New Mod WIP - Realistic Aging at 2 years / turn

[AltarisGreyhawke]

I have been tinkering with the settings in "descr_campaign_db.xml" that deal with character aging in the hopes of creating a more realistic aging system while still keeping the default 2 years per turn. Since the actual aging process is hardcoded, I had to get a little inventive with this, but so far, I'm made a good start.

What I did was to divide all the aging factors in "descr_campaign_db.xml" by 4. So, for example, characters come of age at 4, reach old age at 15, etc. So, characters age appropriately to the year of the campaign.

This does reduce the number of turns that a character is effective for, but I think that's a good thing. In most campaigns, I max my characters out between 1/4 to 1/3 of their playable career, and then have awesome generals for WAAAY too long. With this new aging mechanism, only the truly great generals will reach the heights before death, and even then, only for a short period of time.

The only real downside to this method is that the age displays incorrectly. For example, a character just coming of age will show as being age 4, while a character is likely to be passing away at 15 or 16. I just play this off, though, calculating the actual age by multiplying by 4.

I've still got some issues to work out with this mod, two in particular. The first is the cardinal/pope system. Since cardinals die so quickly, there isn't enough time to get new ones elected before the pope dies. In each test, the whole list of cardinals has died out by 1130 or so. Then, it just comes down to who has the next available priest. I've been looking at changing the needed piety for cardinals from 5 down to 2 or 3 to see if this relieves the problem.

The other major issue at the moment is the way new characters are brought into the family. Since it appears to be hardcoded into the game that the chance of children being born or adopted is tied to amount of territory, I've seen some concerning problems where family members die off too quickly to be replenished, and factions are destroyed quickly because of it. This one has been trickier to address, but I am looking at changing fertility rates through triggers to really high values for faction leaders and heirs to see if this helps.

All in all, though, I've got some hopes that this will work with a little more tuning. I really enjoy the pace of 2 years/turn, as it keeps the game moving along, but I can't stand the current aging process. Makes no sense to only have 5-6 kings in a 450 year campaign. Also, with shorter time frames to make use of characters, it takes away some of the heavily skewed advantages the player gets, particularly with agents. Even if you succeed in maxing them out, they don't get to hang around for huge amounts of time giving you extra advantage.

Anyone else interested in seeing this idea implemented? If so, I can start posting my findings/changes here as it goes along.

[Trajan]

Moved to The Gathering.