Commerce opener

[Zaldron]

I'm not actually sure if this is a bug or not.

I recently noticed that while the commerce opener says it increases income by 10% what it actually appears to do is add a 10% modifier to all your cities. This means that instead of a 10% increase, it's a 10% increase to city *base income*. In other words if your city base income is 300 gold and your total income is 750 gold, the policy is worth only 30 gold per turn, not 75. Has anyone else observed this?

 

[black213]

Just bad wording, not an actual bug.

 

[Sneaks]

This is how all % boosts work for yields in the game.

 

[Thalassicus]

Commerce increases income, not profit (income-expenses). I've changed it to read "+10% gross income" to clarify this.

 

[Zaldron]

Commerce increases income, not profit (income-expenses). I've changed it to read "+10% gross income" to clarify this.

My concern with the wording was that it only affects base income (e.g. markets/banks have no affect on this policy's income), not gross income vs net income. For example, I see my gross income in the status bar as 800gold/turn, but the policy gives me 30 gold/turn because my base city income is only 300 of that 800 (the rest is buildings such as market/national treasury, GPT from AIs, etc).

 

[Thalassicus]

Ohh I see what you mean now.

To give a short answer, in an ideal situation I would alter a player's global gold revenue directly, but this would require the game core code only Firaxis has access to. There's unfortunately no good solution to that problem.

For a long answer, if I read base income and manually add extra gold per turn, that would interfere with the game's calculation for the science penalty when running a gold deficit. This is a similar problem to happiness calculations... we can see a mod-affected net surplus happiness and yet receive the very-unhappy combat penalty, because the game applies the combat penalty in the inaccessible game core. I use a dummy building to adjust the player's happiness to match what it should be once per turn... but if our happiness changes mid-turn the combat penalty won't be accurate until the next turn.

However, despite that this is a problem which cannot be directly resolved with our current modding tools... it's not entirely a bad thing. The fact that it's an additive multiplier (instead of a multiplying multiplier) means the impact lessens over time. In short, the policy is most powerful early in the game when we first acquire it, and becomes less important towards the mid to late game. This is similar to the declining value of most other early tree openers... so at least it's consistent.