Decoupling settlement development from population size and walls - for dIRECTOR's Cut

[Maegfaer]

As part of the mod I'm making (read more here), I'm currently decoupling settlement development in terms of buildings from the population size and Walls. Instead, the different building levels (including Walls) are gated by City Hall buildings (from now on referred to as Halls), which represent the level of governance/organization/administration in the settlement (now also available in castles).

The reasons for this idea:

• Lore. According to lore different races have vastly different population sizes, and their level of civilization is not tied to it.
• Strategy. Upgrading settlements is currently always the right decision, this mod makes you consider whether it is worth it.
• Gameplay. The player has only a little influence on population growth, so upgrading settlements is mostly a brain-dead waiting game to reach the required population levels. It's no fun. With this mod upgrading is tied to finances, which is tied to the player's performance in the game. You have to perform well on the campaign map to advance your settlements. That's fun!

To prevent upgrades of Walls and Halls to max level everywhere in no time the following changes have been implemented:

• The construction times and especially construction costs required for Hall (and especially) Wall upgrades are significantly increased.
• Walls and Halls cost upkeep per turn. Higher level Walls and Halls cost more. Only build them when you need them.
• Economy income now relies far more heavily on taxes, and tax income is dependent on population sizes. Higher tax levels decrease public order more, Halls increase public order. So you're going to need higher tax levels to fund your faction (keeping them all on Low will be very challenging), and you're going to need better Halls to keep public order. Since Halls cost a fixed amount of upkeep, the ability to increase the tax level due to a Hall upgrade might not pay off in low population settlements!
• For the AI additional buildings are required for each Hall and Wall upgrade and may also be limited by 'hidden resources' per region.

With this mod you have freedom of choice concerning settlement progression, but the game mechanics encourage to develop settlements with higher population over those with lower population, and encourage to build bigger Walls in strategically important and border regions over those in the hinterlands.

Concerning population sizes and lore, this decoupling allows changes to building bonuses dependent on race/faction without impacting the ability to upgrade settlements. Realistic population growth and different kind of economy balances can be realized based on race/faction according to lore. Elves could for example be given more trade bonuses from buildings to compensate the reduced tax income due to low populations, while for example Orcs (or certain Orc factions) could get less public order bonuses so it's harder to exploit their huge population sizes by collecting Very High taxes.

Osgiliath
I want to specifically address the Osigiliath upgrades. With this mod, first all levels of Halls will need to be build before the Huge Stone wall upgrade becomes available. This costs more money and takes more time than it did before. Secondly, the actual Huge Wall upgrade will be very costly, and also take longer than it does now. I'd argue it's harder to achieve with this mod, but it may be faster if you perform well in the campaign. Again, it's tied more to your performance than to a brain-dead waiting game.


What do you think?

[Araval]

Sounds interesting! Probably won't have the time to try it out.

Maybe it could be too difficult?

[Pandarr]

It's a very good idea but, since town halls will work as core buildings in your mod, you will need to create new town halls for nearly every faction in the game in order to make the custom settlements work. Indeed every settlement is tied to a certain core building's level.

[arnau]

You really hit on the nail with this idea. It's certainly boring to finish up as a building player, once you become a prosper faction in 50-70 turns. The new rebalance you propose will definitely make the game harder and more enjoyable.

In my opinion I prefer make the economic/strategic management harder rather than giving a vast array of flags to the AI.

[Maegfaer]

It's a very good idea but, since town halls will work as core buildings in your mod, you will need to create new town halls for nearly every faction in the game in order to make the custom settlements work. Indeed every settlement is tied to a certain core building's level.

No no, the town halls won't replace the hardcoded "core" buildings. It will be a simple condition per building:

requires building_present_min_level city_hall <city_hall_level>

Each building will have:

settlement_min village

So the settlement/core level is simply never a requirement anymore. The core building is still the wall, and will determine the campaign model of the settlement.

In my opinion I prefer make the economic/strategic management harder rather than giving a vast array of flags to the AI.

I couldn't agree more. Massacring stack after stack gets a boring grind at some point. It's the campaign game that gives meaning to every battle. Grinding through stacks every turn becomes meaningless pretty quickly, and you only spend 10% of the time on the campaign map because of it. I'd much rather have military trouble because my economy can only sustain a small army. Then the challenge and time goes into the campaign game, not in endless battles.

[tombombadil]

This sounds really interesting. Nice idea Will the AI be able to cope with this system though? You need to be careful it doesn't bankrupt itself by building halls everywhere and that it knows which settlements it should be upgrading. Saw you mentioned something about hidden resources so that could fix where but not the when to upgrade? But if you can get this to work it could be an amazing addition to the mod.

[Pandarr]

Oh ok I misunderstood it. I thought you discovered the way to modify the hardcoded core buildings since there could be a way to do it thanks to Zarathos discovery.

I couldn't agree more. Massacring stack after stack gets a boring grind at some point. It's the campaign game that gives meaning to every battle. Grinding through stacks every turn becomes meaningless pretty quickly, and you only spend 10% of the time on the campaign map because of it. I'd much rather have military trouble because my economy can only sustain a small army. Then the challenge and time goes into the campaign game, not in endless battles.

I also agree about that. Stacks spawning is not a clever feature.

[Flinn]

sounds interesting, maybe you should develop it to be included easily on the major submods, so that much more people will try it directly

following the development, well done so far

[Gríma]

To me this sounds more like a bug fix for every version back to the first boxed release.
Not MOD specific, totally universal. I like it! Great idea

As so far,

...upgrading settlements is mostly a brain-dead waiting game to reach the required population levels. It's no fun...

no strategy what-so-ever(when everything is running smoothly anyway). Just an on-off switch; "growth" OR "i need some cash".

Though as mentioned, AI incorporation could be a tough obstacle to pass.

Good Luck!
I hope you can make it work.

[Xaintrailles]

That's a great idea, I personnaly agree with you !
and it makes a new way of thinking balance in the game :
-> should population growth become more rewarding in bonuses ( on economics, via taxes ), as it becomes less useful in general ?

[Maegfaer]

should population growth become more rewarding in bonuses ( on economics, via taxes ), as it becomes less useful in general ?

I think it should. Ideally, I would re-introduce population reduction on recruitment of troops. I'm in Zarathos group of reverse engineering the engine so this is probably something that could be realized, although currently that project has other higher priorities.

[Maegfaer]

Now that I added Building Upkeep for Walls and Halls, I'm considering adding a modest upkeep to all military buildings. This would create a sharper distinction in the game between economic and military buildings. This would mean that even though you may have enough money, it may not be wise to build those military buildings if they are far from the front-lines, since they'll cost you every turn.

[Maegfaer]

Turns out the AI is handling the new system rather well. The Hall building line somehow has a very low priority for the AI, which means it'll first build almost all other buildings available before upgrading the settlement to the next tier. I'm currently at turn 84 of a Gondor campaign with the new system, and I'm really happy so far with how it's turning out. I'm mainly tweaking values now to get the best balance between all factors affecting population growth, income, and public order.

[tombombadil]

Great News! As someone said earlier if you can get this working I would not be surprised to see it being adopted by most of the sub-mods on here. So much better than vanilla Med II mechanics

[Alekhine]

This is a great idea! +rep Are you still working on this?

[Agamemnon]

How exactly did you go about doing this? I wanted to do the same thing myself for a submod (for something else than TATW) I was making on my own, but I couldn't get around squalor and such.