Dev Diary 2018-10-24

Welcome to our first dev diary for 3.8, due out November 2 to the public and on early access now.

Levant
Cyprus has been divided into three provinces to make it less difficult to land troops but more difficult to blockade and allowing the island its own area. This also lets the Genoese own Famagusta (as they did from 1372 to 1489) while the rest of the island remains the Kingdom of Cyprus.

The coast of Judea/Syria/Lebanon was redrawn to better accommodate released crusader states and so that the province of Tripoli/Trablus actually encompasses where the city is. This made Sidon smaller and while we almost gave it the land Jerusalem (Al-Quds) lost, the regional capital at Safed was opted for as a separate province instead



Vilna
Basically in line with Paradox' recent changes, except that Vilna wasn't the capital in 1309 (fortified and made the capital sometime near the beginning of Gediminus' reign) so the Lithuanian capital starts in Kernave with an added mission to construct a fort in Vilna in order to move the capital there.



Scotland
The highlands with a couple extra provinces to align them roughly with the major clans or groups of clans (Teaser: estates coming for that area in 3.8.1) while York was split similar to vanilla.



Baleares
Split the Balearic Islands into three to give its own area, allow the representation that Menorca was a British possession from 1708 to 1782, and give Majorca a bit more defensibility.



India
Split the province of Madurai so that its existence as an independent entity along with independent Kochin no longer isolates the two southernmost provinces (usually owned by someone north of those two independent polities in any later start dates).



East Africa and Yemen
I won't bore you with a picture of Yemen since it looks roughly like vanilla now, but some considerable redraws and rebalancing in Ethiopia to accommodate some of the smaller kingdoms as well as at least one province that was about 100 miles from where they should have been. In 1309 most of these are independent but any later start dates (after Amda Sayon I) they mostly pay tribute to Ethiopia. Additionally, Ethiopia can now have tributaries.



North Africa
Split a few larger provinces in Morocco (and move the capital to Fez where it should be in 1309) and Algiers; we also split Tripolitania into a trio of provinces similar to vanilla. Additionally the Atlas Mountains now actually cover the highest part of the Atlas range further west in Morocco.



Western France
Missed getting a pic of this one, but we split both Poitou and Armor in half giving Poitevan and Gallo culture each three provinces (and expanding both of those two-province areas to three)