Eranshahr and Zoroastrianism Improvements

Simple description:

This is a mod that overhauls Zoroastrianism, add new church aspects and personal deities(yazatas) system, rework the holy sites, and add more decisions and special festival events.

This mod also add more contents to Eranshahr, the Zoroastrian path of Persia, with new mission tree, new flag, new cultures, Sassanian-style person and place names, more events and decisions, and more great monuments in Persia.

It also allows you to form Eranshahr directly as Fars, giving Fars an unique Zoroastrian path to form Sasan as Ardashir I and restore Sasanid Eranshahr.

I also add a few relevant loading screens and songs. All events have their unique pictures, but because of their picture size, I recommend you to use with Better Event Pictures.

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In-detail description:

This is a mod that makes many improvements for Eranshahr and Zoroastrian religion. Since the mod adjust the event window size, it would be best to use together with Better Event Pictures, I tested their compatibility. Of course, you can run my mod without it.

Completely rework Zoroastrianism. Add church power and church aspect system. You can select three Amesha Spentas from seven as church aspects. Each aspect represents an entity of Ahura Mazda. You can also select a personal deity (yazata) from seven for your monarch in the decisions. I preserve the holy sites, but they are now transferred to triggered modifiers and I adjust the location of a few sites.

Eranshahr now has a new chain of missions about religion and expension, it is designed as a continuation of vanilla conquest and religious missions. They are more difficult to accomplish, but have much better rewards.

Add event chains for Nowruz festival, while can happen if religion is Zoroastrianism or culture group is Iranian. Also add Farwardigan festival, Mehregan festival and Zartosht no-diso for Zoroastrian states. These festival events happen every eight years if not at war.

Add religious festival events for personal yazatas (deities). Anahita, Mah, Tir (Tishtrya) have their unique religious festivals. Other yazatas will share the common festival of Azargan, the fire festival. These festival events happen every seven years.

Add five seasonal festivals, or known as Gahambars, these festivals are triggered by their corresponding Amesha Spentas in the church aspects. Spenta Armaiti has one additional festival. They happen every nine years.

Add twelve new monuments in Persia: the Academy of Gundeshapur, Taq Kasra, Naqsh e rostam, Dayr-e Gachin, Fire temple of Yazd(Adur Farnbag), Tower of Silence, Fire temple of Adur Gushnasp, Sarvestan Palace, Dezful bridge, Taq-e Bostan, Fire temple of Adur Burzen-Mihr and the Great Wall of Gorgan.

Add many new events for Eranshahr, including a chain of love story events from Shahnameh if you control Kabul as Eranshahr and does not have a queen consort; three conquest events when you control Samarkand, Delhi and Antioch. There will be more in the future.

Improve the ideas of Eranshahr and Persia. Eranshahr now has -25 core creation and 5 discipline in tradition, 1 cavalry shock in idea.

Add 15 new loading screens replacing vanilla ones. Also add ten songs for Eranshahr, six of them are composed by Farya Faraji, many thanks to him *^_^*.

When your monarch meets skill and legitimacy requirements, you will trigger the event Xvarenah and unlock a powerful ability in decisions. But be care, low in legitimacy or high in overextension, will cause the lost of farr (xvarenah).

Replace the flag of Eranshahr with Derafsh Kaviani, the traditional Sassanian flag. A short event chain is added to explain the history/legend of this flag.

Add one chain of decisions and events for zoroastrian states concerns xwedodah, or consanguine marriage. Another chain of decisions is added for Eranshahr about the reconstruction of ancient Sassanian defense lines.

Eranshahr now has an event that would allow you to change your prominent culture and all of your Persian culture provinces to Parsik. Parsik, or in Pahlavi scripts 𐭯𐭠𐭫𐭮𐭩𐭪 means Persian language, here refers to both the Middle Persian language and the Sassanian culture. Parsik culture belongs to the Lost culture groups. Also add Sogdian culture, you can change the culture of Transoxiana into Sogdian as Parsik Eranshahr.

The names of kings and consorts of Eranshahr have been changed to Sassanian names but not default Persian names. Parsik culture and Sogdian culture also have a LOT of Middle Persian, Sogdian and Avestan-style names for your advisors, generals etc.

Like Greek culture in Anatolia, Parsik culture will change many provinces’ names in Persia, Mesopotamia, Khorasan, Caucasus and Afghanistan regions. These names are based on real city names and administrative divisions in the Sassanian Empire.

This mod also replace all default colonial nation names of Eranshahr with legendary place names from Avesta. When you colonize provinces in Australia, Canada, the Caribbeans, Argentina, California and Mexico, you will also have events explaining why these regions are given such names.

Finally, in a few events’ descriptions, I use the verses of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and the translation of ♥♥♥♥ Davis, deepest thanks to them.