Cities of Wonders

This mod adds a new type of Great Work or Wonder called a “City of Wonders” (COW), that is meant to represent the great cities of the world that contains multiple structures that could be classified as Wonders. The wonder added by this mod simply allows you to build multiple wonders and most of their associated upgrades inside this new City-Wonder.

The primary issue I had with the free Great Works update was that you could only have one wonder per province/county, while some counties arguably should have multiple. For example, why do Roma only have the Lateran/Apostolic Palace, and not the Colosseum too? Why could the player not rebuild the Mouseion or the Great Library of Alexandria while also having the Lighthouse of Alexandria in the province? Why cannot you have both the Theodosian Walls and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople?

This mod remedies this by allowing you to build all of the wonders in the City of Wonders as long as you meet the very similar criteria to vanilla for them. Currently there’s 14 different types of Cities of Wonders. 12 of them are historical, which can only be built at specific places. The other two types are the ones that can be built from scratch by the player, as long as you meet the requirements for them respectively. All of the Cities of Wonders are divided into 10 stages that should at the very least take over a century to complete all stages from scratch. The buildable ones provide a huge amount of 40 upgrade slots total at the last stage, while the historical ones “only” have 36 slots. This was intended to give a small reward to any player who would build up a COW from the ground up, instead of just taking an existing COW and use that instead.

Each wonder that you build in the city-wonder you could consider a separate city district, after the wonder is built it unlocks any of the associated upgrades so that those can be built too in the “district”. With a max of 36/40 upgrades, that is quite a decent number of upgrades you could build. Also, at the moment the bonuses provided by the wonders matches the Stage 4 of each vanilla wonder, which is kind of overpowered, and I will probably have to rebalance this later.

• City of Wonders – a Great Work that is divided into 10 stages, with a total of 36/40 upgrade/feature slots.
• Two separate version of City-Wonders. The Standard version, and a special version just for Merchant Republics.
• In a City of Wonders, you can build nearly all of the Wonders from vanilla and their associated upgrades. Many events and decisions have been altered and added to ensure that the wonders and their upgrades have the same effect as in vanilla. List of all the upgrades currently available can you find HERE.[1drv.ms] (Patch 6.1)
• Stage 1, Stage 3, Stage 6, and Stage 9 are the major thresholds that will alter the name, wonder strip image, and the description of the City of Wonders.
• Each stage of the City of Wonders that is completed will optionally give a holding slot (at a reduced cost) to the county in question until it reaches the max of 7 holding slots. You can turn even the most inhospitable places into a Great City. (Requires The Reaper’s Due)
• Dynamic name ranking system, that follows this scheme: Alexandria (Stage 1), Great City of Alexandria (Stage 3), Metropolis of Alexandria (Stage 6), and Megalopolis of Alexandria (Stage 9).
  The dynamic name system takes the wonder name from the province/county name, so if you want to use the system you should rename your province/county accordingly. The names will not change if you have changed the Wonder name manually at any point.
• Historical Cities of Wonders: Alexandria, Constantinople, and Roma. —– Alexandria’s COW will use the Lighthouse model on the map and the associated wonder image. Constantinople will use the Hagia Sophia wonder image and it’s model on the map. Roma will use the Amphitheatre wonder image to represent the Colosseum, while it will use the Cathedral model on map.

  There will be quite a few unique wonder upgrades that are historical for Alexandria, Constantinople, and Roma. For example: The Theodosian Walls, Hagia Sophia, the Coliseum, Lighthouse of Alexandria, and et cetera.

  You can rebuild/refurbish many of the historical Wonders that are either in ruin or completely gone by a specific start-date, if you meet the requirements. For example if you get Alexander’s Bloodline you can rebuild his Mausoleum in Alexandria, though most Wonders won’t have as specific requirements.

  If you start a game with the vanilla game rule that turns off the historical Great Works, than none of the Historial COW’s will show up too.

• Game Rules – "COW: Pentarchy", "COW: Semi-Historical COWs", and "COW: Ancient Cities". These rules will be DISABLED by default, so you have to manually turn them on if you want to play with extra COWs.
• Antioch and Jerusalem as optional historical COWs. COW: Pentarchy rule must be ON.
• Baghdad and Delhi as optional semi-historical COWs. COW: Semi-Historical COWs rule must be ON.
• Wonder upgrade feature that can be used to upgrade vanilla wonders into a City of Wonders. To use it you must right-click on the capital holding of where the wonder is located at.

  The upgrade is instantaneous, and the vanilla wonder in your capital province will be converted into a Wonder District.

Should be compatible with most mods, expect for overhauls mods and other mods that alters some of the few vanilla files associated with Wonders. Some of the vanilla event files are altered by COW to maintain the same features as vanilla Wonders. Also, some province files are altered for the respective historical Cities of Wonders.

Direct link HERE[1drv.ms], for the times Steam Workshop doesn’t work properly. Just unzip it in your CK2 mod folder in Documents.

HIP – SWMH compatible version (Frosty2) HERE.

HIP – Vanilla map compatible version (Frosty2) HERE.

When the World Stopped Making Sense compatible version (0.9.13) HERE.

AGOT 2.2 compatible version currently in Alpha HERE.

Maxine Steel’s Russian localization compilation mod which supports Cities of Wonders:
HERE.

COW unfortunately alters the checksum out of necessity, so this mod is NOT achievement friendly.

Please leave a post in the discussion forum if you discover a bug, or have any suggestions on any improvements I could make.

If the mod won’t download or update properly for you, try to subscribe to the mod while the game launcher is running, or alternatively while the game is already loaded up to the main menu.

This mod was inspired by Aenno’s Cities of the World Desire, I would credit much of my efforts to his mod and ideas.