments in America (11 new), 31 in Europe (16 new), 9 in Africa (5 new), 45 in Asia (19 new), and 2 in Oceania (1 new). That’s 52 new monuments in total. We would have preferred to have a few more monuments here and there, but overall we are mostly happy with the result, and we really hope you enjoy them.
So, where did our inspiration to pick the new ones come from? First we incorporated the ones that were voted for in the forum around May; so, Cahokia, Malbork Castle, Brandenburg Gate, Santa Maria del Fiore, Bran Castle, the Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela, the Great Living Chola Temples, Porcelain Tower of Nanjing and Nan Madoll are in.
Then, we had been gathering suggestions from the community here in the forums, in the Monuments-specific threads. We have to thank you all for the passion you showed, as we had a long-list of around 100 Monuments to pick from, and that was a great inspiration for us. Last, but not least, we checked a lot of different places from the UNESCO World Heritage list.
Now let’s go to the cool part of the DD, and let me show you some of the new Monuments.
[Disclaimer: modifiers are currently being tested by us and our QA, so expect changes on them when 1.32 patch is released.]
First one we want to show you is in the Americas: the Qhapaq Ñam, portraying the famous Incan Road System. Although we brainstormed a bit about how we could do this without being attached to only one province, we thought that it would be a bit difficult to do, and we wanted to be coherent with the other monuments, which are located in only one province. Anyway, we represented this as a buff for an united Andean Empire, and because of that it’s on the most northern tag of the region. If you notice the last modifier, it is a new one affecting Yearly Inti Authority (there's a word lacking there to be fixed, yes!), so we think it’s a nice buff for the main religion in the region:
Next one is Santa Maria del Fiore, one widely requested by the community, and one that we obviously think should be included, as being so Stendhal-esque! We took the opportunity to add a nice modifier to it, so here you have this Monthly Splendor modifier that we think fits perfectly with it:
Now let’s move to Africa. It was obvious for us that some new Monuments had to be added to the region we’re focusing on for the next Immersion Pack, and make them useful with the new content we’ve been designing. So here you’ve got the famous Rock-Hewn Churches at Lalibela, that gives some extra flavour when playing as Ethiopia, as it’s our first Coptic-related Monument. And I’ll give you some extra info, not directly related with today’s DD, but with this area: yes, we will have some new mechanics for Judaism! But those will be revealed in a couple weeks.
Let’s go now to Asia. Here we’ve added a bunch of monuments to India, as we felt this subcontinent to be a bit empty of Monuments in comparison to other regions. One of those is Hampi, the renowned capital of Vijayanagar, that grew as a really princely city (until being razed by the Bahmani Empire, of course…). So, here we’ve got a couple of interesting things to show. First is the new ‘All Estates’ Loyalty Equilibrium’, that now will make our lives (and modders’ ones!) easier, as we can add this loyalty equilibrium modifier to all the existing estates in our country. The other thing is that we added a couple new requirements for Buddhist Monuments, so now they can be used also by Hindu countries with a ruler following the Buddha cult, or by Fetishist ones that follow Buddhadharma. [Obviously the Hindu Buddha cult is redundant in this Monument, as it can be used by Dharmic religion groups, but we wanted to show this fix we’ve done in this pic.]
To end with the Oceania continent, we’ve added here its second monument, the settlement of Nan Madoll. We wanted this to work as a kind of race prize and reward for colonizing the Pacific islands, so because of that the nice modifiers for colonization, coupled with the Yearly Navy Tradition one.
That’s mostly all for today! Because I want to make a last announcement: Paradox Tinto will be joining the Grandest Lan event with a Dev (Dream) Team! Probably we will be beaten badly by everyone else in the game, but at least it will probably be fun.
Next week we will come back to the new African content, and my colleague Ogele will be talking about Mutapa and Kilwa new missions, among other things. I’ll be reading your feedback along this week, see you!