shinshin balance

Designed to increase diversity in gameplay, by reducing blatant must-pick choices, and reducing never-pick choices. This is mostly made for myself and my friends, but I think it will dramatically improve gameplay for other people who want a little more choices, and (importantly) want to feel less "well I just win if I do this." Do you want to play Stewardship without just blatantly outscaling the AI? Well here you go.

Stewardship gives +1 domain per 12 instead of per 6
Stewardship gives +6% domicile income isntead of 4%
Stewardship lifestyle divided focus gives +1 domain instead of 2
(I recommend using +1 domain game rule in combination with this.)

Diplomacy stat now gives +1 prestige flat per 20
(stat dumping diplomacy can lose you prestige now)

Advantage is now +5% damage instead of +10%

Spiritual Ethos
+10 opinion of same faith
10% more fax of same-faith
No more cost reduction on heresy (why was a spiritual culture so easy to go heretical on?)

Communal Ethos
+5 opinion of same culture

Ceremonious Ethos:
Title cost creation from -15% to -25%

Conqueror trait now gives -25% all build cost, and +20% cultural fascination
(Intended to make conqueror realms scale much harder for long term AI rivals, I recommend not getting the conqueror trait yourself.)

Stand and fight tradition:
Defensive advantage removed entirely
(This tradition was kind of game breakingly strong. The added toughness makes the culture take freakishly low casualties, despite the +40%. The defensive advantage in addition to that meant that any player with it just rolled the AI.)

Warrior Culture tradition
Added +2 Levy Toughness
Reduce cultural fascination penalty to 5% from 25%
Removed martial lifestyle experience +15%
(This tradition kind of just stomped any culture with it in to the ground. It was a hard debuff for a tradition weirdly meant to help some cultures with it win militarily.)

Horse Lords tradition:
Instead of +10% light cav damage and screen, now gives +3 Light Cav damage

Levies now gain +1 toughness on every Levy innovation
(This should keep levies less wipeable, and importantly make it more difficult on players who ignore them as they progress.)

Frugal armorsmiths:
No longer reduces levy toughness.

Adaptive Skirmishers:
No longer reduces maintenance of archers and skirmishers
(Just weirdly free -5% maintenance)

Formation fighting experts:
Pursuit efficiency is now -30% instead of -15%
(Not enough of a debuff for a large military buff.)

Only the strong:
Now has +25% MAA maintenance
(Pay for the strong.)

All europeans now start the game able to access their unique MAA
(Europe was boring, everyone was the same.)

All MAA techs also give +1 to skirmishers, to try to equalize out a little bit how cheap they are.

Fecund no longer gives Life Expectancy years

Hale-Herculean
Health bonuses reduced by 66%
Prowess increased from 2-8 to 3-9
(Squishing the 100 year old god kings of late game. It made the game very boring after you achieved it.)

Quick-Genius
Stats squished to 1-3 instead of 1-5
(I know everyone loves their geniuses, but in the late game again, the stat bonuses offered trivialized the content.)

Pure blooded
No longer gives incest chance reduction
(No that’s not how it works Paradox, what the hell?)

Legendary buildings:
Changed from +20 flat damage and +10%, to +5 flat damage and +25%
Changed from +10 flat damage/toughness and +20%, to +5 flat damage/toughness and +30%
(The flat amount made this kind of wild on certain units that could stack modifiers.)