Trade Resources

[nikolai1962]

Noticed in a few mods that people have added a lot of trade resources to regions in the descr_regions file in an attempt to increase the income of poor regions. Some notes on this:

1) If the resource icon is not present on the map as well as listed in the regions file then the trade won't happen. (There is some inconsistency here but it is generally true.)

2) If gold or silver is listed in the regions file without a resource icon on the map then the game will let you build a mine but it will have zero income when built.

3) Regions trade when the two regions don't have the same resources. So adding iron and timber to both of two neighbouring regions will have no effect. Add timber to one region and iron to the second region to get the trade.

e.g the vanilla game has all the regions along the silk route with silk. These regions will trade silk with the regions north and south but not actually along the historical path. To simulate the value of the silk route better, *remove* the silk from alternate regions. That way silk trade will occur all along the path.

edit:
4) Obvious thing but i only noticed it today. Farm income (average harvest) is 80 per point of fertility/farm upgarde. So with 7 fertility and one farm level you get 800 per turn in that settlement. Useful for tweaking your economy

[DaVinci]

Just stumbled randomly about this thread:

What you say above is true, but actually you don't need to put the resources into descr_regions (it's redundant). Just list them in descr_strat with the correct coordinates, and all is working proper.

[wlesmana]

Question: how do I boost trade to create a bustling economy without expanding farm? I notice that farm value is hard-coded to increase population as well and this I don't want to happen.

Another problem is that there is no diplomat in the game so there's little to no trade deals with other regions. Add to the problem that the faction started the game with only this 1 region.

In other words, can you give a good economy to a faction with no farm value (in order to keep the population on a decline)?

[Makanyane]

There's a very blunt way to do it for one faction / region. Make sure they can build mine and add mine effect for them / that region in EDB, e.g.

mine_resource 4 requires factions { barbarian, carthaginian, eastern, hun, roman, nomad, }
mine_resource 50 requires factions { nomad, } and hidden_resource unique
Seems to work but haven't tested much (that version will give you two lines describing the effect as you get top one as well).

For more subtle approach, try giving their generals better economic traits or more chance of getting them. Give region the more valuable on map resources (making sure they aren't the same as neighbours as nikolai1962 pointed out) and /or tweak the resource trade values to suit (descr_sm_resources).

You can also use above approach of changing the bonus in EDB for other buildings i.e. markets so you can have:

trade_base_income_bonus bonus 3 requires factions { nomad, } and hidden_resource main just affecting that faction / region.

Re: lack of diplomats (thought I was the only one that preferred playing without them), if you start off allied to the neighbours that will automatically give you trade rights until alliance is broken.

[DaVinci]

Correct.

Just add such lines for a certain faction for any building you want, as there are trade, tax boni.
Also, pop and health boni increase the tax income, but naturally it adds also squalor in the settlements.

As well you can make several resources as conditions for extra trade or tax boni.

And just add several boni to certain faction traits and ancillaries (trade, tax, management) or make new ones for certain factions.

But, all this is a matter of the strategy-balancing of a mod.

[nikolai1962]

Question: how do I boost trade to create a bustling economy without expanding farm? I notice that farm value is hard-coded to increase population as well and this I don't want to happen.

Just to add something to the already good suggestions...

1) Taxable income bonus is good for this if all you want is something simple as, despite what it says on the building card, it doesn't increase tax income by a percentage it gives a fixed amount per point (may vary with difficulty level a bit IIRC). Something like 25 income per point of bonus (roughly.)

The rtr code has it for the start capital of a few factions:

taxable_income_bonus bonus 40 requires factions { armenia, } and hidden_resource home_armenia


2) Sea trade is vastly more lucrative the shorter the distance is between the ports. So if this region has a port you could make a little island off the coast and give your region something valuable like marble.

3) Another thing i'm doing is having farms but removing the "farming_level 1" capability and making it something else (e.g tax and trade)

4) Also if you want to prevent a region's population growing you can have a negative population growth capability. It won't make the pop decrease but it will swallow up any pop growth bonuses e.g


population_growth_bonus bonus -10




What you say above is true, but actually you don't need to put the resources into descr_regions (it's redundant). Just list them in descr_strat with the correct coordinates, and all is working proper.

Ty. Good to know.

[Dol Guldur]

Yep, and you can set the base farm level down to 0 in DR so that you can control the level too by way of the edb by culture, faction (or even race in fantasy mods). We have regions designated as poor_fert, average_fert good_fert and (a few rare) great_fert with no assignment being no fertility (also rare) - we can use these with factional conditionals via indestructible "region buildings" to control what each faction will get in any region. This is probably more important in our type of mod because we have factions that have very low population growth and others that would take no benefit from good fertility or farms etc.

[wlesmana]

Thanks for the input!
I've set it so factions who are not supposed to grow got the exact same penalty in population growth as their farm level bonus. So if farms give them farm +1, then it also give them pop growth -1, which only applies to these particular factions.

This should work, right?

[Dol Guldur]

Yes, it should work as long as the game recognizes the groath bonus from farms as it does from the normal population growth capability (as negatives have no effect generally other than to diminsh a positive).

Note that population is effected by a number of factors though and it can be a bit hard to control it sometimes. Taxes effect population growth quite a bit, as does squalor. The thing is, squalor will most likely exist in factions which are more numerous - unless you can spread the population over many regions or have higher level settlements that the norm (but that is not always in harmony with the known facts of a faction's culture/geography).

[guineawolf]

edit:
4) Obvious thing but i only noticed it today. Farm income (average harvest) is 80 per point of fertility/farm upgarde.

Where do i can edit that base value of farm income "80"?
and base value of tax income.....:help: