Improved Corruption System 1.2.
Good people of the middle earth, I bring you ICS - Improved Corruption System submod for TATW 3.1!
Introduction
ICS is aimed at those TATW players who find the corruption in the last release to be just a tad too strong and the economy just a tad too difficult to handle. The effects of this submod are aimed to be slight but noticeable - It will not make your game much easier, just help you a bit when it comes to dealing with corruption.
Ah corruption! This dreaded game concept, in my opinion, plays an important part in TW series in that it severely restricts the huge factions from becoming ultra-rich once they own half the world and makes the governance of distant provinces harder. In vanilla M2TW this is all nice, but in mods such as TATW (and several others) where the economy has been nerfed and players have to prioritize and work hard to establish a fully functional empire, corruption might be a bit too strong even for smaller factions. The cheap, easy and dirty way of dealing with this would be to simply reduce corruption across the board, or make the distance to capitol play a smaller role - but these are not the kinds of solutions I was looking for as they would make the game far too easy.
Governors
Generals that administer settlements in TATW can get some help fighting against corruption, most noticeably through the GoodAdministrator trait series. This trait is very hard to obtain as it requires the character in question to govern a province on high or very high taxes while certain actions (like finishing buildings) are being preformed.
ICS adds a new trait - GoodGovernor. This trait represent the ability of a character to manage distant and problematic provinces. For every turn a character ends in a province that is far away from the capitol, he gets a small chance of improving his Governor skill. This chance is modified by the distance to the capitol in the sense that it's higher for more distant provinces. There are four levels of this trait:
Novice Governor (reduces corruption by about 10%)
Competent Governor (reduces corruption by about 20%)
Experienced Governor (reduces corruption by about 30%)
Expert Governor (reduces corruption by about 40%)
As there is no way of modeling corruption reduction directly, this trait combines Law and Unrest effects to produce the corruption reduction effect. Increasing Law increases public order and decreases corruption while increasing Unrest decreases public order. All the levels are balanced in such a way that net effect on public order is always 0%, and thus only the corruption reduction effect is present.
This trait represents the fact that a character who has more experience in governing a distant settlement with rampant corruption will become better at it over time. The speed of learning this skill might be adjusted in the future versions of the mod, but the idea is that most governors of very distant provinces should get to capable after 80 turns or so, and just a handful should reach Skilled and Superb levels in that same time. I have calibrated this carefully as characters in TATW live for a long time and I don't want this trait to be too common.
Concluding Remarks
This system should provide decent reduction in corruption without the need for any micromanagement. It applies to both player and the AI, so the AI will get the same bonuses. The idea is to make characters governing in provinces actually useful, I hate it when I see player's armies with 10 family members running around, and cities left ungoverned - I don't believe the game was meant to be played like that. Please try this out and tell me what you think!
Compatibility with other mods
This mod changes the following files:
export_descr_character_traits.txt
text/export_VnVs.txt
It will thus not be compatible with any mods that change the above (should only conflict with mods that add traits in the game). There are, however, two versions of the mod, one for vanilla TATW3.1 and one for Baron Samedi's compilation 5.0.
Special thanks
Special thanks go to makanyane, Gigantus and especially TNZ and Withwnar for their great help in making me understand the b.i.t.c.h that is the campaign script a bit better.
Version History
1.0 -> 1.1
-Added the 4th level of the trait
-Renamed trait levels to represent the gathering of experience
-The trait now influences only corruption reduction and not public order (by introducing Unrest effects)
-Increased the overall effect on corruption reduction (It will still be moderate even in the later part of the game)
-Completely rewrote the DistanceToCapital triggers (as using > than but < than doesn't seem to work)
-Added the small chance of the trait improving if the character manages in a city with overwhelming foreign culture
-Trait should now only improve for characters who do nothing else that turn (not 100% sure this works)
1.1 -> 1.2
-Removed the provincial capitol building for several reasons:
1) I was unable to squeeze it in Baron's due to building limit and didn't want to sustain two versions of the mod.
2) This way the player and the AI are treated exactly the same
3) Players complained about too much micromanagement
-Made the governor trait more common (because the building is omitted)
OBSOLETE - Not relevant for current version |
Provincial Capitol
Provincial Capitol is the second concept this mod introduces. It is a building that, when fully developed, represents a network of administrative and bureaucratic facilities that helps manage distant regions. It acts as a capitol-away-from-the-capitol in that it greatly reduces corruption and increases order in the city in which it is built and highly increases the training rate of capable governors to deal with corruption. The catch is that you can build only one of these in your realm. There are three levels of the building:
Provincial Governor (requires large town)
Provincial Government (requires city)
Provincial Capitol (requires large city)
A fully developed Provincial Capitol gets strong reduction in corruption and greatly increases the chance of characters stationed in the city to advance in the governor trait. This city will act as your distant center as you will send characters there whom you wish to govern surrounding regions for training.
Some Caveats
1) I have not yet been able to completely ensure that only one Provincial Capitol is built. Once the first level (Governor) if finished, you can't build it anywhere else but before it is finished (in the same turn) you can. It theory, you could Start production of several Provincial Governors or que them in different settlements - until this issue is resolved I apply to your decency not to build the first level in more than one city (That is one of the reasons the build time for the first level is only one turn).
2) Provincial Capitol is player only building - the AI cannot build it. This was done to ensure you don't conquer Provincial capitols from other factions. AI characters will, however, advance in the GoodGovernor trait. AI gets his bonuses for money anyway.
3) For the time being the building is disabled for re-emergent Arnor. If you build it as Eriador you can still use it as Arnor, you just can't build a new one when you change countries. I'm trying to solve this issue also so it might be possible in further versions of the mod.
4) There are different pictures of the building for human, elven and orchis factions as well as for dwarves. I'm still polishing them out so they are not perfect, especially for Rhun and Harad.
Download & Install instructions
Download the zip file and extract it to your /Third_Age_3 folder.
ICS 1.1 for TATW3.1. - DOWNLOAD
ICS 1.1 for Baron Samedi's Compilation 4.0 (only with bugfix 1.6) - DOWNLOAD
!!!Important notice!!! Due to the building tree limit being reached in Baron Samedi's Compilation that version contains only the Governor trait, and not the provincial capitol building. I'll try to get around this issue in the following releases.
If you want to uninstall and revert to previous state just download and extract the following archive in your /Third_Age_3 folder.
For reverting back to TATW3.1. - DOWNLOAD
For reverting back to Baron Samedi's Compilation 4.0 - DOWNLOAD
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Screenshots
Here are some screenshots of the Governor trait
Download & Install instructions
Download the zip file attached below for vanilla or Baron's and extract it to your /Third_Age_3 folder. If you want to uninstall and revert to previous state just download and extract the archive named "remove ICS" in your /Third_Age_3 folder for TATW3.1 or Baron's.