[WIP] [SUBMOD] FPS_CTD "V2" - An economy mod *progress slow but steady*

[LordPeter]

EDIT:
The mod is currently undergoing a total reconstruction, and this info is outdated. Please read the latest DEV DIARY if you are looking for new info.

CTD
- "Cutthroat Trade Development" -
A submod for CK2+ of the FPS family​

DOWNLOAD currently not available.
Checksum (with India): -
Checksum (without India): -
​

Idea
I always felt that while CK2 was a brilliant "grand strategy" game, it lacked a real economic part. Everything is overly simplified to just use "gold" as a universal currency, and trade is hardly existent, and not more than a money-making machine.
After playing around with the idea of an economic "system" for a while, and after learning how to mod by making compatibility patches for other mods, I finally decided to make my first own mod. So here it is: A mod that aims to bring the economic gameplay of games like the Anno series to Crusader Kings 2!

Features

Resource system
Every province on the map is assigned 1-3 "Natural Resources". They are assigned based on climate, region and terrain, and split into three base categories:

Plants (20 total) - e.g. Grain, Grapes & Spices
Animals (10 total) - e.g. Cattle, Apiculture & Fishing
Mining (13 total) - e.g. Gold Ore, Stone & Salt

Each "Animals" resource also spawn an "Animalproduct", which is more important than the animal itself later on. Different animals can spawn different products, e.g. Cattle could produce Raw Meat, Milk or Animal Fat, while Sericulture can only produce Silkthread:

Animalproducts (13 total) - e.g. Raw Meat, Wool & Ivory

These resources are randomly distributed in a (hopefully) sensible way upon gamestart, which will cause some lag each time you start a new campaign. Mountains etc. are obviously more likely to get Mining resources and Farmlands more Plant resources, while the Steppe will be full of Animals. Additionally, the following rules apply:

- Desert provinces only get one resource unless they are near a major freshwater basin (Lake/Major River - there is currently no way to check for minor rivers)
- Arctic provinces only get one resource
- Swamps/Deep Woods block the second resource slot
- Volcanoes allow for a thrid resource slot, which can only be of Plants type​

More on these "Natural Barriers" later.

All resources are - like most things in CTD - applied via province modifiers that give bonuses to tax income, tradevalue and potentially other things as well.

If you have the corresponding game rule selected, Natural Resources can also dynamically change over the course of the game.


Manufactured Tradegoods
After a short time into the game, all rulers with a demesne will be asked to chose a secondary or "Refined" tradegood to be produced in each demesne province - for the payment of a small one-time fee. You (and the AI) can then navigate through a number of events that give you certain options, depending on which Natural Resources your province has. This offer can also be declined in case there is no valid option, or you don't want to spend the fee required, which will cause the prompt to re-appear later.

Refined Goods (28 total) - e.g. Flour, Bronze & Wine

These tradegoods can also have additional requirements, such as another Refined Good, a certain Holding type or a Technology level. If a certain option can not be chosen because you are missing a prerequisite, the event option will display that missing item via a tooltip.

Similarly, the third level of tradegoods called "Finalized" tradegoods can also chosen via event, which fires some time after the ruler has chosen to produce at least one Refined Good. These are not used as ingredients in other tradegoods and give rather big bonuses, but often require multiple other tradegoods or higher tech levels to be produced.

Finalized Goods (28 total) - e.g. Bread, Books & Jewelry

Whether you have access to certain other tradegoods is determined by the Trade Network, which I'll talk about next.
Also, Refined and Finalized Goods are not static, but are dynamically revisited roughly every decade. If the prerequisites are still available, you will be given the option to change nothing - if they are not, you will have to chose again or drop the tradegood type altogether.


Trade Network
Thankfully, CK2+ has extended the trade route system to cover the entire map, and these extensive trade routes are the backbone of the trade system.
Every tradegood has a "Traderange" applied to it, which is shown in the modifier's tooltip. These ranges are short, normal or long, which mostly define how far away another province can be from the current province to still give the latter one access to its tradegoods. Generally, a tradegood is available if

a) It is available in the province itself, or in a neighbouring province (regardless of realm - trade passes even trough hostile borders)
b) It is available in the ruler's top realm (exception: Short range tradegoods do not follow this rule)
c) The province is lying on a traderoute and another province that is also on a traderoute is in range
d) The ruler's capital is lying on a traderoute and another province is also on a traderoute and is in range (exception: Short range tradegoods have additional restrictions here)
e) One of the ruler's trade posts is lying on a traderoute and another province is also on a traderoute and is in range (exception: Short range tradegoods have additional restrictions here)
f) It is available in one of the ruler's tributaries realm (exception: Short range tradegoods do not follow this rule)​

Thus, to gain access to more tradegoods you can build tradeposts, conquer provinces etc.
Keep in mind that since tradegood access is determined on a per-province basis, there might be difference between your demsne provinces - plan carefully what to produce where!
In general, there are lots of strategic possibilities. I have tried to teach the AI to make sensible choices, but the player will of course be able to plan further ahead.

There is also a decision to show all tradegoods which are available in your own realm or the top realm (and also in your "World Region, if you have the Buisness Focus).

Natural Barriers
If the corresponding game rules are enabled, up to three different "Natural Barriers" can spawn on the map:

- Volcanoes allow an additional third resource "slot", which can only be of Plants type. They also apply a bonus to tax income in the province. In future versions, however, they will have a chance to explode and devastate the province.
- Swamps block the second resource slot. They also cause more attrition and apply a tax income malus.
- Deep Woods block the second resource slot. They also cause more attrition and apply a tax income malus.​

Swamps and Deep Woods are much more likely to spawn in early start dates and in "low development" provinces, such as tribal realms. These barriers are non-persistent and can be removed via a special decision.
These clearance decisions cost a lot of money or prestige, however, and have a chance to fail. In general, this should simulate the economic development of formerly wild provinces over the course of the game.

Also, winters now apply a tax reduction based on their severity:

-10% for Mild Winters
-20% for Normal Winters
-30% for Severe Winters​

Thus, it might be even more important to keep an eye on the current season!


Final Thoughts
This is my first "real" mod, and so far I have invested more time into it that I could keep track of.
Sadly, from the outside it still overs realtively little gameplay, because I had to first write the entire framework for the tradegood system.
In total, there are now 50.000+ lines of code in the mod, but many are fairly repetitive and only for maintenance. However, I have plans to greatly expand on it in the future - there will be other submods in the FPS family
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the mod, and let me know if there are any bugs or problems with it.


Installation Instructions
IMPORTANT: Most FPS mods are part of a "Generation", which is necessary because they share some files. Generation shows up in the launcher as *G1* etc.
Don't mix different generations!

1) Download and install CK2Plus if you haven't already.
2) Download and install FPS_CTD.
3) Activate both mods (+India if you want) in the launcher and start the game.


Credit
- included in the download. will follow here soon...


FAQ
- coming soon...

 

[LordPeter]

Reserved

 

[LordPeter]

Reserved

 

[Cerest]

This looks pretty good! What do these trade goods actually do?

Do they just give prov mods? Do they make me a better Christian? Will I invent golden pantaloons if I have enough gold and cloth?

EDIT: Nvm, opened up and played. They do provide provincial modifiers (apparently I didn't see this in the first screenshot). But they don't make me a better Christian nor do I see golden pantaloons >:[

Awesome though! Thanks for your work.

 

[LordPeter]

Yeah for now they are pretty "barebone" so to say.
However, it is worth investing into the later, higher tier tradegoods, as they not only give bigger gold boni. Some tradegoods have additional effects, for example:

Wood: -5% Build Time, +5% Galleys
Stone: -5% Build Cost
Wine/Beer/etc: +5% Troop Morale
Medicine: +2% Disease Defence
Books: +5% Technology Growth
Battle Gear: +5% Garrison Size
Jewelry: +1% Prestige Gain (on province owner)​

These are pretty small so they don't break normal gameplay, but they can be a valuable addition - and they always apply to the entire province, meaning all holdings there profit from it!

I have some plans for further submods, including something with buildings, where they would become more integrated... among other things. This is just the framework, and building upon it should be easy now that it is there.

But that will take a while. For now, I am pretty exhausted and feel I want to play a bit more than only mod - I haven't played a proper game of CK2 in five month or so, only test runs or observer games

Please let me know if you encounter any problems - I fixed a major (potentially gamebreaking) bug literally days before this release, so there might still be some problems...


Edit: Oh and in case someone is wondering, yeah CPRplus+ will of course return at some point, as will another minor compatch... But as I said, I first need a short break ^^

 

[Recognizable]

Looks pretty rad, I'll definitely try it out. Hows the performance impact?

 

[Recognizable]

Noticed a spelling error, Resource(Plants): Fuit should be Fruit

 

[LordPeter]

Looks pretty rad, I'll definitely try it out. Hows the performance impact?

Good, I hope you like it ^^

Actually not that big, at least according to my tests.
The initial resource distribution is quite intensive, which is why the campaign will not start for a few seconds. After that, the prompts to chose a refined and finalized tradegoods are only checked bi-yearly and 5-yearly, respectively, and randomly, which causes some realms to get access to the higher tiers earlier, but significantly reduces the performance impact. Resource changes can only happen roughly every 10 years, too.
In general, the behind-the-scenes checks are quite performance intense, but since they happen so rarely, it gets reduced to not much of an impact.
Since I haven't had anyone else test this out until now, I can't guarantee for sure - however, I still have an old Phenom II X4 processor, so if you have a decent computer you should have no trouble running it ^^

Noticed a spelling error, Resource(Plants): Fuit should be Fruit

Ok thx.
I am pretty sure there will be more - I am no native English speaker, so feel free to suggest changes to the language in general in case something sounds strange.

 

[LordPeter]

Also, an important notice:
If anyone is wondering about technology prerequisites, there is a problem with the names.

Engineering means Construction
Scientific means Tolerance
​

I intended to rename them as part of my (future, potential) tech overhaul, but I frankly forgot about that and just now realized. It will be fixed in the next version.

 

[GreatAlucard]

Apart from a few minor problems.

The last screen of options for ~finalized goods~ has no way of going back or cancelling it, meaning that you`re stuck with one of the 4 choices there.

Also I`m not sure if there are better ways of doing it considering CK2 limitations but that whole menu for choosing refined goods and finalized goods where you click a button for 3 new choices doesn`t really look that good, I can`t think of a better way of doing it and while keeping the features though. Having to go through 20 or so of those at once every 10 years is rather annoying too, I end up just clicking to keep the trade good whenever possible.


On a side note, what are the implications of choosing between trade goods, because the way I`m currently looking at it there`s always a choice that is just better because it gives more income, is that a thing or is it actually based on raw products

 

[LordPeter]

Apart from a few minor problems.

The last screen of options for ~finalized goods~ has no way of going back or cancelling it, meaning that you`re stuck with one of the 4 choices there.

What?
Can you post a screenshot of this please?
I am not seeing this, and it's supposed to let you go back or abort...

Also I`m not sure if there are better ways of doing it considering CK2 limitations but that whole menu for choosing refined goods and finalized goods where you click a button for 3 new choices doesn`t really look that good, I can`t think of a better way of doing it and while keeping the features though. Having to go through 20 or so of those at once every 10 years is rather annoying too, I end up just clicking to keep the trade good whenever possible.

Yeah, that's why I put that "keep" option there.
Actually, it was a lot of work to just add that option, since it has to dynamically check which tradegood it should display and whether that is still allowed - was a pain in the a** to code ^^
Afaik there is no better option - overall, you should just adjust your manufactured good when you want to, and otherwise just keep them.
I am also considering making that prompt non-automated for the player, maybe giving you a decision to change it - but I still want to force the player to re-chose if he loses access to an important resource... We will see.

On a side note, what are the implications of choosing between trade goods, because the way I`m currently looking at it there`s always a choice that is just better because it gives more income, is that a thing or is it actually based on raw products

Well, of course some goods are better than other because they give more income.
However, some have unique side effects, such as Bricks reducing the build time, or Medicine increasing disease resistance. These things tend to get buried a bit under all the income modifiers, so I recommend to read the tooltips carefully.

Also, yes, they are based on resources - just try playing an independent guy in Iceland, and you will have a pretty hard time producing anything...
The tooltips should also show this. For example, this is the tooltip from Beer:

As you can see, it has currently no "flavor" description (that will come later).
But the tooltip tells you a few things:
a) It is made exclusively from Grain - if you e.g. are on an island without Grain access, you can not brew Beer. However, Grain is so common that most provinces will have access to it.
b) It is an ingredient for Vinegar or Liquor. Both Finalized Goods can also be made from other alcohols, so this isn't an exclusive ingredient (Medicine, in contrast, always require Herbs - they can not be substituted)
c) I requires any holding in the province - thus, if Nomads have razed all holdings in a province, you cannot brew Beer there.
d) It's traderange is long - meaning it will be available in q lot of other provinces if the producing province is connected to a traderoute.

Also, Beer boosts your troops morale - so if you don't care about a slightly more tax income, but about your armies, Beer might be a better choice than another good.

I will probably update the main post to give more info at some point...

 

[nonameforme]

This mod look great, I really like a new way for player to improve their land. It's more 'realistic' than just building "Castle town" and doing nothing more.

And...the bonus for each 'goods' only apply to the province they appear am I right?

 

[LordPeter]

This mod look great, I really like a new way for player to improve their land. It's more 'realistic' than just building "Castle town" and doing nothing more.

Yep, that's what motivated me to do this ^^
Longer term, I want to do something about buildings, too - but I won't promise anything for now, since it will probably take months or years till then

And...the bonus for each 'goods' only apply to the province they appear am I right?

Yes. Except for the prestige/piety modifiers, these go to the province holder.

 

[GreatAlucard]

What?
Can you post a screenshot of this please?
I am not seeing this, and it's supposed to let you go back or abort...

I'm away from home at the moment, but it appears that the UI limits the choices to 4 per screen, and on the final screen of "Finalized Goods" there are 4 available finalized goods to choose from, I believe it is Naval Supplies, Battle Gear, Medicine and I can't recall the other one, meaning there is no 5th option to go back or anything of the sort.

Well, of course some goods are better than other because they give more income.
However, some have unique side effects, such as Bricks reducing the build time, or Medicine increasing disease resistance. These things tend to get buried a bit under all the income modifiers, so I recommend to read the tooltips carefully.

I understand that, but it's not what I mean.

What I mean is, currently, there is a way to just min max what goods will be produced, because producing them has no correlation with how much raw product is available, what is the quality of said raw product, is the raw product produced by you or does it need to be bought, so on and so forth.

What this means is, it is likely that a determined product will be produced on every single province where it is available, creating a rank of better goods and worse goods.

That is certainly one way of making it work, and it's fine, it's a hard enough endeavor as is, although it would be interesting if the lack of a good increased its benefits and an abundance of it reduced it's benefits. Which would increase the economic importance of certain provinces.

So the short version is, my question was more related to, "is there anything that affects the benefits of the chosen goods, or do you get what the tooltip says and that's about it?"

I understand that making it a complex trade system is probably more than CK2 can handle, I asked just out of curiosity, even if it does just what the tooltip says it's already a nice change of pace in the game and I'm liking it.

 

[LordPeter]

I'm away from home at the moment, but it appears that the UI limits the choices to 4 per screen, and on the final screen of "Finalized Goods" there are 4 available finalized goods to choose from, I believe it is Naval Supplies, Battle Gear, Medicine and I can't recall the other one, meaning there is no 5th option to go back or anything of the sort.

That would be a strange bug then - please check again when you have time.
Battle Gear etc. should only be the penultimate event, and the fourth option should be to go on. Bricks & Pottery should be the last event, with the thir option to go back, and the fourth to abort.

I understand that, but it's not what I mean.

What I mean is, currently, there is a way to just min max what goods will be produced, because producing them has no correlation with how much raw product is available, what is the quality of said raw product, is the raw product produced by you or does it need to be bought, so on and so forth.

What this means is, it is likely that a determined product will be produced on every single province where it is available, creating a rank of better goods and worse goods.

That is certainly one way of making it work, and it's fine, it's a hard enough endeavor as is, although it would be interesting if the lack of a good increased its benefits and an abundance of it reduced it's benefits. Which would increase the economic importance of certain provinces.

So the short version is, my question was more related to, "is there anything that affects the benefits of the chosen goods, or do you get what the tooltip says and that's about it?"

I understand that making it a complex trade system is probably more than CK2 can handle, I asked just out of curiosity, even if it does just what the tooltip says it's already a nice change of pace in the game and I'm liking it.

Okay, I understand what you mean.
No, there is no such thing as "supply & demand", because there is only so much you can do with the economic system of CK2+. I already have an insane amount of expensive behind the scenes checks to make it work as it is, and the only way I can currently imagine for this to work would be multiple stacking modifiers, and another layer of expensive global calculations that would almost certainly significantly reduce performance - not worth it, and too complicated with what the engine can offer.

However, looking into the future, I have some plans to at least improve on the current system.
Currently, the AI has some broad guidelines on what to chose, but it does not yet understand if a certain good is becoming "rare", so to say.
There is already code in the mod to check for "scarcity", which would then significantly increase the chances of the AI picking that option. However, the code is currently disabled because it does not yet account for a few things, and I generally need to revisit it. But this should make the non-player-controlled part of the world behave relatively "realistic", with goods chosen similar to the real world.
Also, AI is already aware if there is another tradegood of the type in range - if it is, AI is less likely to produce another instance of it. Checking how many of that good are in range, however, would be even more performance hungry and thus is not done. The player is free to chose anything, but there are, as I said, reasons to maybe make different choices depending on what you want. I could probably make fake "too much supply" event which fires the prompt again if say the player chooses to produce mirrors in all of his demesne provinces, essentially annoying him until he changes it ^^
Also, there will be an event that punishes the spamming of smelted gold and silver, inflation. That is only an idea for now though, and again, is only there to prevent player abuse.

Looking even further into the future, I can imagine even more things - buildings that, like L3T, a very inspirational mod, require certain goods to be build. For example:
Wanna have a big Cathedral? You need Stone/Marble/Bricks, Wood, Glass and probably Gold/Silver and maybe Wax or so. Want a University? Need Paper/Parchment etc.
Or certain producible artifacts requiring base materials, or event modifiers like "Makeup" that require Perfume/Soap/Cosmetics/Mirrors.
Essentially, my long-term goal would be to make all resources tie in with other current systems, and provide different boni so that you will actually want to have as many different ones as you can have - the economic impact of +0.5 tax income would be, if you think about it, pretty negligible in comparison then.
Please keep in mind that I am only one guy, and doing all this will take a very, very long time.

Okay, wall of text ending.
I am still pretty happy with the current state, and I hope you are, too. The tradegoods should cover 99% of the different tradegoods that existed then - I did a lot of research to get all the production chains right. And at least there is any sort of economy in the game now

 

[GreatAlucard]

I understand, and like your ideas for the future.

I'm not sure on how to do it precisely but I would suggest somehow punishing the player for spamming a specific good.

One way I can think of is tracking all resources produced by the characters demesne (which I think you already do) and maybe cutting down the bonuses when the player lacks a certain raw resource .

As in:
- Player has 2 of the "paper" resource
- Player is producing 4 of the book resource

Maybe the 3rd and 4th "books" should give less benefit.

It could apply only to the player (since the AI already sort of avoids this kind of spamming) and should be relatively close to what you are doing to silver and gold
That of course doesn't take into account the "buying" of more "paper" (in the example) but then again, both the penalties and boons are abstract so the penalty itself could be that need of buying extra raw material

 

[BrokenSky]

What do you mean by "FPS mod"?

 

[GreatAlucard]

Here`s a screenshot of the problem I pointed out earlier

As shown in the screenshot, this screen for finalized goods shows
Battle gear
Naval Supplies
Naval Supplies that I can`t do (because I lack ~Iron~ ~linen~ and/or ~tar~)
Medicine

Currently I`m using CK2 version 2.1 which I`m certain will cause problems with mods not yet updated but this is the same thing that happened yesterday when I first tested the mod so that specifically is not the issue.

 

[LordPeter]

I understand, and like your ideas for the future.

I'm not sure on how to do it precisely but I would suggest somehow punishing the player for spamming a specific good.

One way I can think of is tracking all resources produced by the characters demesne (which I think you already do) and maybe cutting down the bonuses when the player lacks a certain raw resource .

As in:
- Player has 2 of the "paper" resource
- Player is producing 4 of the book resource

Maybe the 3rd and 4th "books" should give less benefit.

It could apply only to the player (since the AI already sort of avoids this kind of spamming) and should be relatively close to what you are doing to silver and gold
That of course doesn't take into account the "buying" of more "paper" (in the example) but then again, both the penalties and boons are abstract so the penalty itself could be that need of buying extra raw material

Yeah, that should be possible.
Actually a good idea - I might just spawn a "too much of X tradegood" modifier that would reduce income/partially negate the boni of that tradegood.
I need feedback like that, so if you have any more suggestions, I'm all ears

What do you mean by "FPS mod"?

That is an acronym for "Fanciful Peter's Submods" - or something like this. It's kinda the overall term for all my future submods that will work together/share some assets.
I just want to use silly abbreviations like these for all my submods, since my weird sense of humor demands it ^^

Here`s a screenshot of the problem I pointed out earlier

As shown in the screenshot, this screen for finalized goods shows
Battle gear
Naval Supplies
Naval Supplies that I can`t do (because I lack ~Iron~ ~linen~ and/or ~tar~)
Medicine

Currently I`m using CK2 version 2.1 which I`m certain will cause problems with mods not yet updated but this is the same thing that happened yesterday when I first tested the mod so that specifically is not the issue.

Great, that screenshot told me exactly where the issue was - it's really a silly copy/paste error.
It will be fixed with the next version, but I currently don't have time to update and also want to wait if more bugs appear, so if you want to fix that error quickly, here's how:

Go to the events folder, and open CTD_tradegood_finalized_choices.txt with a text editor like Notepad++
Go to line 4120 and 4144 and each time change

iron_sand_tradegood_access_CTD_trigger = yes​

to

iron_tradegood_access_CTD_trigger = yes​

It's a really stupid error which causes the event option that tells you that you can't produce stuff to show up - those are actually distince event options that only show up to inform the player.
Once you have done that, the event chain should work fine again.

 

[BrokenSky]

Oh yeah, one thing I wanted to suggest: perhaps it would be good to allow the construction of trade posts anywhere by rulers who are neither tribal nor nomadic, even if there were no traderoute, instead restricting the buildings so that buildings could be built as present, but tradeposts which would be made available to be built by thich change would not be able to have buildings built in them; they would only generate wealth from the intrinsic value of tradegoods and indirectly via trade zones value?

Alternatively to the requirement that they not be built by tribes or nomads, these non-major traderoutes might require a city in the province?