Economists Mod v1

[Ankorafeonix]

I've finally finished what I envisioned as the Economists Mod, and I want to share it with the community now. Just a note: this is my first upload, and I've tried my best to do it correctly, but if I've screwed up somehow please let me know and I'll fix it.

Also, this shouldn't be considered a Final draft either - I've given it a bit of testing and it works out for me, but constructive feedback of your own experiences would be very valuable in fine-tuning some of the details (I don't often play on very difficult settings or small maps so balance may be an issue there).

Without further ado:

What is it?
My Economists Mod had two main goals:

• Both simplify and add more control to your civ's economy through a Tax system.
• Put a natural limiter on the number of military units that you and AI units can build, based on a strategic resource called "Personell", which is gained from Barracks, Armouries, Castles, your Palace, and various National and Global Wonders.

Why on earth would you do that?
Here were some of my issues which inspired me to create the mod:

• Happiness felt bland and influenced by all the wrong things. I mean, I don't suddenly become happy (at least +4 happy) because my country suddenly found a new supply of Copper. I wanted to tie Happiness (or Unhappiness, for that matter) to something more realistic, like taxes. Now there's something that really influences the happiness of a country.
• I felt that Civ5 basically makes me choose between Culture, Science, Military, or Money, and that rushing one of those things tends to squash the others to a greater or lesser extent. Although it's rarely a disaster, I wanted the economy to be less tied to which buildings you construct and what resources you manage to start next to, and more about controlling and adjusting your economy in the same way that Finance Ministers do.
• Happiness is only an exciting feature when you sit on the verge between Happy and Unhappy. Most of the time, I find myself either neurotically endeavouring desperate measures to bring my Civ's happiness back up to 0, or wondering what the hell I'm going to do with 86 Happiness (I'm talking about my previous attempts at fixing this with mods by the way!).
• I was sick of trying to navigate through enemy territory or having war declared upon me by an AI whose entire territory consisted of Mobile SAMs and Horse Archers (ATILLA I'M LOOKING AT YOU). I spent a long time trying to work out how to hard-cap the number of units that each civ can build, and I finally got something satisfactory with the Personell Resource.

So how does it work?
Let's focus on the Happiness/Tax system first.

Happiness/Tax
To begin with, luxury resources now only provide +1 Happiness each, while each citizen now provides a net Unhappiness of 0 (technically, they still contribute 1 Unhappiness but this is negated by the Palace giving a Civ-wide -100% Unhappiness Modifier). Each city contributes to 2 Unhappiness, down from 4. It may not seem like much, but with the reduction of gold revenue from other sources (such as Markets, Banks, and trade routes), you will probably want to start implementing some Taxes.

Enter the Tax Department. There are four possible Tax Departments and one Ministry, which come available at various points of the tech tree:

• Federal Tax Department (Tech: Mathematics)
• Property Tax Department (Tech: Civil Service)
• Goods Tax Department (Tech: Banking)
• Corporate Tax Department (Tech: Railroad)
• Ministry of Scientific Research (Tech: Acoustics)

Here is a picture of the Federal Tax Department at work (all the other Departments work the same way):

As you can see, each citizen in your civ now contributes 0.5 gold (2 with four Tax Departments), +25% Unhappiness from citizens in non-occupied cities (100% with four Departments), and -10% Growth (40% with four, etc). In this picture, my Civ has 31 citizens, equalling +15 Gold in Tax Revenue and 7.75 Unhappiness.

How to Use: To implement a Tax, just build the Tax Department in any of your cities. It will automatically spawn a Local Tax Office in each city and start collecting revenue from your citizens. If you are having problems with Happiness and want to abolish a Tax, go to the city with your Tax Department and simply delete the building. Note: you won't be able to delete the Local Offices individually, but if you delete the Department then the Local Tax Offices will disappear too.

Now, the Ministry is a special case, but I'm considering adding Ministries of Culture and Ministries of Religion as well if this works out well. This appeared because I decided to drop the inherent Science per Citizen down to 0, since I was having a lot of unbalanced games where huge pop Civs simply out-scienced the smaller ones and there were large differences. Again, since I was already working on giving more control over yields, I decided to experiment with a Science one. So, the building allows +1 Science per Citizen again, and this time at a 15% Unhappiness modifier.

All in all, I'm a bit iffy about the idea, so if you think I should scrap it or change it somehow, all ideas are welcome.

Resource: Personell

This has so far been my personal favourite aspect of the mod. Always having been something of a minimalist, I was frustrated that I had nearly cover my Civ's territory with units to sufficiently defend myself or launch successful invasions of other players. Okay, maybe I'm just a bad strategist (indeed I'm useless at anything over the King difficulty), but another motivation for having less units was a performance issue. My system is for some reason awful at handling modded Civ5, so anything that put a hard-cap on the number of units swimming about my large maps was attractive to me.

Here's a list of things that provide

Personell:

• Palace +3
  
• Barracks +1
  
• Armoury + 1
  
• Castle +1
  
• Heroic Epic +5
  
• Himeji Castle +3
  
• Kremlin +3
  
• Brandenburg Gate +3
  
• The Pentagon +3
  
• Red Fort +3
  
• Terracotta Army +3
  

So far, every unit just costs 1

, but I'm currently weighing up the idea of making certain units cost more, and even creating a new class of "Heavy Units" which generally cost more but provide more concentrated firepower.

Here's the Personell Resource at work.

I haven't been able to give this a comprehensive testing yet - it works fine for me so far on Large maps with many civs, but balancing in different sized maps or in late-game stages might be an issue - feel free to offer suggestions on that. Otherwise, if you have some modding experience you can always tweak the numbers in the XML to get more or less.

So, hopefully this is interesting for some of you Personally I don't expect it to be a roaring success - it was more for my own pleasure than anything else, but if it makes someone elses experience more fun, then great!

Anyway, ciao ciao!

 

[ThorHammerz]

So what happens when say, you lose a city containing +Personell sources, and you find yourself over-the-cap? Do the units get a combat penalty or something?

 

[Ankorafeonix]

Indeed - once I was about 5 units in deficit I had a -16 combat penalty. If this happens, you can ask your allies for a top-up, or try to ally with a City-State (which can provide 3-4 Personell even in the early game). Otherwise, you'll just have to try and take back the city

I might think about some other ways to offset this issue, but I don't mind that it happens. It makes sense, given that loss of a city should represent a big dent in the armed forces.

 

[hardcore_gamer]

Since deleting the tax buildings is the only way to end a tax in a city I assume that you can't actually tweak any tax sliders.

While I find the premise of your mod interesting, I think the execution (from the sounds of it', haven't actually played it) leaves a lot to be desired. It would be way better if there was simply some kind of a global tax (which you could tweak) which affected all cities at once, like the current happiness system does. Also, does the AI know how to use any of the new features you created?

I suggest you change your system to make it so that there are 2 different kinds of global taxes: Income and corporate. And each tax would have 5 different settings: very low, low, medium, high and very high.

Income taxes decrease the global happiness of your civ, while corporate taxes decrease production. Both give you money, and the amount of money obtained depends on the overall number of population in the empire and other factors like luxary resources and trade outposts. As already mentioned luxary resources should be made to add a bonus modifier to your overall wealth instead of adding happiness.

Just my suggestions (don't know if he AI could use this properly, I will admit).

EDIT: Here is my proposal to how the amount of money obtained through tax could be determined:

1. There is a certain base wealth everyone starts with, just like in the case of happiness.

2. A single population point adds a 2% bonus to it, a trading post within the empire (it doesn't have to be worked by the city, just be located within the borders) 1%, and luxary resources 5%.

3. The tax settings add a modier as well:

-very low: -25% wealth, +25% happiness
-low: -15% wealth, +15% happiness
-medium: No effect
-high: +15% wealth, -15% happiness
-very high: +25% wealth, -25% happiness

4. The corporate tax works the same as the above except that it adds a penalty or bonus to production instead of happiness.
Just a rought proposal

EDIT Nr2:

I forgot about things like gold mines and gems. They should provide a global modier like other luxary resources, but instead of only doing that they also provide a plain flat sum of bonus money. 5 extra money per mine sounds logical.

 

[ThorHammerz]

Indeed - once I was about 5 units in deficit I had a -16 combat penalty. If this happens, you can ask your allies for a top-up, or try to ally with a City-State (which can provide 3-4 Personell even in the early game). Otherwise, you'll just have to try and take back the city

I might think about some other ways to offset this issue, but I don't mind that it happens. It makes sense, given that loss of a city should represent a big dent in the armed forces.

How does it scale (linearly? with thresholds for various penalty modifiers?)? With the relative reduction of unit numbers, did city combat strengths change? A lack of units may lead to cities serving as too strong of bastions of static-defense, particularly if one goes for an ICS with a city every 3 tiles.

What formula does it rely on (for negative combat modifiers when going over the personell limit)? From your example above, does that mean we can have some 31-odd units(16/5 = 3.2; 100/3.2 = 31.25) before our combat strength goes below zero?

Is it a stand-alone mechanic? Or does it tie into others such as gold or happiness (which I think it should, but that's just my opinion) when you sink low enough? If you somehow have a lot more troops than your nation can supposedly support (through the loss of buildings and cities), how are you feeding them/paying their salaries? Conscription of the local populace?

 

[Ankorafeonix]

While I find the premise of your mod interesting, I think the execution (from the sounds of it', haven't actually played it) leaves a lot to be desired. It would be way better if there was simply some kind of a global tax (which you could tweak) which affected all cities at once, like the current happiness system does. Also, does the AI know how to use any of the new features you created?

I agree that it's a nubjob, in its entirety As you can see, I'm anything but an expert modder, so a more experienced person would surely be able to create such sliders and whatnot. I also thought about that, but I wouldn't have the foggiest when it comes to implementing it.

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

I've done my own experimentation using buildings for taxation. The problem I ran into is the AI doesn't seem to understand the concept of selling buildings to make tax adjustments. The AI just isn't smart enough. Creating a slider would require Lua programming or maybe more.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I've done my own experimentation using buildings for taxation. The problem I ran into is the AI doesn't seem to understand the concept of selling buildings to make tax adjustments. The AI just isn't smart enough. Creating a slider would require Lua programming or maybe more.

It would be an intriguing idea to have not only a tax slider, but also a spending slider too-or something to that effect.

So maybe you could have it that-initially at least-you can't set your tax slider very high at all (or maybe not at all), but when you get certain techs (like Currency & Economics), build certain buildings (like the tax office mentioned in this mod) and advance down the Commerce Social Policies you can raise it ever higher. Also, certain Social Policies & Ideological tenets could impact on both how much tax you can raise, & how it will impact on your population's happiness & growth.

Last of all, Social Policies & Ideologies might effect how much money you can put into military spending (Honour), Arts Spending (Aesthetics), Foreign Affairs (Patronage & Exploration), Science (Rationalism) & even Religion (Piety).

Of course, this is all coming from somebody with absolutely *zero* Civ5 modding experience. However, given what I have seen with mods like Events & Decisions and Piety & Prestige, I feel it must be do-able.

Aussie.

 

[Danmacsch]

Subscribed.

This looks promising - looking forward to trying it.
As others mention, the whole selling-of-tax-buildings-to-adjust-taxes doesn't seem very, well, elegant, and if - as mentioned by UncivilizedGuy - the AI can't figure out how to exploit it, that is very unfortunate.
A tax slider, or something similiar would be great.

As said I haven't tried the mod yet, so I can't really comment on balance and such, but setting all luxury resources to only provide +1 happiness could maybe be a problem with custom resources such as More Luxuries.

Anyway - keep up the good work!

 

[chrisgatt7]

I tried to get your mod to work it wont ?

 

[lex_kravetski]

Some suggestions.

1. The values for personel are very low now. Palace should give somthing about 10—it helps small civs to defend themselfs, at least. And I think baracks, etc should give 2 or 3.

2. Due to AI can't figure out your building selling mechanic, you need to make simple lua routine, that automatically destroys one tax department if empire happines is less than 5. If in the next turn it is less than 5, it destroys another one, etc.