Personally, I think it would be interesting if building up industry was more of a curve. So its easy for a minor to industrialize because they are going from zero-little industry to building their own new park, but a country with a large industrial sector is already full of rules, red tape, market competition, logistic issues, etc.
This way, it would avoid the whole "Singularity Building" where a nation with huge IC pools can build loads of IC with their giant IC pool, allowing them to exponentially build more IC.
Interesting.
- Perhaps an event can be created in this regard?
Examining the event commands .txt file in the Darkest Hour\Modding Documentation folder, noticed that there is the following event command:
Code:
type = building_prod_mod which = [building type] value = X%
#Bonus to production time. Additive. NOTE: Positive value = reduced time.
In The Grand Campaign (TGC) mod, there are the Great Depression events created by Burning and originally from the Arms, Armistice and Revolutions (AAR) mod (according to the file's documentation) that enable penalties on the creation of IC during the interwar period. (One of the reasons for the penalty is to prevent the human from mass producing IC between both wars, which can seriously ruin the global resource market.)
An example of the IC production command is as follows (as taken from the "Economic Recovery Event"; ID 13300012 in TGC, as mentioned above):
Code:
type = building_prod_mod which = IC value = -50
The above event command will enable a 50% production bonus to industrial capacity. In other words, IC will be produced 50% faster. And vise versa, as the comment in the event commands file indicates.
Now then, the issue seems to be finding consensus on an event trigger.
- The "generic_decisions.txt" events in TGC, for example, make use of IC triggers in a number of their events.
- In these cases, the triggers are such that a decision will cost more money depending on the amount of base IC a country has.
- It makes sense to use ranges similar to the base IC criteria that permits additional tech teams, using multiples of 20.
- So, each additional 20 base IC a country has, means they will receive an additional penalty to the production of industrial capacity.
The trade-off: more tech teams; slowler IC production. This reasoning coincides with the comment by
@Slaughter that the more "developed" (using the term loosely) a country becomes, the more bureaucracy, "red tape", and so forth, which altogether create obstacles to further development (again, using the term loosely).
IC is supposed to loosely represent GDP, and except for the major combatant nations like Germany, USA, USSR, Japan, UK, etc, the was not much GDP growth in non-combatant nations at all.
Then of course there is the reasoning here. If IC is accepted as GDP in an historical sense, then one may not welcome the idea of creating an event that provides for IC production penalties and bonuses. 'Suppose it all depends on how far -- in an ahistorical sense -- one is willing to accept a scenario's alternative history event path. Some are okay with alternative historical paths in scenarios, while others prefer a scenario's campaign to be more historically linear than historically alternative.
There won't be enough resources in the world to support all those new factories. I play almost exclusively as minors and regional powers and still find them fun and playable. I enjoy the challenge and planning. There are also the industry and research decision that help boost their economies.
Another point raised against the case for enabling a form of IC production bonus aspect to a scenario.
One way of approaching the imbalance of resources, is to create an event that trades money for resources, such as the common generic_decision that enables one to, "search for metal, rares, and oil." An event such as this can be modified so that there are individual events that focus on either energy, metal, or rares, thus giving a greater return on the investment. As opposed to just blindly searching for any resource, the search is targeted towards a specific gap in the country's market.
Furthermore, there is the possibility of using buildings and/or decisions so that they can have a positive impact on resource production. For instance, in some mods the nuclear reactor energy production idea has been discussed and implemented! Here, the more advanced one's nuclear technology becomes, the more energy produced from nuclear reactors. This concept can be taken further. If not buildings, then decisions can be used:
- Decisions to build hydroelectric dams in countries with major rivers or where such facilities were created historically;
- Decisions to build oil refineries in countries with oil (if recalling correctly, Venezuela in various mods often has events such as these);
- Decisions to improve the efficiency of coal power plants -- or to build coal power plants?
- The decision can be triggered once a certain amount of money has been accumulated;
- Similar to the current generic decisions, but more targeted for specific resources (such as energy for minors);
- Etc.
Another potential response to the concern regarding resource imbalance in the global market, is to (as mentioned in this post above)
design the IC production event so that the more IC a country has, the greater the penalty on IC production. Here, it is less likely that major countries will be producing as much IC as they did in previous scenarios. Of course, since there are more minor countries, it's possible that these will be producing lots of IC over a longer period of time, and possibly decades in a mod such as TGC. However, these problems can be amended if the event is only available to the human and not the AI.
Finally: ministers!
- Some mods have implemented unique minister traits for IC production;
- Noticed there is a minister type in (if recalling correctly, in TGC) that gives a bonus to producing IC;
- If the event option is not preferred, then it seems possible one can make a "Development Team" ministry available only for minors;
- The development team "minister" can give significant development cost and time bonuses that are only available to minors.
In summary:
It does seem possible to add an "IC Production Penalty/Bonus" option to Darkest Hour by using the current events, decision, and minister mechanisms, as indicated by an examination of events currently in use (The Great Depression Events from TGC) and the "Event Commands" txt file in the Darkest Hour Modding documentation.