The title is just a philosopher's stone reference isnt it?
Correct!
Easy one I know, but it did fit and I like it
So here, have the teaser (more info visible):
Also i havent been paying too much attention to this but it sounds pretty sick actually. Vanilla (and ck2+ by extension) was always sorta lacking the trade dynamics that affected so much during the time. I can't find any specific talk about it, but will things like culture or religion effect where traders (and therefore trade goods) go?
Indeed after learning more about Medieval History I found it surprising how underrated pre-industrial economy is. It's like most people deny or ignore that it was of any importance, when it really was as important as it is today for pretty much the entire human history. Interestingly, both LotR and GoT fail pretty hard at simulating a proper economy as well, but nobody cares... I still like the books, but it's kinda sad that this aspect is always forgotten. A prime example of an author that got it right is Polish writer Sapkowski with his
Witcher novels which you should read if you like fantasy - the video game is more known, but the books are brilliant as well (and feature a proper "Medieval" economy!).
But yeah, that's why I did this mod - and others are also occupied with the same idea: If you want to taste a different approach,
@Arko's new version of his economy mod
just launched.
As for cultures/religions, I haven't really thought about it. But the mod is complex enough as it is, we'll see how much more complexity it can take.
So, in your example, Brement could receive salt one year, and the after after possibly not ? Or there will be a continuity criteria that will weight the import priority ?
That's indeed a major problem, and I don't have a solution for it. I considered using dynamic flags for it, but these are not dynamic enough for my needs, as I can't read the province ideas directly from them, only compare them if I already have a scope (which is useless when I am searching for a scope).
There is also going more dynamic stuff on, so that there isn't really much use of keeping track of these things anyway. The whole idea of trade priorities is just to give the whole procedure an order: If Bremen always has a high value (and thus level), it will always be able to import the Salt first, because all the other provinces only come later (and Venice/Cairo etc which could compete has access to other, nearer sources of Salt).
How this will imbricate with the presence (or not) of merchant republics, in your example, how having the Hansa formed yet or not will affect the system.
On the opposite (Hansa still), would such trade system can make emerge earlier, or another Hansa ligue ?
Frankly I haven't thought about it yet. But indeed I could factor that in easily, and just add an extra entry to the scripted effect that adds another say +5 if the province is owned by a merchant republic. But yeah, stuff like this I can still adjust later.
How will this be impacted by wars ? Say Bremen is directly at war with Westfalen, one attacks the other, their lieges are at war, their top liege is at war with Danemark that will harass the merchants in the country etc. ? These are different levels of wars of course and should affect differently the trade as a consequence.
My general point is how the system reacts to the game dynamics.
Well, similar to how the latest patch changed it so that war does not block a traderoute entirely, trade in this mod will not be totally blocked by war. Actually I haven't figured that out as well, but it can and will react to game dynamics somehow. There could be events that affect it, or you lose access to import from provinces of your enemy if it's a really harsh war - I don't know yet. One thing that is factored in already are tributaries: They are treated like vassals in regard to traderange, so e.g. you can import from them even if their provinces would be out of range for normal trade - but if you lose them, you could lose access to that precious Gold Ore! That should make waging wars for *economical* reasons much more sensible.
Good point overall, but yeah as I said design is also only 80% done ^^
Do province goods make more money if they are able to export them (except finalised goods)?
Well the teaser teases a bit about that
The idea is to make trading away goods better than them never leaving the province. That should force you to think which tradegood is a good choice if you are a small realm that does not have huge import centers like Constantinople or Paris, but can produce useful goods for export such as Charcoal or Pelts etc. Could be fun, but I need to figure out how to tech the AI about it first...
Import/export mechanics look interesting. It was pretty weird to have every province around a single silver ore to produce smelted silver in v1. While I do like the idea of import priority, I am confused as to how it would be used to distribute resource export/imports. Does the event first check the highest values and does that mean you have an if then series for like 20+, or how even big import priority can get?
Agreed, that was a problem with the old design, which is why the new version is much more exclusive with resources.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean with "if then series", but maybe you didn't really understand me as well. I shall try to explain the whole import and priority thing in more detail, but it'll also be more technical.
The event to determine priority is entirely separate from the import mechanic itself.
First, every few years an event will determine based on all the factors which province gets which value, and then assign every province a "level" based on their local value in comparison to the global maximum. Then that event ends, and the thing that remains is the flag that designates the priority level.
Then, another global event fires year, which checks all provinces, and fires delayed events for all provinces in the world based in their priority level flag.
Let's say all provinces with level 10 get the event on October the 1st, then all with level 9 get it on October the 2nd, and so on until October the 10th when the last bunch of events fires for the level 1 provinces.
Those latter ones are all "one time" events that do not repeat, only the global one does. Thus the systems are rather independent, and I can make adjustments to each individually without breaking the whole thing.
While it sounds like there isn't enough finished yet for this to be a problem, the idea of a single regular interval for importing checks sounds like a headache waiting to happen. The large amounts of checks being made are bound to slow down even more powerful machines. I can image, especially after looking at v1 files, how big these event checks can get for a single province but then you are going to check that for a thousand provinces on the same day every year (v1 only did this when you loaded the game, but it still took a second or two extra on my machine). I really think that the maintenance event will lead to performance issues. I assume it will be recalculating the import priority values along with distributing resources imports/exports. It sounds like a really big maintenance event. I think most computers would struggle to calculate all this unless you break some of the checks up. While I still believe that handling provinces individually at mtth interval as needed only, like when a resource changes, would be best, as you could also have fun event chains for the player to find imports and form relationships with other characters, you at least break the checks into tiers, so as one day in spring an event checks primary, one day in summer an event checks secondary, one day in fall an event checks tertiary and one day in winter an event calculate import priority.
Well, I am not sure if it got clear enough from the dev diary: The primary idea behind the concept of "Priority Levels" was to spread out the performance demand over several days, or weeks and months even. I am well aware that if I fire ~1800 events (one for each province) on a single day, there will be a significant lag. But imagine these 1800 events are divided into 10 groups, and spread out over 10 days: Now you only have ~180 events to fire per day, which will tax the CPU only 10% as much on each day. Of course the performance will still be diminished, but it will feel more like "the game slowed down a bit" as opposed to "there's a huge lag on this day". If needed, I could even increase the number of "levels", so e.g. for 20 levels it would only be 5% of the performance impact, yet then spread out over 20 days, and so on. Which is kinda like what you suggested I think.
That there will be an impact on performance I am well aware, and if your PC can't handle it, I will just recommend you don't use the mod. Sorry, but that's just how things are.
But let's just wait and see how bad it really will be when the mod launches, as even I can't really estimate that yet.
Edit: Forgot to say that "import priority" will probably not be calculated yearly, but only in larger intervals (say every 5 or 10 years). It doesn't need to be up to date at all times, so yes that would just needlessly decrease performance.
In addition, the number of province modifiers looks too numerous in the screenshot. I would suggest you try to condense them as even having six modifiers per province from a single mod seems rather excessive. Perhaps you could use flags or values to store what is being produced and crate combined modifiers with one, two, or three plant product(s) and the same for animals and minerals. This would also reduce the number of icons needed as you only need three to nine, depending if you want the icon to show if it is one, two, or three products.
No, I'm afraid that won't change. There's a lot of info in this mod that you need to see, and I can guarantee you there will even be more than the current 9 modifiers in the final mod. The whole point is that while "vanilla" modifiers are just a temporary thing (and I doubt you check every province in your realm for whether it has bandits or unhappy peasants), modifiers from this mod are important.
Like, you really will want to keep track on them, at least from time to time. And 9 is just the total max amount of tradegoods any province can have - some might or might not be hidden away e.g. if the province does not produce any finalized good yet, but most of the time that won't be the case.
That's why you'll need a mod like
@Arko's Interface mod, which via my
compatch can be used together with CK2+. Without such a mod, the province interface will be unreadable and this submod here nigh unplayable. With it enabled, however, modifiers are still readable even if you use an insane number of them - I tested it:
Still fine:
Too much (obviously ^^):
Arko's mod also does use province modifiers for it's goods (although arguably not as much), and I believe it's a good approach. And I want to keep different icons to preserve visibility: It's important to see at a glance whether a province produces Wheat or Sugarcane, and by combining modifiers I'd force the player to hover over every single icon to see crucial information, which wouldn't be good imo.
In the end, that's my artistic freedom and I don't intend to change it, sorry.
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