Friday Update: Week 28/2015, The French

So here we are, eleven months and two days after the last Friday Update. Nearly a year of radio silence. However, as the mod approaches its eighth birthday, we're back!

As I mentioned on Facebook, the French are going to be the next civ to get our major attention. Having worked our way up through the Iberian peninsula by pretty much finishing the Moors and Spanish, it's now times for a feast of croissants, baguettes and onion soup, with a Bordeaux red alongside it; les Français. The French civ in K&B is a rather peculiar one. It's one of the European civs, so it follows the same basic principles that the Italians and Byzantines that you're all familiar with do, but the French are more unique than either of those two civs.

Most of our civs have a specific period on which they focus. The Saracens for instance are very much focused on the time of Salah-al-Din, and the Spanish focus on the latter days of the Reconquista, leading in to the Age of Discovery. The French, meanwhile, focus on the Hundred Years' War. In many ways, the Hundred Years' War was an absolute dark age for the French. Beset on all sides by the English and their Burgundian and Navarrese allies, while having to fight related but separate wars against Flanders, Brittany and Portugal, the French were pushed to the absolute limit of their resilience. Anybody who gets his history from stereotypes, or has no interest in anything earlier than the Second World War, would probably expect the French to start waving white flags around, but they'd be very wrong indeed. Granted, the French nobility was largely broken in morale by the latter stages of the war, but the French peasantry wasn't having any of it. They rose up in defence of their country, and under the nigh-mythical leadership of Jeanne d'Arc they actually managed to push back their enemies. It should come as no surprise at this point that Jeanne d'Arc is the French AI personality in K&B. Even more than just her personal achievements, she was the epitome of a prevailing trend in France at the time, of low-born peasants defending crown and country when the nobility had pretty much given up, a level of caring for matters of state among the lower classes that could well be seen as an early portent of principles of citizenship and nationhood that weren't established until the 18th century.

In our next Friday Update, we'll talk more about how this part of French history translates to actual gameplay, but for now, let's take a look at some pictures instead. Our resident wolf in nun's clothing Pepp has been finishing up the Slavic units, among them the Konny Kusznik, the Slavic replacement of the Knight:


Meanwhile, Persian_Fusilier has been making some new portraits for the Barbarian units of the Goths and the Visigoths:



This week, Pepp summarised K&B's situation perfectly. It's been a bit odd for all of us to go back to something we haven't really looked at for months...

Pepp wrote:Wow, this is so old. I am sure we have left the mod not for 3 months, more like 3 seasons...

K&B salutes... you. You, the people who have been asking for our return, and you 434 (at the time of writing) Facebook subscribers. I know I've been very touched by how much K&B means to you, which I still find amazing...
K&B refutes... nothing, really. We'll skip the cynicism and general despair for this week.

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- Quoted from peugeot407