Enhanced Culture

Ever feel that culture is the most useless of the four commerce types? You either need it on the fringes of your empire or in your very center if you have completely dedicated yourself to a cultural victory. Between those two extremes there is simply no point in producing culture.

I intend to bridge this gap by making culture more useful in general.

This mod adds three new mechanics:

• Culture is accumulated on a civ-wide basis and used to trigger Golden Ages, unlike in earlier versions one time culture boosts from Great Artists and Random Events do contribute towards this as well
  
• Some Buildings can now add an exponential modifier to Great People Birth Rate based on a City's Culture Level
• Some Buildings can now add an exponential modifier to Trade Route Yield based on a City's Culture Level

Maybe now someone might actually want to build a Monument in their capital.



(If some of the values in the screenshots appear strange to you, it's probably because I took them in a Renaissance starting era game on quick speed)

Furthermore, I made some adjustments to the AI so it values culture more in general.

I also took the liberty of reducing the culture output of most buildings, corporations, civics etc. to maintain some semblance of balance. If you're not interested in those balance changes feel free to delete everything in the XML folder except GlobalDefinesAlt.xml and the Buildings and Text folders.

I have also added the relevant DLL source files, every single line change I made is commented with //KNOEDEL, larger blocks start with //KNOEDELstart and end with //KNOEDELend.

You can download it here.

Credits:

• The creators of the Planetfall mod for implementing the original Cultural Golden Age mechanic I based mine on.
• @Leoreth for implementing the original Trade Route Yield/Great People Birth Rate Modifier per Culture Level mechanic in Dawn of Civilization.

Which assests folder do i apply this to? The main game or the selected mod?

Ani Taneen said:

Which assests folder do i apply this to? The main game or the selected mod?

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The mod, never change the base files, always do everything in separate mod folders. The way I planned it you shoud just unpack the zip archive in your BtS mods folder, creating a new folder named Enhanced Culture which contains all changed files.

What a coincidence!

Just today, while modding, I thought I should make culture production cause happiness somehow... Love you for this! It's like having a free pizza arrive at my door the moment I get hungry!

Zholef said:

What a coincidence!

Just today, while modding, I thought I should make culture production cause happiness somehow... Love you for this! It's like having a free pizza arrive at my door the moment I get hungry!

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Aw shucks you're welcome! I have considered something like this for about a year, but only recently got around to SDK modding, so I figured this would be a nice first test of my abilities.

My next trick will be a crowding penalty, making units fight worse the more units they share a tile with!

Ambitious. Have you given thought to how to teach the AI to cope with that?

Zholef said:

Ambitious. Have you given thought to how to teach the AI to cope with that?

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Well it's just a simple mathematical function. The only problem is finding the right location in the code for it.

No, and honestly I'm not sure how I would go about that.

I'm back from the dead to ask, have you seen my Holistic Culture mod? Well actually I don't seem to have an isolated version of just the culture model available but if you want to modify culture, I'm curious what you think of my approach.

Mylon said:

I'm back from the dead to ask, have you seen my Holistic Culture mod? Well actually I don't seem to have an isolated version of just the culture model available but if you want to modify culture, I'm curious what you think of my approach.

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No, I haven't seen it. It has some nice ideas, but it seems to retain the issue that annoys me the most, that culture in cities that don't have any tiles or cities to flip nearby is useless.

this is a really great idea. thinking about it makes me want all building happiness to come from culture. you could even very crudely get the AI to play along by leaving in/putting happiness tags on the buildings for the AI to decide what to build, but don't actually use those values to calculate happiness and don't display them to the player.

I noticed alsothat you don't need a new culturelevels.xml or schema to get the same effect. just use getCultureLevel - 3 instead of calling the xml tag

anyway, I think this is going into RFC Classical World so thanks!

srpt said:

I noticed alsothat you don't need a new culturelevels.xml or schema to get the same effect. just use getCultureLevel - 3 instead of calling the xml tag

anyway, I think this is going into RFC Classical World so thanks!

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Yeah but I wanted to do it by the book and ensure future modders will have an easy time adjusting the values without digging into the DLL.

Be warned though that I had problems implementing this modcomp in Dawn of Civilization, for some reason it messes up flipping and frustratingly enough I have yet to find the exact cause for it.

I really like your culture changes. If I ever pick up my Fractured States mod again I’d like to use it.

I’m wondering if you (or someone else) knows how to make culture no longer affect borders or territory growth.

OzzyKP said:

I really like your culture changes. If I ever pick up my Fractured States mod again I’d like to use it.

I’m wondering if you (or someone else) knows how to make culture no longer affect borders or territory growth.

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Sure, go ahead.

Well, I have seen that feature in some other mods like Rise of Mankind and Earth2010, but I'm unable to find it as a stand-alone mod component except for this one which only fixes the first ring instead of all territory.

Imp. Knoedel said:

Sure, go ahead.

Well, I have seen that feature in some other mods like Rise of Mankind and Earth2010, but I'm unable to find it as a stand-alone mod component except for this one which only fixes the first ring instead of all territory.

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Yea, there are so many cool features in mods that never get made into mod comps so others can use them, it’s too bad.

I just posted an update that radically changes this mod. Basically I threw out all of the work I did and put in Leoreth's code instead because unlike me he probably knows what he is doing. Also I merged in my old Cultural Golden Ages mod with some improvements as well, no need to have that separate.

It's nice to see that in 2021, literally over a decade since the game has been released people are still coming up with cool ideas like this and making them happen. Especially ideas as cool as this one. Like, seriously, this is how the base game should have worked.