Modding population growth?

[Musashi]

Anyone know how to go about this? Ideally I'd like to mod it so that farming upgrades didn't have any effect on population growth, but if that's not possible, just some sort of overall nerf to population growth or capping the maximum population would be good...

Anyone have any idea?

hmmm... looking in descr_settlement_mechanics.xml I assume it's something in there...

Everything is labelled SPF, SOF, or SIF... I think SPF is settlement population factor, SIF is settlement income factor, and SOF is something to do with unrest...

[BrandonM]

Someone released a mod called SloMod that drastically lowers population growth. I have to build farms just to make cities grow and usually it's at 1 to 2 percent even with level 3 or 4 farms.

I'm sorry I forget who made it but if you search for it you should find it. If you only want to have the growth changes and nothing else, just copy the descr_regions.txt file from the mod to your base campaign directory (backup the original). I think you will also have to delete the map.rwm file, not sure, but it won't hurt.

[Spur]

Anyone know how to go about this? Ideally I'd like to mod it so that farming upgrades didn't have any effect on population growth, but if that's not possible, just some sort of overall nerf to population growth or capping the maximum population would be good...

Anyone have any idea?

hmmm... looking in descr_settlement_mechanics.xml I assume it's something in there...

Everything is labelled SPF, SOF, or SIF... I think SPF is settlement population factor, SIF is settlement income factor, and SOF is something to do with unrest...

Yep, think you guessed correctly there - good thinking.

The O probably stands for Obedience or something...

Just a matter of lowering the max_values to a lower threshold, I think for the SPF ones.

Also, look at the bottom where it gives the max values for populations as well - citadels are capped at 18000, same as their upgrade level - going to fix that, maybe also up the max values for cities to keep unrest a bit down the easy way

All a matter of fiddling and testing, I guess. But good thing it's tweakable, now.

[Musashi]

Yup, I was right. managed to seriously nerf the effect of farms on population growth... Now I'm going to eliminate it altogether... So I can build all the farms I want for the farm income without making population grow to unmanagable levels :D

[Kobal2fr]

What the SloMod does (and what I also did, although not in as drastical a way - 2 turns per year is too slow for me) is modify data\world\base\descr_regions.txt

A region entry looks like this :

Inverness_Province
Inverness
scotland
English_Rebels
20 25 225
atlantic, explorers_guild
5
4
religions { catholic 90 orthodox 0 islam 0 pagan 5 heretic 5 }

The bold number is the province's farm output, which affects pop growth and crops cash.

Since I decided to play 1 turn / 1 year, I just halved all values, rounding down. Now, most regions not intended to have fertile farms and fast pop growth (like Tuscany or Egypt) will actually have the pop die out if I don't build at least basic farms (which may be a bit of a problem with settlement held by rebs for too long, I guess...). Oh, and I'm definitely strapped for cash until I get to either farm 3, or massively devellop trade and merchants, meaning tech upgrades also get slower.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results.

[Musashi]

Well I didn't want to slow anything down, I just wanted to make it so that you could build the farms, get the income bonuses from it, but not the population growth boost.

Actually what I did was normalize the farm bonus so that you basically always have the same level of bonus as you would normally start with. The benefit is that it effectively caps your city populations around 380000, where they're still very managable in terms of unrest and squalor.

[Malachus]

If you want to get rid of the associated pop. growth bonus with farms, you have to edit it out of the export_descr_buildings file for the farm entries. However, seeing as all those are still packed, you'll have to wait for the patch.

[Bob the Insane]

If you want to get rid of the associated pop. growth bonus with farms, you have to edit it out of the export_descr_buildings file for the farm entries. However, seeing as all those are still packed, you'll have to wait for the patch.

Not quite so...

You can use the Mod Switching feature and the unpack files provided by CA and hosted on this site to make changes.

[Dooz]

Someone released a mod called SloMod that drastically lowers population growth. I have to build farms just to make cities grow and usually it's at 1 to 2 percent even with level 3 or 4 farms.

I'm sorry I forget who made it but if you search for it you should find it. If you only want to have the growth changes and nothing else, just copy the descr_regions.txt file from the mod to your base campaign directory (backup the original). I think you will also have to delete the map.rwm file, not sure, but it won't hurt.

Hey, in case anyone's interested, the link is in my sig. Much better experience in my opinion, for my prefered play style anyway.