Balance Update.

Feedback that pop growth in general and especially pop growth after the black death is too high. RGOs still too powerful

Solution RGOs : RGOs reduced for both towns/cities and rural

Solution pop growth:
This was a tough nut to crack, but i think i found a solution.
Rural/Town/City now have a STATIC MINUS -0.2% population growth. This defactor means that at current numbers,
IF the location has less than 5 months of food stored, it will lose population VERY slowly, but it will not be considered starvation.
The point of this is to shift the equilibrium of food -> population growth. This leads to situations where pretty stable populations can exist without bouncing between big growth and starvation.

Additionally i changed to maxmimum bonus from stored food to not be at 120 month but at 36 months.
In practice this means the maximum pop growth of a location will be 1.5% yearly food ((36/12)*0.005) minus the 0.2% modifier leading to 1.3% max growth.

Additionally i further reduced inert population capacity for town/cities. That population cap is still very soft and its main objective is to slowly stop rural places from growing if there are no further staffed building investments to increase pop cap.

In practice all of this means peasants are now MUCH more valuable. The later the age the more food production boni will come from advances, you will see much more growth 1600+.

A bunch of other minor changes have been made. In my opinion the ai does NOT overbuild granaries anymore, it seems totally reasonable what they build and its actually insane how much food production is now necessarry to keep big cities running.

Still in my full test game (until 1836) a bunch of ai countries (korea, a bunch of indians, bohmeia a little, papal state and hungary) industrialized a lot.

Other countries NEVER recovered from the black death.

General Changes
Generally most balance concerns were that early game growth is too springy, especially after the Black Death. To resolve this I reworked how population capacity for a location works. It is now LESS dependent on inert modifiers like Farmland and much more dependent on how many STAFFED buildings a location has.

Farmland has been hit the most, other big ones a little, and locations that give very little pop cap haven’t been further reduced.

Pop growth from food storage has been reduced slightly more.

AI and Granaries
Another reported issue was that the AI values granaries and food storage too much now and spams granaries, meaning it will also spam masons.

So I did change how food is stored now: granaries take fewer bricks to work and allow for more storage.

AI is less focused on creating storage.

Staffed buildings and population itself now add a little bit of storage to the location as well (I think that makes sense), but granaries stay the main method to store food.
I am not 100% happy with how the AI builds granaries and am thankful for your reports on this to further dial this in.

Runaway City Wealth and Building Spread
Another issue was that there were runaway effects of single cities becoming very rich and still not enough incentive (especially for AI) to spread out their city buildings.

For this I added a 0.5% per staffed building level building malus (big cities have higher housing prices) and it greatly improved the AI spreading out their buildings.

Additionally I reduced the city/town inert building malus, allowing for small cities to now build cheaper until they get bigger. And I added slight rural inert building malus as well.

I think the AI’s pop growth and especially eco growth has now been reined in enough from my test games, and might even be on the lower side. I am excited to see what the 1.10 beta changes will bring.

Downloads
Lastly, if you prefer not to patch your mod or experience bugs or problems (you hopefully shouldn’t): every version from now on will be on my GitHub page where you can just download the last version.

https://github.com/JanB1989/ProsperOrPerish/activity

Small Bugfix, farming villages now work on all farmlands! Thanks big time for the bug report!

Minor cleanup and file changes.

Repo now on github https://github.com/JanB1989/ProsperOrPerish

Smallish balance test:

I have run a couple of games as observer and adjusted some stuff based on feedback and what i saw.

Problem: AI is really dialed in now dealing well with the food changes, this means they are less in self inflicted "emergency mode" and are focusing more resources on scaling. Leading to slightly too high pop growth and too high eco growth. I checked every single overperforming country and every single one had like 75% of taxes from peasants and these taxes are nearly purely from RGOs.

Solution:
1. Double RGO gold cost
2. Small increases to peasant/labourer food consumptions
3. Minor nerf to coastal food production (the fishing viallage + coastal buff from last patch was slightly too much i think)
4. Some adjustments to food storage, cities and towns now have slightly less absolute inert food storage, so ai (and you) have to build a couple more granaries.

In my test game on the new patch, AI's are slightly more brittle again and eco growth is visibly slowed down.

Lastly if someone knows if its possible to scale RGO base cost based on the level of the RGO, please write me. I think this would be a great change to further incentivice ai/players to spread out rgos leading to then needing to connect more parts of your empire earlier.

From next patch on repo will be on github aswell, so its easier to follow these changes, for everyone that uses it.

Small update to fix an issue with production methods. This might brick your savegame if you update the mod (if someone used the bugged production methods, which happens in lategame). Since patch is only out since a couple of horus i doubt it affects many people.
You fix this by manually downloading (and loading) the last mod from the old patch notes page if you want to continue that save!

Current Issues and Implemented Solutions:

Problem: It should be more valuable to keep satisfaction up in a province
Solution:
Increase average satisfaction impact of prices
Increase control and prosperity malus of lower satisfaction

Problem: No Use for Peasants, because farming buildings aren't diverse enough, even though you have the money.
Solution:
Added ability to build farming village on ALL farmland tiles, independent of which RGO they produce
Added Farming village production method for sturdy grain / millet
Added Forest village production method for wild game and gave forest village slight food modifier

Problem: Still slightly too high population growth:
Solution:
Nothing major, but decreased pop growth from food storage slightly, and reduced how many food storage buildings AI builds slightly. Sooner or later I will pass over all forms of food storage so they make sense.

Problem: Inland food production massively outperforms coastal food production, and which scales worse (because of RGO base values and because fishing village doesn't have food modifier). This led to population being more dense inland, this absolutely never was the case in human history.
Solution:
I gave fishing villages a minor food production modifier bonus. I also increased coastal food production modifier bonus, because fish is just too weak in general.

Problem: Urbanization is much harder in this mod:
Solution:
Added a very small global development (flat) depending on what the percentage of burghers in your total population is

Problem: Japan starves horribly (and other mid-game soldier heavy provinces)
Solution:
This is caused because soldiers (as laborers) are part of your peasant estate and they have real trouble dropping back to peasants again. So you had provinces in Japan (and general in mid-game) where there are soldiers getting promoted, but no peasants available, leading to starvation loops. I decreased soldier food usage, but increased the higher pops food usage slightly to compensate.

Problem: Cities accumulated too many peasants and had weird migrations (thanks for bug report)
Solution:
Fix wrong modifier and reduce inert city pop cap down a little. I also removed the positive migration speed modifiers as suggested, since migration is such a trial and error thing, we have to observe this. There currently exists very little documentation on how the math actually works. Thx for the nice feedback again here! I'm unsure if there is migration modifier based on distance, if you find that, tell me.

Problem: Cities/towns produce too many high pops independent of if there are jobs for them or not
Solution:
Reduced gravitation for higher pops for cities and towns

AND NOW TO THE BIGGEST CHANGES:

Problem: I (and many others) disliked the static city/town food malus, it's giga hard to balance and why would a newly built city with no people reduce food production by 100+%? And why does it get 100k free pop capacity without anything being done?

Solution: I found out that the modifier for “currently staffed building levels” is moddable. So this value will now be used to tell us how much Human buildings have been built in that location. This means more staffed (this is important because of doom loops) buildings you build in a province (take land from nature):
The more Pop capacity that place will have
The less food it will produce
This means your giga late-game city will be worse at producing food, but will actually have super large pop capacity (in actuality not too dissimilar capacity to now).

This has the added benefit that there are a little less GIGA rural locations that are purely peasants and have INFINITE RGO level.

It also means your rural locations with many buildings that are not food related are also worse food producers, but have more pop cap.

Still, building up all these villages WILL outscale the malus from building in that province.

Additionally I massively reduced the malus you get for building over building cap, to make it less punishing.

I also now allow for population to grow over cap of location, with rising maluses depending on how far above we are, this is just more realistic (feedback on numbers please).

You will see many more slight adjustments I did to make this work and I hope the numbers are somewhat decent.:steamhappy:

Small Balance Patch:

This hopefully helps out some regions in the world that are doomlooping a little bit too much (looking at bohemia @thx for the feedback)
- Removed development monthly reduction from starvation and put (a weaker version) into devastation
- Increased scaling food capacity malus from devastation
- Decreased food production malus from devastation

Bugfix

- Fix raildroad gold cost typo, should be working now. Thanks for bugreport :)

AI Update:

- AI will build less cities
- AI will keep more good food rural spots untouched and not urbanize them
- AI is much more triggered to act from negative food in province
- AI starts resolving Market food shortages way earlier to not spiral and keep food price more cheap
- AI will even produce more food in province food positive provinces to resolve more akute market food shortages asap
- AI Tries to keep food storage potential bigger, building more granaries and stuff.