Mastikator's Mods

[Mastikator]

I finally decided to make mods.

These two mods have been tested and work together, the effect is that it's no longer trivial to keep sprawl below the cap and going above it is less trivial.

Empire Sprawl balance
Changes:
Sprawl from districts 1 -> 2
Sprawl from pops 0.5 -> 0.3

Going over the admin cap limit changes: (per point above)
Leader and upkeep +0% -> +0.1%
Research cost +0.4% -> +0.8%
Tradition cost +0.6% -> 0.8%

This slightly buffs empires with many pops, the district change is deceptively huge. The research and tradition cost are in sync so that going above is equally damaging to both.

Bureaucrat Balance
Changes:
Bureaucrat admin cap produced 10 -> 8
Bureaucrat consumer good upkeep 1 -> 2
Bureaucrat planet designation bonus 2 -> 1

This effectively means you need to spend x2.5 more consumer goods and x1.2 as many pops to get the same amount of admin cap. Making the cost of admin cap go from trivial to medium

Sorry for the terrible logo on both.


Upcoming soon (tm) is a mod that makes a few small tweaks to weapons ranges which I believe can change the meta away from alpha damage >>> everything else (make it more balanced, make more kinds of builds viable)

 

[James Fire]

Another attempting Admin cap stuff! I wish you luck in your balancing.

 

[Hansatron]

It seems very hard to make empire sprawl "matter" in the sense of being a check on empire growth, at least with the way minerals feed into CG and alloys & pop growth is parallel. That said, it seems like a lot of the vanilla effects around admin cap currently are trivial and can be ignored. Unruly is practically free trait points, for example. Byzantine Bureaucracy has gone from amazing to mediocre in all but niche scenarios. So I support making the bureaucrats matter more!

Have you had a look at machine and hive admin cap jobs? I honestly feel machines are just better at this, and hives got the short stick again.

 

[James Fire]

Byzantine Bureaucracy has gone from amazing to mediocre in all but niche scenarios.

How is making Bureaucrats give stability mediocre?

 

[Mastikator]

It seems very hard to make empire sprawl "matter" in the sense of being a check on empire growth, at least with the way minerals feed into CG and alloys & pop growth is parallel. That said, it seems like a lot of the vanilla effects around admin cap currently are trivial and can be ignored. Unruly is practically free trait points, for example. Byzantine Bureaucracy has gone from amazing to mediocre in all but niche scenarios. So I support making the bureaucrats matter more!

Have you had a look at machine and hive admin cap jobs? I honestly feel machines are just better at this, and hives got the short stick again.

I haven't tried gestalts yet. Only one play test (with both mods) so far and it's noticeable but doesn't go far enough.
I think lowering the sprawl from pops was the wrong decision, maybe even raise it 0.75. Then you'd need 1 bureaucrat for every 10.66 pops rather than 1 for every 20.

I'm also considering how this affects Byzantine Bureaucracy since if you need to have more bureaucrats then you end up with more of those bonuses

 

[Hansatron]

How is making Bureaucrats give stability mediocre?

The problem is that unlike stability effects from sources like police state, shared burdens, or even Nobles, bureaucrats are a job you don't really want to spam (because you want only as many as you need,) and a large empire doesn't actually have that many in vanilla. If you go look up say, stefan annon's civics tier list for 2.6 you can see some more reasoning.
I still like the civic, but it's no where near what it used to be. Again, consider the fact that Police State is like having 5 bureaucrats' worth of stability on every planet. Even the Nobles Estates, which only takes one pop, it similar in stability/unity output to 5 byzantine bureaucrats.

I do think it's a great civic for people running slave heavy builds, though, since its at least a spammable building. But there's a lot of other ways to get stability, so for non slavers you don't really need Byzantine to get close to or over 100%.