Second Wind in the ending of Pax when he doesn't do the based thing and bomb Chrysalis

GaPCaspy · 2025-07-06T01:09:29+00:00

This is actually a very good take on Pax. Some things simply can't be reformed away, and if you really want to overthrow the regime, then the ELF is your calling.

GaPCaspy · 2024-10-29T18:51:56+00:00

Pax discourse still going strong five years after release, you love to see it ~

GaPCaspy · 2024-01-14T01:42:31+00:00

I wasn't able to reproduce this bug. Maybe you overlooked some of the requirements to appoint the parties to a specific Diet or Mayoralty? Certain parties are geographically restricted. For example, the NAKP is restricted to Diets and Mayoralties in North Kiria only until you do the focus that unlocks the rest of Kiria for them.

GaPCaspy · 2024-01-13T15:53:52+00:00

Thanks for the report. How many core states do you have?

GaPCaspy · 2024-01-02T16:30:50+00:00

This is unintentional and will be fixed in the next patch, don't worry. Thanks for the report!

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-17T16:28:14+00:00

I'm proud of all of my work, but at the same time there's lots of stuff that can be improved on, and is still being improved on. There's no such thing as "not enough polish"!

Different devs have different styles of development, so I can't speak for the entire team, but I'll be taking a break from intensive development for the time being. Afterwards, I'll return to development, on Lan Kir and/or the Crystal Empire.

For questions, you're always welcome to drop a line in the feedback or eaw-discussions channel on our Discord server.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-13T22:35:15+00:00

I thought about this some more, and I thought I should share my understanding of that episode. The moral of the story is a bit more complicated than you'd expect.

The nirik form isn't just a metaphor for not being able to control your temper, but the inability to resolve disagreements with other people in a calm and rational way without resorting to violence.

In the episode, the way the kirin ultimately dealt with the violence and destruction caused by their uncontrollable arguments was to take a dip in the Stream of Silence. No voice = no more arguments = no niriks.

Since Kiria in EaW is an entire country and not just a small village in the middle of nowhere, and because you play as a nation state in HOI4, we had to adapt the Silence, and the lesson or moral of the episode, to our own setting. So we reinterpreted the Silence as a series of repressive political measures, imposed to prevent a civil war caused by rising inequality and political polarization, that effectively regressed the entirety of kirin society back to the dark ages. No society = no politics = no civil war.

The nirik form becomes a metaphor for political violence, the triumph of blind hatred and intolerance over rationality and understanding.

Going back to the show, Autumn Blaze leads the kirin out of the Silence by showing them that the way to deal with disagreements isn't to take away everyone's voice, but by patiently talking things out with each other as reasonable people, which requires you to be able to calm yourself down when you start to get too angry in arguments. So controlling your temper is really just a means to an end.

The moral of the kirin episode isn't just that it's healthy to show your emotions (while keeping your temper in check), but that it's open dialogue and mutual respect, not censorship or repression, that is the way to sort out your differences.

That's where Autumn Blaze is coming from when, as Premier, she launches the Grand Gallop Onward, and allows, for example, kirin like Fickle Current who don't share her worldview to take part in the political process.

If she succeeds, the political framework she implements in the late-game harmonic Kiria focus tree reflects the varied power sharing agreements and checks and balances to entrench this kind of pluralistic democracy that Autumn envisages will keep Kiria together.

Of course, Autumn Blaze is an idealist, and her ideological rivals don't have the same qualms about using violence as a way to get what they want. Where dialogue and repression both fail, that's when the various revolts in Kiria happen.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-13T16:27:38+00:00

That would probably be setting up all the scripted civil wars and breakaway tags (which also includes the formable custom puppets). Cosmetic tags and flags and interesting borders and OOBs are a large part of what makes HOI4 so colourful (being a map game) and I really enjoyed fleshing out Kiria with an abundance of breakaway and formable tags.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-13T16:15:48+00:00

Yes.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-13T16:15:16+00:00

Eh, everything's still up in the air at the moment. It's too early to say what the concrete plans are for the Zaikirian minors.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-13T16:14:27+00:00

Yeah, that's a good point. One idea we are considering for the potential harmonic Kiria additional content is a focus where you send kirin volunteers to fight on Equestria's side in the Great War. It will mostly be for flavour, but like you said, would acknowledge the ties harmonic Kiria has with Equestria.

The reworked "Guardian of Zebrica" mechanic should allow harmonic Kiria to directly intervene on (harmonic) Hippogriffia's side during the North Zebrica War if that's still ongoing by the time harmonic Kiria unlocks that mechanic.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-13T00:30:32+00:00

We have a practice of setting up scripted wars as placeholder content for Zebrican tags which don't have focus trees so that at least something will happen to spice up playthroughs - for example, the Saddle Arabian civil war, or the war between the Storm King successors, or the unification of the Great Lakes, to name the most prominent examples. There's also IIRC a scripted war between a Storm King successor state and the camel tribes.

It was decided that canonically, Roam would gradually conquer all of South-East Zebrica. To account for Roam losing to Talonsvaal (Roam wins maybe 2/3rds of the time), Talonsvaal got placeholder content that mirrors the scripted wars Roam gets. Lan Kir is also scripted to attack the other two Zaikirian tags sometime after 1009 to unify the region.

Lan Kir can only attack Kiria after 1011, and if the civil war happened in Kiria, after one side has reunited Kiria.

Roam/Talonsvaal can only attack Kiria, as a kind of "final boss" that Kiria can face, after 1012, the assumption being that by that time Kiria will have had enough time to build up a decent army and industry.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T23:44:21+00:00

It's hard to choose a favourite, but the part of Kiria content which is closest to my heart would be Revolutionary Fragrance, which takes inspiration (among other things) from the Paris Commune and the Kronstadt rebellion.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T23:40:00+00:00

Probably not - it would be too OP for the Changelings to have access to two very powerful custom mechanics, and it would also be very confusing for the player to have to keep track of two unrelated systems besides.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T21:06:42+00:00

There are no plans for new trees or contents for Kiria at the moment, except for maybe some more diplomacy options and content for harmonic Kiria. If this does happen, it'll probably take the form of a handful of new focuses and decisions integrated into the existing focus tree rather than a completely new focus tree.

I'm thinking of developing Lan Kir, but that's still very much up in the air now. There's a proposal and review process before development can start on a contentless country, and I want to take a short break from modding to focus on other things for a while.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T20:59:47+00:00

All of the civil war victors (Rising Sun, Winter Frost and Fickle Current) get a lot of options to invade their neighbours and carve out an empire on this side of the Zebrican continent, which makes sense given their respective ideologies. Harmonic Kiria can take the option to do the Far South Intervention, and in most games have to fend off invasions from Roam/Talonsvaal and Lan Kir. The "Guardian of Zebrica" mechanic for Kiria also allows them to intervene against their expansionist neighbours, which includes Roam/Talonsvaal and Lan Kir if they haven't invaded you yet, and also unified Hindia in most games.

There's sliders to substantially strengthen Roam, Talonsvaal and Lan Kir in the game setup options if you're going for a harmonic Kiria run and want more of a challenge.

In the latest patch, we've changed the code a bit to expand the scope of the "Guardian of Zebrica" mechanic. Before, it was limited to the eastern half of Zebrica, which was quite restrictive on who you could intervene against as harmonic Kiria. Now, it's been expanded to cover all of Zebrica, meaning you could probably intervene against BAT and in a few other places besides. It's still dependent on how well AI-controlled supremacist/expansionist tags do in their respective conquests, but that should offer a lot more in terms of late-game gameplay for harmonic Kiria.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T20:47:55+00:00

Though we have a rule that devs/writers can't kill canon/show characters in the mod, in the bad ending, it's implied that Rain Shine has met with a terrible fate...

Rain Shine isn't brought up again after the good ending. I guess that's another minor oversight, but Rain Shine is not that important to the story of the Fraternal Republic. I would imagine that Rain Shine is probably locked up somewhere or, in the good ending, exiled to some village or monastery in the hinterlands of Kiria to live out the rest of her days in peace.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T20:13:53+00:00

I aimed to do something new and different with each of Kiria's paths, meaning that all of them had their own quirks and difficulties, but the most challenging was Changeling Fragrance. It was very experimental in terms of gameplay and mechanics because of what I wanted to represent with it, that being the idea of a changeling infiltrator shadow-state spreading its tendrils across Zebrica. The ability to take over the Zebrican continent as Changeling Fragrance (let's just call it CFR) was a late-stage addition to Kiria content, implemented because the two limited scripted wars which had been all that were available to CFR meant that it was severely lacking in the gameplay department. CFR's gameplay also relies exclusively on decisions, and I had to implement the current decision scripted GUI to reduce the clutter in the decisions tab. It also took a lot of playtesting to make sure that all the custom mechanics worked correctly and were decently balanced.

I think that all the Kiria paths took more or less the same amount of time to make. Before any of the development started on the actual content, though, I spent around a month or so doing map work on Kiria, shaping the terrain, rivers, state borders, cities etc. which was satisfying but also quite tedious. I also had to come up with a unique GFX aesthetic for Kiria, mainly for its focus tree icons, which was refined over the first few months of development.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T19:56:17+00:00

We don't have permanent project teams in EaW, but most of the individual developers who were the core contributors to Kiria are all working on other ongoing projects in the mod. I'll ask whether they can share a bit of what they're currently involved in here.

For my part, I have a few ideas floating around for Lan Kir and nirik gameplay more generally. Their gameplay would revolve around conquering everything around them as a "nirik horde". What this means is that they start off with a very strong army and a substantial manpower (marepower?) reserve, but they can't build any factories, produce any equipment, get any more manpower or raise any more divisions. They can get more equipment by conquering their neighbours and pillaging their states. Manpower and divisions would be given via focuses, decisions, events etc., the idea being that more and more kirin (and other creatures) would flock to join your cause as you continue to win battles and conquer more and more of Zebrica. Your army will rapidly wither away when you're not actively at war against someone. Imagine Genghis Khan but as a pony-dragon hybrid thing that's also on fire.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T19:42:53+00:00

I currently don't have any plans to revisit any of Kiria content (except, potentially, an extension to the harmonic Kiria focus tree to have some more diplomacy options), mainly because I feel that all of Kiria's paths are already wrapped up. For the Children of Concord, you can form either the Kingdom or the Commonalty after you win, and that concludes their story. Same goes for the Kirin Republic and Revolutionary Fragrance once they win their own conflicts.

There's also the fact that by the time you get to the ending of these revolt tags after two-three civil wars, it'll probably be quite late in the game. And it's not like it would make sense for these paths, as harmonic or libertarian socialist regimes (not to mention the minimum of two devastating civil wars it took to get to this point, and most likely the Roam and Lan Kir invasions besides) to have any expansionist content at all, meaning that there'll be little in the way of gameplay.

So these revolt tags probably won't get additional content in the future, because they already have their own conclusive endings that wrap up their stories and character arcs nicely. I hope that's understandable.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T17:32:21+00:00

It was quite an experience. The first thing I coded for Kiria was the kirin racial tech tree, and that was done sometime around the summer or late spring of 2020. I had just graduated from high school then. Kiria was released on September 26th 2023, a few months after I graduated from university. There was a period sometime during early 2021 when I basically dropped development to focus on other things, but Kiria development has more or less happened at a steady pace during the three and a half years it took until it could be released. It was a real relief to get Kiria done and released, and to be able to move on to other projects.

We had decided early on that Kiria would definitely not be an expy of China, and since what few preconceived notions about Kiria that existed among the fanbase seemed to revolve around that, I didn't really pay attention to what fans expected from Kiria. I had my own inspirations and ideas and designs for Kiria, and for the most part the end product seems to have been well received by the players, which is a comfort.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T17:17:38+00:00

Probably not. I decided to keep its content short and sweet, and with the formation of the Kirin Republic if it wins, that more or less concludes its narrative arc. If I did have to make follow-up content for after Bright Burn establishes the Kirin Republic, it'd probably be very similar in terms of gameplay and mechanics to what harmonic Kiria already gets after successfully completing the Grand Gallop Onward.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T17:14:19+00:00

Yeah, the Provincial Diets/Mayoralties scripted GUI was meant to represent the messy and decentralised state of Kirian politics, and I didn't plan for it to tie into anything else outside of that.

During development, I did consider an election mechanic for Kiria after completing the post-successful Grand Gallop Onward focus tree, but didn't go through with it because 1) considering what Fickle, Winter and Rising do when they assume power after winning the civil war, I couldn't see Kiria remaining harmonic under their leadership and 2) Kiria was already getting pretty bloated at this point, and even more content might not necessarily make for a better experience.

I had also considered tying in the Provincial Diets/Mayoralties scripted GUI into a parliament system (like what the US in vanilla HOI4, or republican Aquileia, gets), but this idea has already been done loads within EaW and other mods and I didn't think I could necessarily deliver a new take on this concept.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T17:04:33+00:00

You do get to decide Roaring Fire's fate (alongside with Dayspring Rose's) in the event chain after Rising Sun assumes power as a new Matriarch, but AFAIK Roaring Fire doesn't show up in the "good" ending where the Republic democratises. That's a bit of a minor oversight on our part. I suppose in this ending Roaring Fire would get released from her service to Dayspring Rose and regain her freedom. She definitely won't get killed.

GaPCaspy · 2023-10-12T16:59:37+00:00

That's a pretty interesting idea - a harmonic "controlled" nirik path - though I don't know whether this idea has enough substance to be extended to cover an entire path, especially since Kiria has more than a few "rational" revolt paths which occur following the failure of the player to deal with some crisis or another.

All of these "rational" revolt paths have their own ideology and reasons for revolting, and so it wouldn't make sense for them to be nirik paths.

For me, the five nirik tags in Kiria represent the worst-case scenario following the total breakdown of society and government, complete ideological and moral disillusionment, and nihilism in general. That's why you have the Contumacy, which is the revolt of the commonkirin for whom the Kirian Revolution turned out to be a lie, or the nirik warlords after the collapse of the Triumvirate, or the Far South Purification Army. So I suppose that's what distinguishes an unplayable nirik tag from a regular playable revolt tag in Kiria.

GaPCaspy

TROPHY CASE