[Mod] Fim's collection of small mods

[Fimbulvetr]

I have not started AI modding yet. I made a few smaller mods, which I now also bundled into one big mod, "Older World"

Some things just can't be done with XML alone, and some are very hard (for me) to do with Harmony, so I made one DLL for helptext changes and, AI improvements and modding features that I wanted. Some of my other mods depend on it.
Base DLL (DLL)

Most of my smaller mods, except for No Paganism, all bundled into one package. I always play with this one. Requires Base DLL.
Older World (XML and Harmony-DLLs from the other mods)

The smaller mods:

I didn't like having to handle more than one religion, someone would always be the pagan religion head and that character would get an opinion malus that can't be removed. So I made a mod that disables pagan religions.
No Paganism (XML)

I would in many cases research the "Free XXX" techs, even though nothing about them is free, they cost science. Those "free" things are mostly newbie traps and just delay you.
No Bonus Techs (XML)

With food so abundant and with no real way to use it, I added food consumption to units (mostly 1 more than current vanilla), and made population always consume 4 food. I quite like the result: You really need farms, not just on resources.
More Food Consumption (XML)

With enough elder specialists, you can currently create citizens that outperform most other specialists, most importantly: the civics per citizen from Poets. My opinion was that this doesn't make sense and specialists that you have to train should always be better than the citizens you get for free from growth. Many of the yields that scaled with culture level no longer scale either, yields were just too high.
Less Scaling Specialist Yields (XML)

Making the families somewhat balanced isn't easy. Devs are trying their thing, I try my own.
Family Balance (XML)

Ranged Units get various advantages, like no river attack penalty, no retaliation damage, but mostly really their range, which makes them really order-efficient, and they sometimes can stay far enough from the enemy, out of harm's way. That makes melee units a bit uninteresting in comparison. My solution is simple, and fights involving many units get really cramped. I love it.
Reduced Range (XML)

Sometimes you want to connect your lands to that small island off the coast, or a mountain blocks your city's territorial expansion: if only you could buy water tiles directly, you could reach that patch of land that has no city site. Well now you can
Buy Coastal tiles (Harmony-DLL)

I have enough space on my drive, don't want to manually save all the time, but still want to keep savegames in case I want to report a bug later. The obvious solution was
Unlimited Autosaves (Harmony-DLL)

Some smaller things I changed didn't get their own mod, they got collected in the
FimMod (XML)

I made Harmony-DLL mod that exposes all the constants that the AI uses for decision making to XML, like the Better AI mod from the good old days
Anyone who's interested can look at it here, I attached it to this post - it's not on mod.io - and never will be, also it's a bit outdated now. To use the folder in the zip needs to go to %UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\OldWorld\Mods - as always. (edit: fixed improper closing tag in XML)
I will include that feature in the Base DLL soon, but I'm not quite ready to really start playing with those values anyway.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

So I finally got around to implement at least one feature I wanted: Alternative Unlock Conditions
I think I got it working, including help text for the improvements themselves: they will tell you how you can unlock them. From the other side, the techs and other conditions however don't tell you about their new special unlock powers yet. (Helptext is hard work.)
AI also doesn't know about this yet, so they can't work towards any such new unlock condition - but once they get an improvement unlocked in a city, they can build them normally.
This mod doesn't use Harmony, and is therefore incompatible with all DLL mods that also don't use Harmony.

Spoiler Alternative Improvement Unlocks :

Oh right, there was this other feature: City Biomes. Based on the non-urban, non-water territory tiles, the game decides if the climate around the city is either cold, temperate or hot, and I made it so that based on that only one bath is available.

Spoiler City Biomes :

 

[Fimbulvetr]

In my quest to improve Helptexts, I added a few things with my Base DLL mod.

When trying to build an urban improvement, many new players struggle with the rules for urban placement, since they are only in some tutorial, but not in the general helptexts. It's one of those details you expect to find when you look for it, but that is not the case, so this is how I amended the helptext:

Spoiler Urban (Terrain) Helptext :

When you first started playing this game, did you know that Statesmen start with +4 Civics because neutral "Cautious" opinion is actually level 4 of 6? I did not, and I thought maybe family opinion levels need that tiny bit of clarification I provide:

Spoiler Family Opinion Helptext :

If a unit usually ignores Zones of Control, but not all, I think those exceptions should be listed.

Spoiler ZOC ignore exceptions Helptext :

When trying to find resource tiles, to grab or to build specialists for family luxuries, it becomes painfully obvious that this game still lacks any kind search functionality to look for things on the map.
With the addition of resource tile links, available from resource helptext, you can just click, and the map centers around that resource tile.

Spoiler Resource Links in Resource Helptext :

Of course, there's the good old Discontent/Happiness thing which still confuses new players.
TL;DR: Ignore it until later.
The longer version (the point about fewer Urban Tiles than Population is already removed in last version):

Spoiler Discontent Helptext :

 

[Fimbulvetr]

New(ish) additions:

Trouble getting across water early game? An early ship unit could help
Boat (XML)

I got a bit tired of never finding Olives or Wine for my families, so I tried to make sure that at least some instances of every single luxury are always placed on the map, if at all possible.
Minimum Resource Count (Harmony DLL)

The number of mods got a bit too large for me so I bundled them all up into one. Does not include No Paganism, because the new DLC requires Paganism for some events. Requires Base DLL (which is also not included)
Older World (XML & Harmony-DLLs from the small mods)