Colonization Overhaul For Exploration Mod Proposal

[tman2000]

This will build off of my Antiquity Age mod proposal: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/better-city-town-ecosystem-mod-proposal.696941/

This substantially increases settlement growth in Antiquity and adds better town functions.

I would also use this proposed system for map generation as a prerequisite for this mod proposal: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/better-exploration-age-map-generation.696935/

This divides the world into 5 longitudinal sectors: homeland, maritime distant lands, megacontinent distant lands, ocean, latitudinally split ocean/steppe-desert. While settings can be customized, historic civs will spawn in their appropriate part of the world, and the other two lands become your distant lands. When starting the exploration age, one distant lands will be assigned the "plague disaster" and the other the "invasion disaster". The plague disaster will feature a very empty map which will slowly fill up with independent powers, and civs spawning there will feature growth limitations for the duration of the age, with 1-2 settlements max. The invasion disaster will feature an appropriately sized exploration start civ, split in half towards the greatest desert/steppe/coastal side. These settlements will be assigned as neutral city-states with a mutual affiliation (i.e.: they don't attack each other, and share the same set of enemies).

Better Exploration, Colonization and Religious Wars

The new lynchpin feature is the colonial warehouse (the English civilization to be added will have a colonial warehouse building called the factorie, and a merchant-adventurer mysterie building).

The colonial warehouse:

• Gathers resources from that settlement after a number of turns. It can spawn manual treasure fleets, with custom allotment, unless you click the automatic spawn button (there's also an auto-sail to homelands button).
• Colonial warehouses must be adjacent to the coast, on a settlement with a fishing quay, to send treasure fleets. Otherwise, it can spawn wagons.
• Wagons and treasure fleets can bring goods from colonial warehouses to other colonial warehouses.
• Homeland city centers can hold some resources, but the wharf expands this capacity. Resources are only kept in the homeland to trade, whereas in the colonies they provide a bonus.
• Resources in a colonial warehouse can be held for upload, they can be slotted to provide a bonus effect to the settlement, or they can be consumed for that settlement for a reward.

Resources will be updated. No more distant lands resources. Instead, each of the three types of distant lands have their own unique resources, which will appear in greater abundance after the start of exploration.

1. Maritime distant lands: whales, silver, sugar, furs
2. Inland Sea temperate lands: wool, salt, tin, wine
3. Southeastern jungled lands: silk, spices, dyes, porcelain

There are four universal trade resources: gold, tea, wood, fish. These should spawn with relative uniformity between the three distant lands areas, and they are uniformly demanded by them.

Each trade resource type has 2 of 4 that can be improved via a crafts workshop building. Wales -> ambergris, sugar->rum, wool->warm shirts, tin->dishware, silk->garments, porcelain->bowls. These are assigned from colonial warehouses with a button to the settlement's workshop and will automatically return when complete if there is warehouse space available. If you don't make room in the warehouse, you'll create a production bottleneck.

Trade is different now, within a new economic victory system. There is a global demand function with trade, where each of the three "lands" has a global demand for goods. They will demand goods from their distant lands. The function increases demand as population increases, demand gets fulfilled every turn, and also there is a luxury strata that can increase in proportion to specialist population. Every turn, the total available demand is divided into all trade turned in that turn, and players can view a summary of the end of turn rewards for turning in trade. Met demand and luxury demand provides homelands wide happiness bonuses.

Ideally, if you are oversupplied with something like silk in the homelands, you can export it to the maritime distant lands for greater value, setting up trade networks, and customizing how or whether you improve resources. With the appropriately designed resource menus, this should be pain free and could be largely automated as well so long as the appropriate structures are built.

Regardless of demand and payout, in linear proportion to distant lands resources brought to the homelands, the homeland cities with wharfs will spawn supply ships. There are three kinds of supplies:

1. Tools - when assigned to a colonial warehouse slot, these provide a % production boost. Or they can be consumed for a one time gold amount.
2. Household goods - these provide a % food boost.
3. Luxury goods - these provide a culture boost, or sell for more money.

There are also religious beliefs which modify these. For example, on belief introduces a fourth category of good, religious relics, which provide influence and happiness. Another belief, "Work Ethic" adds culture to the household goods food boost. Etc.

New Unit - The Explorer. This unit is a better Scout, with limited combat ability, and the ability to "work" a mountain for a few turns for a larger visibility range. Most importantly, explorers can found outposts. Civ unit explorers might have missionary charges if you're Spain. The Norman explorer will be able to convert an independent power to a settlement as an alternative to dispersing it. Etc.

The outposts are purchased by explorer special ability, from a currency that accumulates through: diplomatic endeavors, trade (at outposts), religious conversion, or conquest of distant lands powers of any kind.

Outposts have 1-tile radius and so have limited ability to exploit resources and provide a defensive bonus similar to a settlement. Every civ will have slight differences in their outposts and explorers. Spain's outposts will be missions, which can exert religious pressure on trade routes. Chinese outposts will have defensive bonuses.

Other features of outposts:

• Every outpost is a colonial warehouse and can spawn wagons based on the resources it captures.
• Outposts can be converted to settlements for a slightly higher cost than a settler, but don't count in any way toward settlement caps, and aren't affected by happiness.
• Friendly independent powers who send a military unit or scout to outposts receive a small gold bonus, while the outpost owner receives an additional bonus based on their civ.
• Some outposts will send religious pressure for these actions, some will receive rumors and reveal the map (trails, or IPs or natural wonder locations), some will gain combat advantages, some will simply accrue culture/science/influence yields depending.

The system of trade has diverse resources, bi-directional trade, colonial warehouse bonuses, an outpost system just to get resources from the interior, global demand levels, and so forth. The economic victory will involve if you meet enough demand for a given product in one of the lands (3 x 12 possibilities), you are granted a monopoly on that product which will only allow you to sell a certain amount of the product, but for the best possible price (or higher price if you sell less). Lots of chances to get a market monopoly, and something like 8 monopolies gives you the legacy path, or 20 as a victory.

Religion will be totally different.

• Rural religious conversion is much slower, and has steadier zeal.
• Urban conversion is quicker, and zeal is high after conversion, but declines faster.

Urban populations are more responsive to conversion pressure, and can exert pressure on rural areas, but if religion is neglected, rural areas will revert urban back to their belief system.

Missionaries no longer have conversion charges. They build a religious center (i.e.: church, mosque), which is a building that exists within an urban district not as one of the two buildables, but in the marginal house structures part of the city model. Only one religion can occupy an urban tile this way, and they do so permanently. Thus, a settlement with one urban tile can only accommodate one religious structure. The more urban tiles, the more religious pressure and possible diversity. Missionaries can only build one religious center per city with their 3-4 charges. A new missionary can come to that same city and build a second center of that religion.

• The first religious structure built in a settlement converts all of its rural tiles.
• Religious pressure is simple arithmetic. One religious building cancels out another. So Islamx2, Christianityx1, Judaismx1 results in 1 religious pressure for Islam.
• Trade routes take the result of this then add it in again. So if another town's buildings result in +2 Christianity, the result is rerolled with Islamx2, Christiannityx1 + 2, Judaism x1, this becomes a new urban pressure of +1 Christianity.
• Land connections, direct settlements, apply +1 pressure from whatever the current urban converted religion is, not more than +1.
• There is a "zeal meter" for the current urban conversion. When the urban population is first converted, zeal goes up to 10, then declines according to religious pressure against it per turn.
• When urban religious pressure exceeds zeal, the urban population is converted. When this happens, one rural tile is converted as well. A settlement can "re-convert" to its own religion, which is how rural gets converted.
• Rural tiles don't affect the urban religious pressure calculation, however, they each count as one zeal for their own religion. Whatever the highest number produced by religions from religious tiles (2 Islam, 4 Christianity = 4 Christianity), that is measured against urban zeal. Urban will convert if rural zeal exceeds urban zeal, each time this occurs one rural tile is re-converted back to that religion.
• You will have situations with religious structures and trade where an urban center could have something like +8 Christianity pressure, and six rural tiles practicing Judaism. This will retain high zeal and quickly convert the rural tiles to Christianity.
• Or, if trade declines, and a couple new religious structures are built there, you could drop to +4 Christianity pressure, and +6 rural Judaism zeal, triggering the conversion of rural tiles back to Judaism.
• Settlements with few urban tiles will always be harder to convert. Settlements with many urban tiles are better candidates for permanent conversion as each tile has to become a permanent religious structure.

Over time the religions will solidify permanently. Racing to convert rural heavy settlements first is a good way to maintain religious dominance. Building many missionaries and many religious centers in urban heavy settlements is a way to lock in your victory. Trade is important too.

Independent powers are converted in the old-fashioned way, but are much more sensitive to outposts and pressure. The benefits and legacy rewards for IP conversion will be asymmetrical to city conversion, representing a different strategy fork with different benefits.

Once religion is firmly planted, a few things happen:

• Relics are now transferable and conquerable. They are permanently slotted into culture, influence, gold producing, etc. buildings. Or in Army commanders with certain civics/civs for a combat boost. When such a building is conquered or a commander killed, the relics transfer. They can also transfer in peace deals, although a leader or two might have a special initiative to gift them (like Byzantium). They will possess "wonder-lite" levels of benefits, and not count towards the victory condition.
• Religion now deeply affects diplomacy, like ideology, but asymmetrically. All religions will have "regional affinities" that are selected when you choose the religion and meet your first neighboring religion. For example, Christian religions might be allowed to engage in naval combat and outpost destruction if 1) they are different creeds of Christianity 2) they don't attack cities or homeland settlements. There is a defender of the faith bonus, where if your religious sphere or affinity is being attacked, but let's say it's another player with a different creed, still if your overall sphere has suffered much defeat, you automatically gain a combat bonus against whichever sphere was the attacker. In other words, global affects tied to a religious wars narrative.

Religious beliefs will be more diverse and come from civics, acting much like the social policy system but in a different tab. Examples include:

• Jizya - gold bonus for non-state religious buildings built in settlements.
• Priesthood of the believer - if you happen to have most of your settlements converted to another player's religion, then your controlled settlements of that religion receive the founder's bonuses and the founder loses access to them, but you also get an automatic loss of diplomatic affinity with everyone converted to that religion.
• Conversion - You can choose to give up and join another player's religion, which unlocks two special beliefs for them, one which is a benefit to them for all converted players, and one which is a benefit to you that they pick. Multiple players can convert to one religion through a diplomatic endeavor, but these two beliefs are unlocked once.
• etc.

I'd prefer slottable policy cards as beliefs over what exists now, especially since you can divide these into founder and follower and multiple players can convert and enjoy that stack of benefits.

Religious victory is a combination of total population converted, plus some extra bonus points for total beliefs slotted.

Other changes
I would like to use the accelerated growth modification I am implementing for the antiquity age. This means homeland cities especially will run out of room to grow, or be burdened by unhappiness. I think it's fine to have an active population reduction crisis system.

I want to add a new system that automatically converts excess population into unhappiness modifiers per city (overpopulation even = -5 unhappiness). Throughout the age, unhappiness randomly generates either a peasant revolt, or plague.

• Peasant revolt destroys an improvement, spawning a rabble which has to be defeated and do have the potential to raize settlements.
• Plague can spread, but a quarantine civic will lock all units in a city until the plague wears out, but prevent spread. Plague will destroy improvements until population drops and happiness improves.
• Improvements destroyed by peasant revolt and plague are not burning and cannot be repaired, only overbuilt. They possess a small, permanent happiness cost until overbuilt. The game will prioritize antiquity buildings first, but otherwise choose randomly.
• With lots of colonial supplies being sent out from that settlement's wharf, sometimes unhappiness will produce a migrant.

With this implemented, I don't think revolt or plague should be the exploration crisis, although either can be provoked by low happiness levels. Instead, a version of the bourgeois revolution should suffice. A Tulip crisis might also be appropriate. There should almost certainly be a revanchist dark age option for modern if you are overrun by the revolution and survive in one settlement. Ideally, there's a colonial war where you basically pick sides, wouldn't that make sense? Imagine figuring which of your distant lands or homeland settlements will do better in the modern age!