Like Pigs at the Trough – Corruption at Court

A script mod to reduce income and increase costs at extremely rich courts, so that gold doesn’t become meaningless during late game.

By the late game most players have an income in the hundreds of gold per month, making gold essentially meaningless for most expenses. Meanwhile, for expenses scaled with income it leads to unrealistic situations like building a university is cheaper than sending your child there.

This mod tries to make gold meaningful for a longer part of the game by introducing income loss and expense growth due to corruption. Since corruption is captured by the base game in some abstract way, the goal of this mod is model what happens when a court gets obscenely rich. Then it becomes much easier for councilors/officials/merchants/etc. to skim off the top, leading to a loss of revenue and an increase in costs. The problem is worsened by incompetent rulers and disloyal councilors, just as in real life.

Corruption is expected to ramp up when an old ruler becomes incapable and also after a new ruler takes over (which is realistic), making successions more challenging and dramatic.

Note that the mod introduces corruption effects only for very wealthy rulers, so it does not increase early game difficulty.

As the income of a ruler exceeds a threshold, it becomes harder to keep track of expenses, and larger and larger fraction of the remaining income is lost to corruption. Some of the lost revenue is distributed among corrupt councilors and court position holders.

Note that no matter how corrupt a court is, increasing your tax base will always increase your income, but with a diminishing return. At the same time the cost of new holdings and MAA will increase as well as the maintenance costs for the army. These cost increases are capped, so these will never cost more than double their original price.

The level of corruption at court is modified by the following factors:

• Original monthly income (more income -> higher corruption)
• Ruler’s administrative skill, lifestyle perks and dread
• Loyalty and administrative competence of councilors
• Government rank and type (higher rank -> less corruption, small bonuses for administrative and republican governments, theocracies get a small bonus from learning)
• Cultural era (later era -> less corruption)
• Corruption severity setting (can be changed via decision)

To give a better idea of how corruption affects different courts, let’s take a look at the following characters:

• Emperor Mediocrates, a man with middling skills and a neutral council.
• Count Supérieur, an administrative genius with competent and loyal councilors.
• King Doofus, an imbecile surrounded by disloyal advisors.

While all of these characters are affected by corruption, the threshold where it takes effect is significantly higher for more competent rulers.

AI characters in the game generally have a hard time running their economy and are prone to fall into debt spirals that often leads to the breakup of their realm. To avoid making the situation worse, several guardrails have been added. Corruption effects are turned off for AI characters when they are at war or in debt. Corruption income loss is also capped so that it does not cause a deficit. AI characters are notoriously bad at handling army maintenance, so corruption does not increase maintenance costs for them.

Also, to keep the game challenging, conquerors and great khans are not affected by corruption.

Treasury mechanics are now included in the mod. To compensate for the reduction in treasury income (due to corruption), the treasury sent to vassal development is automatically reduced at the cost of vassal opinion. This helps the top liege avoid going bankrupt when corruption is present, but mild. Note that with very high levels of corruption the liege will need to use their own gold to supplement the treasury.

If you don’t like these mechanics, you can turn off corruption for rulers using treasury from the settings decision.

Compatible with essentially all mods, it can be put anywhere in the load order.

It is safe to add this mod to an existing game, but I recommend making a backup save. To remove the mod enact the decision to disable the corruption mechanic (see screenshot). The mod can be re-enabled at any time with the same decision.

This mod is part of my More Late Game Drama & Challenge collection.

The mod is in English, but Chinese translation is available here .

I have tested this with my mod list and without mods, but there might still be bugs. If you encounter any, please post a comment.