Expanded Economy 0.9.6

[Magil]

Magil submitted a new resource:

Expanded Economy - An overhaul mod focused on the economy.

Warning: This is a very early version of the mod. Expect bugs and unintended behavior. I have done some testing and tried to make sure everything works, but the scope of the mod makes it difficult to make sure absolutely everything works in every case.

This is a large-scale mod project I've been working on for quite a while now. As my special thanks indicate, I have drawn inspiration from quite a few other mods that are kicking around the community, and it's likely this project wouldn't have been possible without all the help. You guys are awesome.

Now, this mod. It's an economic overhaul mod that began with an attempt to move the economy back out onto tiles that are worked by citizens, and to make economic decisions regarding specialists, trade routes, policies, districts, and buildings more meaningful. You can see my stream-of-consciousness style rambling on what I wanted to accomplish with this mod here.

Currently, there's only so much I can do with trade routes and specialists using the modifiers system and xml tables, so I've made fairly minor adjustments there. However, I've done a lot of work on tiles, buildings, districts, and improvements. Here's a brief summary of what the mod has done:

• Added new improvements, namely the Village, an early-game gold-generating improvement that can generate science, culture, or faith based on nearby districts.
  
• Added new districts: the Administrative Precinct, a district focused on diplomacy and espionage, and a food-based district called the Agricultural Complex. Two districts have been removed: the Entertainment Complex and the Neighborhood (the Mbanza is now a unique improvement, the Street Carnival is now a unique theater square, and the Acropolis is a unique replacement for the Administrative Precinct).
  
• Lots of new buildings have been added. Many are ways to improve the terrain or add mutually-exclusive specialization to districts.
  
• All buildings have been redesigned in some manner. Flat yields have largely been removed and replaced by %-based increases for the primary buildings of districts specialized in a particular yield.
• Policies have been overhauled, recombined, and re-organized to better suit the new way the game functions.
• Other miscellaneous game balance changes: for example, a city now requires 1 amenity for every 1 population, starting at 3 population. Population no longer innately provides science or culture, you must work improvements that generate science or culture to do this. Roads have been improved, and tech/civic/Great Person scaling has been adjusted.
• Diplomacy has been adjusted with bonuses for declaring Friendship with other leaders (you can check the bonus by looking at their agenda description). There have been a variety of other changes to adjust various diplomatic actions and the associated bonuses/penalties.
  
• For an extremely detailed list of changes, check this PDF: full list of changes.

This is sort of a pet mod project for me and may not have very much wide appeal. I'm a builder and it really bothered me how the economy was handled in Civ V and Civ VI, with raw pop providing benefits and the economy being moved off of the land and to a more hands-off "you'll get benefits even if you don't do anything" kind of thing. I want more thought and effort to go into managing your nation's economy, with the proper rewards for doing so.

As the mod is in a very early stage of development, all feedback and bug reports are appreciated. I'll be throwing a version of this up on the Steam Workshop shortly.

Moderator Action: Moved thread to 'Released Mods' section as requested --NobleZarkon

 

[ITcore]

Crazy amazing job on this.

Quick question, though. What is the purpose of the .DEP file? It seems to say it's dependent on the base game which would be required in the first place, right?

 

[1SDANi]

-1 Gold and -1 Faith from worked Villages with Temple but +30% Faith and +1 Amenity? I would assume it works out in-game, but I wouldn't mind knowing the design philosophy and encouraged strategy behind this.

BTW, I had a chuckle when I saw synagogue giving gold. I'll assume you didn't mean it that way.

EDIT: After looking further into the changes, maybe it's just that you mistyped the Temple part of the PDF. All of the other tier 2 buildings provide faith by removing one gold per worked village, so maybe you just pressed the wrong key.

EDIT2: Okay, got bored of reading the pdf, DEFINITELY trying this mod now. Looks like a blast.

 

[Magil]

-1 Gold and -1 Faith from worked Villages with Temple but +30% Faith and +1 Amenity? I would assume it works out in-game, but I wouldn't mind knowing the design philosophy and encouraged strategy behind this.

BTW, I had a chuckle when I saw synagogue giving gold. I'll assume you didn't mean it that way.

EDIT: After looking further into the changes, maybe it's just that you mistyped the Temple part of the PDF. All of the other tier 2 buildings provide faith by removing one gold per worked village, so maybe you just pressed the wrong key.

EDIT2: Okay, got bored of reading the pdf, DEFINITELY trying this mod now. Looks like a blast.

Thanks for catching that typo, fixed that.

Synagogue just turned out that way honestly! I wanted one of the religious buildings to generate gold and that was the one that was left, basically (I didn't want to shift things too far away from the base game when I didn't have a specific reason to).

 

[1SDANi]

Thanks for catching that typo, fixed that.

Synagogue just turned out that way honestly! I wanted one of the religious buildings to generate gold and that was the one that was left, basically (I didn't want to shift things too far away from the base game when I didn't have a specific reason to).

XD gotta love coincidences.

 

[Kodimus]

Did the warmonger changes result in more war declarations? Or am I just not used to the base AI anymore? I've been running artificially intelligent since it was released, but wanted to disable it to get a better idea of how this mod impacts things.

Overall I'm liking what you've done with this. The declaration of friendship bonuses might need to be alliance-related instead, due to how strong they are, but I'm a fan of that concept for sure.

 

[Magil]

Did the warmonger changes result in more war declarations? Or am I just not used to the base AI anymore? I've been running artificially intelligent since it was released, but wanted to disable it to get a better idea of how this mod impacts things.

Overall I'm liking what you've done with this. The declaration of friendship bonuses might need to be alliance-related instead, due to how strong they are, but I'm a fan of that concept for sure.

The increased AI warmongering may be due to lack of penalties, yes. That'd be my suspicion. I'll probably need to play with those values some more to find a good sweet spot, it's one of those things I can't just load up in Firetuner to quickly test.

Edit: On the Friendship bonuses, I can't take too much credit for that--it was heavily inspired by the same system implemented in Quo's Combined Tweaks. I am considering working more on that, as I was thinking of trying out a Tiered system, with Friendships providing small bonuses and alliances providing larger ones, and tying one or the other to the Administrative Precinct district (possibly involving its buildings) in some way.

 

[Kodimus]

The increased AI warmongering may be due to lack of penalties, yes. That'd be my suspicion. I'll probably need to play with those values some more to find a good sweet spot, it's one of those things I can't just load up in Firetuner to quickly test.

Edit: On the Friendship bonuses, I can't take too much credit for that--it was heavily inspired by the same system implemented in Quo's Combined Tweaks. I am considering working more on that, as I was thinking of trying out a Tiered system, with Friendships providing small bonuses and alliances providing larger ones, and tying one or the other to the Administrative Precinct district (possibly involving its buildings) in some way.

I like the tiered bonuses idea. It's been a little too easy to lock down 5-6 friendships in the game I'm playing, which has given me access to the Great Wall, Ziggurat, Chateau, +1 Amenity to an extra city and the Mbanza (that I can remember off the top of my head--there's another I'm missing). That seems a little too strong, but if it were locked behind alliances that would better reward a player for using the diplomacy system. Maybe something generic for friendships? Like % bonus to Culture and Science, and the unique bonuses at ally?

 

[dukisha]

Kill all those restrictions about buildings. Have you ever seen city with hotel and without bank!?
Regards to idea, if I knew how to mod I would do like you. May I suggest to add buildings from "additional buildings" mod, and add more new, like "Central bank" limited to one per civ and must be in capital. Also increase income from trading routes and give more political meaning to trade between civs. Lower that requirement for population number to build new districst. It must be lowered because there are too many districts.
And if you want to focus on economy, feel free to ask me whatever you need, I'm not into modding but I'm economist.

 

[Magil]

@dukisha I don't think we're quite on the same page. I thank you for the suggestions, but it strikes me as not at all what I want to do with this mod.

The reason those restrictions exist is to encourage district specialization. If you can do everything, then that removes one of the core principles of Civ, having the player make interesting choices. In particular the choice of Bank versus Inn is meant to be a choice of a purely gold-focused Commercial Hub versus a bit of extra Tourism + amenities. I don't really like the idea of lowering the population cap on districts (if anything I might consider raising it), the player is not meant to be able to build everything in every city. This is to encourage the player to consider what exactly they want the city to provide for the empire as a whole. Ideally I'd like to bring districts in better balance with each other so a player doesn't make the same choices all the time, but that's going to be an ongoing struggle I feel.

As for your other suggestion regarding additional buildings, I've done something similar with my National Wonders in another mod, and I'm considering how to best implement them here.

 

[dukisha]

@Magil well I didn't understand then. But It is problem when playing with much players and no space for 3+ cities.

 

[Wedekit]

I was excited to come across and use this mod. The scope and purpose reminds of the Communitas project for Civ V. Obviously a lot of work has been put into this and some of the features added were things that should have been in the game to begin witn. It's hard to tell how this all balances together the way the information is currently organized. Some things could definitely use some work, such as the friendship bonuses (which is what caught my eye when I first saw this mod). Other than what I assume to be a small positive relationship modifier, I never saw the point of agreeing to a friendship with another nation in vanilla. Doing so usually is just the AI trying to prevent you from declaring war against them so they can settle right next to one of your cities or conquer a city state. The addition of the benefits of a friendship is exactly what was missing. However, I will say that the benefits in general could probably use some work. The Civ friendships that provide access to tile improvements are much more valuable than something like Japan's bonus. The former is a permanent benefit (assuming you get some built before the friendship ends) while the other is only transient.

It was an interesting play with the mod, but some things felt a little off so I'll wait for some more updates and (hopefully) a more concise guide on how all the changes you've made line up to goals for the mod. Presently, some seem more like personal preference.

 

[DemonEmperor]

@Magil - is there a way to color the government center/agricultural districts a different color? - its kinda hard to tell them apart from the base game districts

 

[Leyrann]

Gonna read that full list of changes and just gonna add all questions and comments when I have them. This will probably be a long post.

First off, I want to say that I think this is a great idea, and I'm sure going to play with it.

I agree with comments made earlier in the thread that it feels like it's better to move the friendship bonuses to alliances. Also, when I conquer, eg, an Australian city, normally all the Outback Stations disappear. Would this happen when I lose the friendship, or not? It would feel kinda weird if that happened.

For the Acropolis, it feels a bit weird that such an iconic, classical Greek thing unlocks in the Medieval Era. It does tie in well with ancient Greece's city-state nature though.

I also feel like there's a lot more reason than with the base game to micromanage every city because of the specialists and villages (which I certainly don't mind, by the way), so I was wondering, is it easy to add a message when a city grows? Because then it's a lot easier to just lock all citizens in their spots and change it up when the city grows or finishes a building.

It also appears I have to disable 8 Ages of Pace now... Thanks for adding it in. Imo it's the most important mod there is.

Next question: Is the Civliopedia updated with all information, so that we can look up the building chains in there?

With Firing Range unlocking at Archery, does that mean you may have it before you have the Encampment?

Fishmonger: Provides food equal to the gold output of the district. Does this include gold from specialists, or is it just the adjacency bonus, like Shipyard in the base game?

I really like how you can get only one trade route from Harbor and Commercial Hub together, but if you have both, the trade routes grant more gold.

And I guess that's it. I'll probably pop by in a week or two to propose balance changes after playing with the mod.

 

[Leyrann]

Found the first bug. Village gets +1 faith from Arabia's Holy Site.

EDIT: I like how this mod actually makes me care about gold early game. Before you were basically always in a surplus, while now you actually need to look at what gains you gold and what costs you gold.

 

[1SDANi]

Agree with notification on city grow, that'd be awesome

 

[Magil]

@Wedekit I'm not sure what you mean by both making the information more concise and also detail my thought process behind the changes. Seems to me it would be impossible to do both--I have tried to include the detailed breakdown of changes in a separate Google doc to keep potential players from being overwhelmed, while also providing a general outline of the changes and goals in the post itself. For example, the Friendship bonuses occurred to me after I already began to integrate the Village design into the game. I decided to try and buff unique improvements (as most of them were underwhelming in vanilla) by having them gain some of the bonuses that Villages get, and then I decided a way to share the improvements around would make things interesting and give players more choice in how to build their empire. I drew inspiration of tying it to Friendship bonuses in particular from Quo's Combined Tweaks mod, though that may end up being moved to an alliance bonus.

If you have any suggestions for how to better format it--or any questions in particular, I'd be happy to try and accommodate.

@DemonEmperor I have tried to do this, but in my experience the problem is mostly that the prominent buildings in the districts don't change their color, unless I was to actually change the textures used in the building models or something. My art asset modding is a bit rough, I kind know of how to set it up but in-depth stuff (like texture swapping) is somewhat beyond me. I've managed a few tricks, but it's obvious I'm not on the level of @sukritact or other modders of that caliber when it comes to modding the game's art. You will notice the smaller "house" buildings in the Administrative Precinct have light blue roofs, but the large structure in the center of the district doesn't change accordingly. For now I think they'll have to stay as is, as I'm much more comfortable dealing with the sql/xml tables for code than I am with art asset modding.

@Leyrann That's likely going to have to stay as is, I have actually noticed that when playing that you can get Village bonuses from other Civ's districts, but due to how the code works I'm not certain if it can be changed (at least with how I've coded it). It should only affect district adjacency and Church/Scrivener's Office and not local building/policy modifiers though. I'll call it working as intended for now.

The Acropolis is a bit of an outlier--I am strongly considering moving it earlier in the tech tree, but it'd be a bit weird to have it sit at a point where there are no buildings you can build in the district.

With regards to the Firing Range, no, since it's still a building built in the Encampment, you need to have an Encampment before you can build it. As for the Shipyard/Fishmonger, despite what the text suggests, my experience has been that they don't just provide a bonus equal to the adjacency bonus of the district, they provide a new yield equal to the district's overall yield. It's difficult to see this behavior in the vanilla game, except in the case of the Madrasa which provides faith equal to the Science "adjacency" bonus of the Campus, which will also add Faith for Science-based City-States (in vanilla).

Thanks for the feedback, I've been taking a bit of a breather from Civ and Civ modding after pushing out this build as I'd been working on it for weeks and kind of burned out on it, but I'll be continuing to make notes and adjustments for a future version that I'll probably start working on in a couple of weeks, when I'm ready to come back to Civ.

Edit: To answer a few more questions (sorry I missed them on the first time around), adding a pop-up message might be possible, but I imagine it'd be a LUA interface thing, which I'm not very familiar with. I'd need to ask around if it's possible from people more familiar with that part of the game. The Civilopedia is not filled out with "flavor" text, but it should display all the other relevant information when it comes to game mechanics. Finally, improvements don't seem to disappear when friendships expire in my experience. It's probably hard-coded to city capture/trading. I have tested that much personally.

 

[Wedekit]

Bugs

• For me, the new luxury goods you create in the commercial district appear as text at the top bar (I'm using CQUI). They're labeled as: [ICON_RESOURCE_CULINARY_GOODS], etc.
• It's turn 369 (running epic speed) and Montezuma is currently producing a staggering 206 science, 208 faith, and 83 culture per turn only four cities. Seems like a bug that hes able to I'll attempt to observe his tiles to see exactly how he's accumulating that much but it's significantly more than every other AI and myself (and I have 8 cities with max districts). Notes on him:
  • Also note that he was able to outproduce my 8 cities with only four as it certainly fits the old Civ V definition of building tall. To be honest, this mod in general is an ode to the tall empire because it emphasizes the quality of a city's tiles as more valuable than twice as many cities with mediocre tiles. So while you may find the Tall vs Wide discussion absurd, this mod is still heavily embedded in those ideas.
  • His tourism is only 21 while mine is 51, so I'm led to believe he doesn't have as many wonders as me.
  • It looks like he's spammed villages everywhere, which I think, contributing to his insane yields. So at least we know that the AI is smart to exploit things like that.
• There were a few exclusive building options that kept appearing as options when I had already gone down a different path. I wish I would have wrote them all down before finishing the game. I'll be running another game and I'll note them all.

Notes

• Friendship Perks -- As I said before, I'm a huge fan of the friendship system you have in place. I kind of want it to be its own mod while this one is further expanded and tweaked. Also, all the AI's were taking advantage of the tile improvements they gained access to through friendships, so that's a good thing too.
  
• Districts -- I like how the districts now each have a different path you can take to best suit the city. It's really something that should have been expanded on more in the original game and it's really great work on your part.
  • I really like the administrative precinct, especially how it gives you the ability to further increase your influence points. However, with this particular district, I wonder if it should rely on the normal district/population limit. I see arguments for both sides, but because the district doesn't directly contribute to a victory condition I found myself having to choose others over it.
  • May want to specify that the game speed it is designed for is, I assume, standard. As mentioned above, I played an epic speed game and won via domination. At the end I was cranking out around 700+ culture per turn and I was nowhwere near done with the civics tree. I had just received Ideology by the time I won.
• While the warmongering penalties in the vanilla game were staggering, I think the changes made to it in this mod are too much. Basically everyone is my friend after wars, including people who have declared war on me.
  
• War weariness didn't hit until well into a chain of wars, and only in the capitals of two cities that I had conquered. Seemed a little odd.
  
• I personally found all the changes to policy cards a mixed bag of amazing (the +1 sight for scouts is simple but amazing) and ok. Some seemed a lot alike while others were so nuanced I didn't have the patience to sit and count tiles between my cities to decide of the bonuses would be for the best or not. But they certainly gave more to work with than the original cards.

I'll be playing another game on standard speed and I'll offer more notes. I was looking for a specific mod when I gave this game another shot (after all the new Civ DLCs came out) and this is pretty much what I was looking for. So I hope this was helpful to you and that I can be of help in the future.

 

[Wedekit]

@Wedekit I'm not sure what you mean by both making the information more concise and also detail my thought process behind the changes. Seems to me it would be impossible to do both--I have tried to include the detailed breakdown of changes in a separate Google doc to keep potential players from being overwhelmed, while also providing a general outline of the changes and goals in the post itself. For example, the Friendship bonuses occurred to me after I already began to integrate the Village design into the game. I decided to try and buff unique improvements (as most of them were underwhelming in vanilla) by having them gain some of the bonuses that Villages get, and then I decided a way to share the improvements around would make things interesting and give players more choice in how to build their empire. I drew inspiration of tying it to Friendship bonuses in particular from Quo's Combined Tweaks mod, though that may end up being moved to an alliance bonus.

I think what I intended when I wrote that (it was very late) was to list things by category: production, science, culture, gold, faith, etc. to see if they all seem to be getting the same kind of potential for yields. As I mention in the post above, it seems at least one nation in a game had skyrocketed their science yields very early along with a couple of others. I conquered all of his cities to try and determine how he did it which was incredibly hard since his units and walls all outranked me. In the end, the only thing notable was that he spammed villages. Since I couldn't see his policy cards or anything I couldn't be sure what else could have given him such an intense % boost.

I'd be happy to contribute what I can to helping make a kind of chart or list. I'll see if I can come up with an example and you can see if you think it's helpful or not.

 

[Magil]

@Wedekit I have noticed that CQUI is really bad about recognizing new mutually exclusive buildings, so that's likely why it's showing you some options even after they're not available. I think it also didn't recognize Alexander's unique barracks when it was first released, and would list the Stable as being able to be built even after building it. I'm not sure if there's anything I can do about it on my end, the CQUI guys would need to make their code better able to recognize mutually exclusive buildings (it has always worked reliably for me without any UI mods). It's probably hardcoded to only work right with the ones in the base game. It's a similar thing for the luxury goods, they will appear as [ICON_GOOD] text instead of the icon at the top of the screen for CQUI (and on the Reports screen) and there's not a lot I can do about that. I know what file I need to edit to fix it, but there's currently no way (that I know of, and I've asked around and I don't think anybody else knows either, I believe even the Resourceful mod has this issue with its new resources looking at their screenshots) to edit that file via modding. I really do want to fix this! But I've been wanting to add new resources to the game for months and always run into this issue.

As for Monty, I'm not sure what difficulty level you were playing at, but it's likely the AI will be able to do some crazy things on the higher ones. I gave them a bit of a handicap because of how they don't really intelligently design their cities to make use of the new features and policies, which is something I may adjust in the future if it produces undesired results. However, I'm not sure this is all that bad, I'd need to know the difficulty level. While I wouldn't say the mod encourages "building tall", I will say that properly developing and growing cities is intended to be more rewarding in this mod, so yes, 4 well-managed cities may well out-produce twice as many okay cities, especially if they have AI bonuses behind them! With that said, the largest runaway I encountered in my test games was an Australia who conquered nearly half of his own continent (on Prince, putting out about 600 science per turn when I was doing about 800, was ahead of me earlier in the game). If you want to see the details of the Handicap, I believe they're towards the very end of my PDF, basically the AI gets a free 1 science/1 culture for every district they build.

Regarding game speed, I'm not quite sure if that's actually a bad end date for Epic speed (Domination is usually the fastest victory condition). Do you happen to know what year it was when you finished the game (about to hit ideologies)? It's certainly true that I did all my testing on Standard speed, but I don't have a good gauge if that kind of advancement is good for epic speed or not. I could certainly tweak the later era tech/civic costs a bit more, it does sometimes slow down towards the end, perhaps a bit too much!

I agree with you about warmonger penalties, I'll be adjusting them in my very first update. If for no other reason than for what you stated, that the AI seems way too willing to declare war even on their friends, even later in the game.

Thank you for the feedback!