Question on changing the game's timescale.

[magick]

Hi, I've been playing SS for about a month now and I find it to be very very good.

Because I was so in love with this mod, I started looking into the sub-mod section to see anything that will add even more to the type of game-play that I enjoy, and one that really caught my eye was the 2 turns/year mods, particularly http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=190081, by Tsarsies.

From the looks of it though, there appears to be some problems that inherently come with making such a change though, and so I decided not to download the mod, and then I got a question after thinking about the issue for some time.

Assuming the reason people want to make a 2tpy mod for the sake of realism and to see their characters age properly(something that I want as well), isn't it possible to simply change the timescale of the game to meet this? I know the early era campaign for SS is currently 1.5ypt, and that late ear is 1ypt. If I made a change to the game to simply change the time itself to .5ypt, and leave everything else alone, would that cause the problems that came with that mod above?

The only real problem can I can see coming out of this is that the end-date for the game will be changed rather drastically, but i'm not certain if it'll do anything else, as all I intend to do is change the in-game dates, and that doesn't affect anything besides scripted events, afaik.

Thanks for answering my rather convoluted question =D

[Caesar Clivus]

It wont change the end-date for the campaign as that is set as an actual date rather than the number of turns.

If you just change the timescale by itself then you will get fortresses and huge citadels way too early and you'll get advanced technologies (platemail etc) far too early into the game. Then you're left with no new buildings and units to look forward to for about 85-90% of the game. If you're changing the timescale for realism's sake, then this would break that realism even more.

It is because even though you have reduced the timescale to a third, you still have the same population growth levels in the settlements. So instead of a settlement gaining, for example, 500 people in a year, it will gain 1500 instead. So you also need to edit the descr_settlement_mechanics.xml file in the SS\data folder to reduce the settlement growth rates.

I actually did this for my game a while back but the files are relatively untested (although some people have said they work fine). You can download them here

The settlement mechanics file goes in the SS\data folder. The descr_regions.txt file goes in the Stainless_Steel_6\data\world\maps\base folder. Make sure you delete map.rwm in that same folder or the changes wont go through. The game will rebuild this file when you next start it up (which may take a minute or two so dont worry).

[magick]

Thank you very much for your response =D

If I don't care whether I can incredibly advanced technology 100 turns into the game, changing just the time-scale will be perfectly fine then, right?

And if I use your population changes, i'll have to change the time-scale myself, right?

And, just out of curiosity, what real difference is there between just making this change and the ones presented in the link I gave? Both are meant to address the same thing, then isn't it more simple to just change the time-scale and adjust the population growth accordingly? Or will this lead to the other problems of the AI's not being able to adjust properly and such, as shown in the other attempts?

EDIT: Opps, forgot to ask.

The changes that i'm talking about here won't be compatible with save-files right?

[Caesar Clivus]

If I don't care whether I can incredibly advanced technology 100 turns into the game, changing just the time-scale will be perfectly fine then, right?

Yep, except for scripted events but you are aware of that anyway

And if I use your population changes, i'll have to change the time-scale myself, right?

Yes.

And, just out of curiosity, what real difference is there between just making this change and the ones presented in the link I gave? Both are meant to address the same thing, then isn't it more simple to just change the time-scale and adjust the population growth accordingly? Or will this lead to the other problems of the AI's not being able to adjust properly and such, as shown in the other attempts?

Tsarsies mod changes a lot more than just the population growth and the timescale and in that respect is more complete. My files only change the population growth. I myself admit they need more testing but everything works fine from what I and a couple of other people have seen. More testing would probably be required though

[magick]

Thanks =)

I'll try your files out and report back if anything bizarre happens.