Some Observations:

Good:
- Ai handles handles food well now, culprit was 100% the equilibrium point for higher pops, now buildings are more responsible for creating higher pops, if you dont build them you have more peasants, so less food problems
- I love how roads pop up in rich countries but dont in country that struggle to urbanize more
- I love how tucked away nations (korea in my test games) really manage to urbanize quite fast
- New production methods are used by ai and dont seem op?

Bad:
- I dont like (maybe vanilla problem) how nations refuse to explode, often in my games great yuan is starving and 99% peasants, but they just dont explode, maybe i dont understand the mandate mechanics well enough. But i had games where they have like 300 base tax in 1800 and 80 mio pop, total peasant wasteland, but still holding on agains their neighbours
- Maybe urbanization is too much winner takes all currently. I see some cities (nürnberg, cologne) who own markets and industrialize like crazy. Then they are rich (from giga urbanization) enough to just buy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of food from their market. Its fun to watch, but im unsure if its too much.
- Since the ai now really handles the changes well, maybe eco scaling is slightly too fast now? Need feedback on this.
- Super Late game some AIs still spam cities/towns, i dont know if the AI just ignores the settings i put in to not do this, or if it has to do with the setting to build more cities in coastal, IF the have a sailor deficit. If someone understands the settings better please tell me

Idea:
- I was thinking about adding a cost modifier of like 0.3% or something that stacks for every building build in a location, with the idea that first you build easily build buildings, every later one becomes more expensive and harder to urbanize. Gameplay wise this would incentivise more urbanization all around your country.
I do not know how the AI calculates ROI though, if they just build by profitability and ignore building price this change wouldnt work. I also am quite apprehensive of these somewhat nonsensical, cost increases.
- I also agree with someone who complained about prosperity/satisfaction. The mechanic should much more depend on how easy the lives of your population are, which should massively depend on how cheap goods are and a little less on the giga strong prosperity / satisfaction modifiers. This will be super hard to balance, because it again will create more winner takes all scenarios.

I do indeed think you can tune the eco scaling down a bit. Personally I do think pop growth is too high. If you don't ruin your food supply and don't death war all the time your population just explodes like crazy. In my current save (1485) countries have population numbers like it's the 1800's, that's 3 to 4 centuries ahead of schedule.
The insane pop numbers probably contribute to the fast economic scaling too.

Good feedback, which region do you see this in? And is it only population or also base tax that in your opinion is too high (and where again)?

I now understand very well how to tune both of these (i hope), its just a matter of where it occurs.

@Hatsefiets

I would consider that if it was possible for me to add actual dynamic road cost/maintenance. I personally really like the idea of actually having to pay a lot for roads. I would love if road cost would scale with that locations development, but i dont think its possible. If i would buff them (they are already some or maybe the best building you can build) i would accelerate the game more. I do however intend to sooner or later take a look at market access and stuff like that. I will probably implement some form of regional capital buffs/buildings or something. I like the idea of slowly taking control of specific regions of your decentralized empire, dependings on if the pops/rgo/cities there are of value to your empire.

Is there any reasons town and city construction is set to 0 days? Just seems odd

Oprindeligt skrevet af Boatt:

Is there any reasons town and city construction is set to 0 days? Just seems odd

To be honest, because it annoyed me in the normal game, and i thought with the mod changes, not much changes at all from calling a village a town, its the buildings that change it. We can could reverse that, it not important to me.

Have you thought about adding a proximity buff to roads? Similar to https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3611916322&searchtext=road

Oprindeligt skrevet af hdoubleh_2:

Have you thought about adding a proximity buff to roads? Similar to https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3611916322&searchtext=road

I think roads are currently the best spammable building (next to temples maybe) and i would rather make them not stronger.

Oprindeligt skrevet af Salty.BOAY:

Good feedback, which region do you see this in? And is it only population or also base tax that in your opinion is too high (and where again)?

I now understand very well how to tune both of these (i hope), its just a matter of where it occurs.

@Hatsefiets

https://imgur.com/a/cbvApqk here's a screenshot of the pop mapmode of my game together with the political mapmode. I checked for GB (which controlls scotland and england so it's easy to compare to historical data). The 9.7m pop in-game was hit somewhere between 1750-1800 historically.

Edit:
My understanding of tax base and what it should be is honestly not all that great so I can't really give any helpful opinions on it, sorry :/
@Starkanas I hit 3% pop growth in some locations at some point. It did slow down though so by now I still have roughly similar absolute growth but the relative increase has slowed down.

I don't quite understand why relative pop growth has slowed down so much but I do love that the absolute growth is still roughly the same as it was. Takes the exponential growth out of it

My first playthrough with mod, played as Brandenburg up to 1420 now. I love the mod, changes the game completely!

Good:
- Markets matter way more now, because of food. I started inside Bohemia's market, I made money by shipping their gold to places. After a while - I noticed that I am their food supplier, because made some ducats that way. Not a perfect long-term strat to be a farm for Bohemia, so I created Berlin market, lost access to gold/silver/jewelry though. 10 out of 10 experience.

- I included Saxony to my market with a treaty, because of their silver and jewelry. It was nice while it lasted, but they refused to build food and urbanized off of my hard-built food production. I kicked them out to keep food for myself, they joined Bohemia's market, I lost all access to silver/jewelry. 10 out of 10 experience.

- Not sure exaaactly why, but Bohemia after Hussite wars crashed hard, which is a good thing. They basically stopped buying food from their market, they had way too little of it, running -500 in Praha and -300 in some other province. I tagged into them and tried buying food for a month, it cost 450 ducats with food price being 0.14.

Bad:
- Bohemia situation: While it's cool that this situation can exist, not sure if AI should have got there in the first place.

- Bohemia situation: Might answer your question why famine don't explode countries. In Bohemia have a lot of angry pops, but they are angry because they are Hussite, but Bohemia flipped to Catholic after the situation ended. These guy absolutely don't mind a small issue of so called "famine" in their lands :D

- Bohemia situation: tested a bit more, tagged into Bohemia. AI set food slider to 0 and got serious famine in almost all country. But when I put food slider to max and let it sit for a few months, I took a few loans initially to fill food storage in provinces, but after that I *only* spending ~40% of my budget on food. Still not ideal, but definitely better than famine.

- Pop growth feels to fast? I mass built granaries in one province and it exploded to 1.6%. It's leveled off, but I got +30% pops in like 10 years. The process is amazing, but I feel that it should react more slowly. Some kind of cap on effect maybe?

Ideas:
- Increased build costs per building - amazing idea, I though the same. This might help slow the snowballing somewhat. Maybe not per building that exists, but per building slots remaining? Something like scaling from 0% to +100% building cost when you go from empty location to full. Of course slots would grow as well as you play, if you do it slow enough, but if you try to force 500 building in one location with all that gold money - ♥♥♥♥ gets expensive.

Random thought - maybe clicking a building could introduce some inflation? If you build everywhere hard you basically have to stop minting in eco sliders.

- Do you know if AI understands that it can make money by selling food? Let's say Bohemia from my save decided to buy all their food with all that gold money they have. Would some country in the same market would be more inclined to build food for profit rather than local consumption?

Oprindeligt skrevet af Starkanas:

My first playthrough with mod, played as Brandenburg up to 1420 now. I love the mod, changes the game completely!

...

Your experience mirrors mine very much.

To address some of your points.

1. I think i understand how the ai works (somewhat) bohemia is a special place because there are SOOOO many insane RGOs that are not food, they get rich fast and they dont have the greatest locations to build up food supply. So once they hit high urbanization and too high consumption, they start buying food, which they can afford because of the RGO wealths (thats also why i now doubled RGO cost).
This works for a while, but doesnt slow down growth, because their storages are full with bough food (from you). At some point the ai get into debt or a war -> debt. This turns on the AIs "money saving mode" they stop all food buy orders to stabilize their econemy and reduce debt. In that timeframe the ai will lose (sensically) lots of pops and especially urbanized pops (which eat much more than peasants). At some point they resolve the debt situation and either dont need to buy food anymore or the prices have reduced because their neighbors build food for them and enough of their pops have deranked/died. In general this works really well.

Im absolutely do not now if the ai factors in food market price when constructing food goods. I hope they do, but the ai 100% understands food market shortages and province food shortages and has emergency modes where it tries hard to address these. This is why you see frances eco stagnate massively, because they need to build food rgos / farming villages to stabilize their market. I love that this works tbh.


Feedback seems to be pop growth is still too high, i am currently experiments with a bunch of changes on the beta patch to adress this. Im sure we will cook up something so it is more inline, i particularly agree that recovery after black death is too freaking fast.

In general i absolutely dislike how satisfacton/prosperity is currently handled by paradox, it essentially has nothing to do with needs being fullfilled. Slowly introduce more changes to address this (i have already added some changes, like more prosperity per month malus if population is not satisfied). But its tricky and will take some time.

To your ideas: Im unsure if inflation can be added, i would say maybe, but im super unsure how the ai would handle this.
It might also be possible to script something like you suggested with a "slider" from 0 to 100 based on how filled the slots are. I am currently testing a flat price increase per staffed building in location, especially to see if the ai actually uses return of investment to spam buildings or purely by monthly profit of building (which i suspect).


Amazing feedback, thanks!

I think you're going in the right direction. It's indeed true that my most insane pop growth was after the black death and by now (1485) it's at a pretty acceptable level.
I do like your ideas about prosperity in particular. Pop satisfaction is impacted by access to goods (maybe not enough) but prosperity isn't which makes no sense, though satisfaction does impact prosperity which you amplified (great idea tbh). I'll try to check in on this thread once in a while as I will keep playing with this mod

Oprindeligt skrevet af Hatsefiets:

I think you're going in the right direction. It's indeed true that my most insane pop growth was after the black death and by now (1485) it's at a pretty acceptable level.
I do like your ideas about prosperity in particular. Pop satisfaction is impacted by access to goods (maybe not enough) but prosperity isn't which makes no sense, though satisfaction does impact prosperity which you amplified (great idea tbh). I'll try to check in on this thread once in a while as I will keep playing with this mod

Maybe to quickly explain how pop growth % works in my mod, and why its so hard to balance.

Each Province has a united food storage. For each province there is a very simple calculation made. (Currently Stored Food / Total Province monthly Consumption), which in words means, how many months of food (at current consumption) is stored in this province. Then when i mod it, i get to decide how much growth i want to have a province to have based on this number. So as your consumption increases, your storage (if it stays same size and is filled the same) will produce less % growth. This is also what the ai reacts to when building food. It sees either market of province shortage and tries to resolve that.

The "issue" with this system is, that in theory there could be provinces with a gigantic storage, that once upon a time were producing net surplus food, but arent anymore since forever, these provinces will continue to grow until "monthly consumption stored" is reduced. In practice i am constantly balancing what gives how much storage and what produces how much food, so it makes sense in a rural desert province with 3k pop and in paris with 800 k pop.
I have to be careful that the ai doesnt have too much storage (leading to too high pop growth even though they are accumulating an insane deficit already) and the opposite (province produces INSANE amounts of food, but has no storage, and doesnt grow).

is it possible to add higher disease spawn chance to high pop towns and cities? would be historically accurate and quell the city birth rates a bit

I honestly havent looked at that, but diseases are currently GIGA bugged (as far as i know), until they work i wont probably look at it. I do like the idea though.