Essos information has been scarce these past few months, the reason being a lot of us have been busy in that time and progress has slowed. But rest assured we are still going, we have decided on a vague plan to make our next release an Essos one. This will be after Sons of Abraham has been released so we can take advantage of any features we can use for the mod. So hopefully a December release! In the meantime here is some things we have been working on:
Piracy
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The regions of the Stepstones and the Basilisk islands shall be inhabited by pirates! Aurane Waters shall be a playable pirate in A Feast for Crows:
As you can see pirates have their own piracy religion which both allows them to raid provinces and negotiate rivers. They have mechanics very similar to that of the Wildlings, in that they have a free invasion casus belli and a philosophy of only following strong rulers. If you have a weak heir your realm will fracture with all higher titles being destroyed, but of course you can try and rebuild your pirate realm if this happens.
Triarchs
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The Free City of Volantis has a unique system of Governance which we are trying to replicate in the mod. Volantis is ruled by three Triarchs with equal power that are elected in yearly elections. Of course the game engine only allows for one ruler who directs foreign policy and the like, but we have introduced an election system whereby two junior Triarchs are elected each year:
Any landholder of the republic chooses a political party: Either the Elephants, the party of merchants, or the Tigers, the party of the warriors. Any Valyrian party member of the republic can stand for Triarch:
At the moment the head Triarch, the ruler of the republic, rules for life (something which we are hoping will become moddable in the next patch so they to are elected yearly). The junior Triarchs, elected yearly, have a few powers they can wield against the senior Triarch, including veto of wars of aggression and appointments to the council:
But if a Triarch doesnt toe the party line, e.g. the Elephant party expects Elephant Triarchs to veto wars, the party members will be unhappy and their re-election will become less likely. To balance this Elephant pacifism Elephant patricians can much more easily sieze trade posts from non-Elephant patrticians using party support. Hopefully this will all make Volantis a more unique merchant republic to play!
The Bleeding Years
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After the Doom of Valyria and before Aegon Targaryen invaded Westeros, the nobles of Volantis tried to establish a new Valyrian Freehold themselves, conquering Myr and Lys before attacking Tyrosh, upon which Aegon came upon his Dragon to oppose them. In the Bleeding Years scenario, which has replaced the Seven Kingdoms, the war betwen Volantis and Tyrosh is in full swing:
If the Volantenes are successful they can continue their war against the other free cities, with the aim of unifying the new Freehold.
Giants!
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Not techinally Essos related, but cool nonetheless, Giants can now emerge as characters in wildling courts via a fairly rare event:
That is all for now!
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And finally the official Steam group :
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A Game of Thrones 
How can this be: (travelling to find vayrian sword, warrior companion)
-Dueled him and won: thinks fondly of me
-fought the pirates with warship: thinks fondly of me
-saved his ass from snakes: thinks fondly of me
-listening to him instead of taking the sword…
>Takes the sword and kills me
Not what I expected from a brave, honorable, patient and ambitious person. I didn’t want to accept this because it just feels wrong to have such a “honorable” person, which ass I saved and who thinks 100% good of me betray me and kill me, because he thinks “I’m not worthy”, so I reloaded the game and played it all trough again.
This time we became friends.
Can you explain how dragon breeding works?
Do you need two dragons? Who has to own these dragons? Do they have to be in the same province? What are Dragon Pits for? How to you hatch an egg?
I suspect Giants would have higher martial strength than 11, but cool nonetheless.
I love your guys mod, and really look forward to the Essos release quite a bit.
Are you planning to extend the timeline to before Aegon’s landing? I notice you talking about the time period after the Doom. Is there any plans to include Harren the Black’s conquest of the Riverlands? Or maybe the battle for Dorne, between the Yronwoods and the Martells?
Martial = ! Duel ability. No. And the other questions i let you Ask them on the forum
Looks awsome! Also noticed that dothraki lands are not wastelands as in earlier dev diary. They will be playable then i guess?
One Day sure
In my game i dont have Essos, and its the last one, its a new release coming out?
Its a sneakpeak, essos will come in time
Hey great news you guys it really looks exciting.Will you be able to send your sons away to become a sellsword with the new sons of abraham possiblity to join a holy order?
May be. Feel free to suggest on our forum
will you ever do more with house mudd
new patch will the mod still work?
Hey guys, I’m a novice map maker trying to make a custom map of a fictional world, and the vanilla map size is a bit too small. How did you guys fit Essos onto the existing GoT map? To test it out, I made a map the size of the Europa Universalis IV map, but the vanilla borders and camera angles cut everything off.
Did you edit some files so that the game would recognize a custom map size, or did you shrink everything down to fit into a 2048×2048 box? I’ve been dying to know…!
Giant. – 5000% fertility….
id you edit some files so that the game would recognize a custom map size