Epigoni mod

[Trin Tragula]

I suppose it's away from the main focus on the mod but is there any possibility of Carthage getting some attention? I've tended to play it since I first played EU:Rome to learn the game as a republic and I find their decisions to be rather bland.
I don't know much about Carthage otherwise however (and I haven't been able to find much out) so I have few ideas on what that might be unfortunately.

What has always struck me as odd is that their naval standardization decision increases overall tech costs. I could possibly see it increasing naval tech cost but perhaps not the overall costs of all techs? I tested the modifier "naval_tech_cost_modifier" from eu3 and it works for Rome too even though it's got no localization and as far as I can tell is unused in the vanilla game.
I also find their mercenary decision a bit odd as it doesn't seem to relate to actual mercenaries at all.
Otherwise I suppose something about how citizens would serve in the navy rather than the army might be grounds for a decision or related events?

 

[Trin Tragula]

With Carthage I dont really know if we have enough information on them to add any real detail. We know they were great sailors, rich, used a lot of mercs, etc. I might be extending the map inland very soon and down the west coast of africa. If I do that I might put in some colonisation decisions (eg, colonise the Canary islands, etc). Also I want to split away Utica and make it independent but allied and tributary.

Map expansion sounds nice (especially as that might perhaps mean the end of the current events recreating barbarian presence in the southernmost provinces in Africa?), as I said my primary reason for wanting more stuff for Carthage is that I tend to play them. I haven't really got a clue about Carthaginian history (apart from what's on Wikipedia).

I am not that savvy on how tech works in EUR. Do you mean the 6% technology cost modifier from this decision? Its affecting all technology but you think we could use the EUIII "naval_tech_cost_modifier" so that the penalty is specific to ships?

Exactly. The current decision increases tech costs by 6% for all techs while "naval_tech_cost_modifier" will just increase the cost for naval techs. If used localization will have to be added however as the modifier is accepted by the game (and works) but as it's unused by the base game there is no existing localization for it.

I'm not that knowledgeable about eu:r modding either. I'm much more used to modding EU3 (and that's also a historical period I know more about).
I wasn't able to find a list of usable modifiers for EU:R so I tested one from EU3 that worked.

You are suggesting another naval decision, where the the citizenry focus on naval matters rather than army matters? It could be increase naval recruitment speed but reduce army recruitment speed. It seems to have some basis, Wikipedia entry:

It could also reduce populist attraction by the sounds of it but increase civic and mercantile attraction. Thanks for the idea.

This was exactly what I was suggesting Perhaps a higher organization for navies as well (as the mercenary decision lowers it for land troops)?

 

[Trin Tragula]

Carthage:

- Two new laws added (Punic Naval Law and Punic Tophet Sacrifice )

Nice Though I wonder if I will be able to use the second one

- I tried out the modifier "naval_tech_cost_modifier" and it appear in game ok, without the localisation entry. Shall I up it to 10%? Not sure how to test if it works.

In order to test if it works you can compare tech costs for naval tech with that of the other techs by using the tooltip for the tech progress bars. When I tried this all techs had the same cost except for naval tech (which was more expensive).
Not sure about 10%, a human player could probably handle that no problem but testing would have to determine if it works for the AI. Personally I always thought a tech malus was a bit wrong in the first place. I can see how standardization would mean less innovation. But on the other hand standardization also means it's a lot easier to switch out old components across the board so to speak.
Imo it's also a bit counter intuitive to give Carthage a naval tech malus compared to Rome. On the other hand I don't know any better malus and it does seem to me most decisions should have both good and bad consequences. I know too few of the modifiers for eu:rome to be able suggest a more fitting penalty (though I think it might be worth it to try out more modifiers from eu3 as some of them evidently work in rome as well).
Wikipedia has articles about the punic military that seems good enough for inspiration but I'm not able to determine anything about it's validity due to my lacking general knowledge of the time and/or place

 

[Trin Tragula]

No matter which stance one takes on this I'd argue the modifiers themselves are actually too high. +10% can be a huge increase and does seem a bit unfair to me (and makes the provinces that gets the modifier more strategically important than they should be).
I'd rather use pop growth modifiers (which I see as people actually moving in and settling down rather than just increased birth rate) for climate and/or terrain differences. Tax modifiers seem to me to be better left for administrative or technical differences.
I'm also of the opinion that most existing growth modifiers are too high. EU3 accepts lower pop growth modifiers than 1 percent and I think Rome might also benefit from using lower numbers if possible.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Cheaper ships might also make the storm event less harsh. I once lost over 300 ships to that event... The naval power balance was shifted away entirely for 50 years or so.

If you are redoing the map I would also like to place a low priority wish on increasing the amount of sea zones. Controlling the seas with just one megastack seem too easy at present (and I am guessing that sea zones don't increase the strain on the engine in nearly the same degree as land provinces do due to them not having any people or buildings in them and thus significantly fewer calculations). I would also argue that the more new ports you add the more the need increases for more sea zones.

Also if EU:Rome works anything like EU3 then maintenance cost is based on recruitment cost (and any modifiers to recruitment cost will also make maintenance cheaper in eu3).
If this is indeed the case in EU:Rome as well then it might probably be used to good effect to create generic naval recruitment laws for states other than Carthage (I'm thinking these would be directed at using slaves rather than citizens like the punic one though but again my grasp of this period is poorer than my interest in it ).

It's in general my opinion that the more laws, decisions, etc there is in this game the more diverse the states will be develop to be during the game which is exactly the area Rome needs to the most improvement in. There is currently no general decisions or laws that I know of that a country can take to profile itself as a "naval country" (apart from taking naval ideas). While few great powers of this era might have had this "profile" I'm sure some of the minors did.

An alternative penalty would have to be something other than a naval penalty. There just arent enough naval modifiers. As you said the innovation penalty stands for reason in a certain way and I guess this is proved by history in the case of the Carthaginians. The Romans innovated with the corvus the Carthaginains floundered and were eventually crushed at sea.

Yes and the 10% more expensive naval techs might actually work nicely to make Carthage have a better (cheaper) navy initially but eventually be surpassed (or at least would have to work very hard not to be surpassed) by Rome. This would be a very attractive mechanism from a historical point of view.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Maintaining the navy should always be expensive, can you confirm if maintenace cost is based on recruitment cost. I have only pushed it down to 7.5 (instead of 5) on this basis?

Semi-confirmed. I don't have a lot of time to test now but atleast the maintenance cost was decreased when I passed the Carthaginian naval standardization law (I was using one of the bookmarks were Carthage starts at peace and the decision reduced naval maintenance from 0.18 to 0.17).

 

[Trin Tragula]

Thoughts about population

Trin Tragula, I'd be interested to see your suggestions for modifiers focusing on growth rate (which I agree are usually too high in Paradox games) rather than tax modifier. I don't find +10% or +20% tax modifiers too high, personally, and part of my thinking in experimenting with a "rich" modifier was to make certain provinces more important and worth fighting over. The Seleucids and Ptolemies fought six wars over that rich cluster in Syria and Judea that I worried about in the previous paragraph, after all.

I have been working with the pop growth modifiers for EU3, where pop growth in fact refers to the growth of the urban centre of a province (so not quite the same thing as pop growth in EU:ROME). What I did was to set the base pop growth to 0 and then made other modifiers (such as buildings, tax and manpower base) increase population growth. The population number in a province itself I set to act as a malus on population growth (so the population will reach a point were growth stops by itself).
In effect I made urban growth dependent on a lot of things (such as the richness of a province, the size of a present CoT, the amount of provincial buildings (which I interpret as how developed the administrative centre is)). I also made things like looting, winter, etc decrease growth.
In doing all this I was mostly using modifiers smaller than 1 percent (with a few exceptions).
The idea came from when I was researching historical urban population numbers for cities on an Indian map I made for my mod and the MM game. Unlike EU3 the real world did not see a constant 3% growth but rather the historical population of the cities in question tended to increase and decrease a lot dependent on a wide range of reasons.

Now this is only partially applicable to Rome as population growth does in fact incorporate the entire province. There is also no such thing as a provincial base tax or manpower to act set the "natural" population size in EU:Rome. But I still think that making population growth dependent on many small things is preferable to having a constant growth like is the case in most paradox games. This is especially true as manpower and tax income is entirely dependent on population in EU:Rome.

In my opinion no province should have exactly the same population growth rate as any other, the whole point of them are that they're different. Climate would make excellent modifiers for population growth (one has to keep in mind that even when the population in question is that of the entire province the growth modifier is as much a modifier of people settling in as it's a question of actual increased birth rates/decreased death rates).
As I stated earlier I think population growth is a much better effect to model the fertility of land (which is what the climate modifiers seem to be depicting currently) than a tax modifier as the base tax is already dependent on population. Using population growth modifiers would also mean that certain areas would become more populous than others automatically as long as they aren't continually plundered/and or underdeveloped.
If one was to apply the same reasoning for population growth to Rome as I've done in EU3 (and this is a big IF, I suppose ) climate could act as the modifier that set the base growth of a province on which other modifiers are then applied such as if the province has been looted, how highly developed it is, etc.
Total population could still act as a negative modifier that grows as the population grows making growth stop at one point (dependent on other modifiers such as the climate the province has). As the player removes barbarian presence, appoints a good governor, builds irrigation systems and increases civilization values growth might then again start increasing (and with it the value of the province).
Keeping your major population centres supplied with grain will also be a lot more important using a dynamic population growth model like this one.

Additional modifiers that are already present that could be used to effect population growth in the game would be:
barbarian_power
civilization_value
no_governor
corruption
coastal (currently unused)
non_coastal (currently unused)
tropical (already does affect population growth)
mild_winter
normal_winter
severe_winter
blockaded
no_adjacent_controlled
city_population
core
same_culture_group
non_accepted_culture
different_religion
same_religion_group
occupied
under_siege
looted
revolt_risk
nationalism (probably better left out in favour of revoltrisk, using both can lead to unwanted results)
foreign_rebels
desecrated
regional_troops (this one should definately have an influence on growth imho)
construction_tech_level
civic_tech_level
religious_tech_level

As EU3 doesn't allow global population growth modifiers I've not experimented with those but ones that might fit Rome at a glance would be:

stability
positive_stability
negative_stability (probably just one or two of these)

civil_war
war
peace
war_exhaustion (probably better than war)
tyranny
any of the ruler_party modifiers though that would have to be carefully tested

These are all static modifiers. I'm sure if one wanted to go this route to create a more dynamical population growth model there's also plenty of event modifiers that may be used to good effect.
It's also my view that the omen that increases population growth in EU:Rome is very overpowered. Taking it repeatedly can increase your population by quite a lot quite quickly.

Sorry about the long post (especially as I didn't give any set numbers, if one is to adopt the design I propose a lot of testing would have to go into which numbers to choose).
Even if the idea of a dynamic population cap isn't something you want to do I think you should consider the use of climate modifiers instead of (rather than in addition to) the base population growth currently in the game as well as the use of population modifiers below 1%.