Zee’s Properly Timed Eras
Vanilla allows the World Era in a standard 500 turn game to reach the Future Era in as little as 320 turns. Look at the Epic timescale and the World Era is in the Final Era as early as turn 460 in a 750 turn game. This unbalanced pace is terrible for so many of the games systems, which are actually pretty great in a correctly paced environment. If you’re anything like me you find it really unsatisfying to see the world constructing jet fighters in 1520 AD.
It’s not a good idea to make the AI any weaker than it already is, and placing rules that only apply to the player isn’t fun.
So what do? What. Do.
This mod is my attempt at a solution.
The reason 320 turns is possible, is because the minimum limit set on each era defaults to 40 turns, which is incredibly low when players and AI are more than capable of moving from one ‘Era Layer’ of the tech tree to the next ‘Era Layer’ in well under 40 turns at vanilla settings.
Several steps are taken to correct this.
- The Era (Min:Max) range has been increased from (40:60) turns, to (55:60) turns.
Using a Standard 500-turn game as an example again, this increases the minimum Future era turn from (320) to (440) out of 500. Much better. Now you actually get to use the turns in your game… - The bonus and penalty for researching Techs & Civics outside of the current World Era
- is increased from (20%) to (80%) for techs/civics ahead
- is increased from (-20%) to (-40%) for techs/civics behind
In the first half of the game these numbers make it very difficult to break ahead or fall behind.
The longer the game goes on however, the larger income-values get and the multipliers have less and less of an effect; which is why the vanilla value of 20% is nearly pointless.
This will force the World Era to exist and progress in that (55:60) turn lifespan, in spite of any Civs doing really well/bad because those Civs will find it much harder to throw the world average tech-level out of line.
(Another pleasant side-effect, more Civs stay competitive the whole game)
(Since the June 2019 patch, this portion of the mod has not worked. Firaxis did something to disable the dynamic cost modifier even though the code is still in the table. If you switch the ruleset from GS to RF, these modifiers work again. To my knowledge, there is no way around this. Unfortunate, but nothing I can do about it.)UPDATE: Happy to say the May 2020 Patch has finally corrected the bug Firaxis introduced back in June 2019. The core function of this mod has been restored.
- The entire months-per-turn scale was rewritten from scratch for all 4 game speeds. This means the year shown at each turn will correspond to the technologies you and the rest of the world are researching much more accurately and realistically.
- Tech and Civic costs are given increasingly larger multipliers based on era.
Tech starts at (1.0x) and ends at (3.0x).
Civics start at (1.3x) and end at (3.6x).
The specific combination of these 4 key changes will virtually guarantee a World "Tech Level" that matches the World Era, and ensure all of it occurs on dates that are realistically feasible.
Other minor tweaks are also made to support the theme of this mod.
- Eureka and Inspiration boosts reduced from (40%) to (10%). This change is extended to the Chinese trait, bringing the buff down from (50%) to (20%).
- The AI receives no free tech or civics for increased difficulty. You can crank that slider up and give yourself a real (semi-fair) challenge now!
- Great Person cost increased by (10 to 50)%, increasing with each era.
- Repeatable District-Projects made more expensive to account for longer eras.
- Since Eras are now longer, both Dark and Golden Ages have been made slightly more difficult to acquire to compensate.
- Since Eras are now longer, City Growth rates have been slowed to match (Food-Required-Exponent from 1.5 to 2.3)
This mod can be used standalone or alongside all of my other mods.
Requires a new save.
Works with or without all DLC.
Not compatible with any other mod that attempts to tweak the games pace.
Let me know if you run into issues.
You might also enjoy my other mods:
Zee’s Strategic Resource Overhaul
Zee’s Distance Is A Good Thing
Zee’s Fewer Trade Offers
Zee’s Normalized Climate Change
Zee’s Decommission Power Plant
Zee’s Third Party Grievances Reduced
Zee’s Slower Grievance Decay
Zee’s More Reliable Reactors
If you’re feeling generous, you can donate here.
[patreon.com]
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
