Improved Buildings and Rebalance – Update Preview

V2 Preview Release

All buildings have been updated except for Trade, Conscription, Administration.

This mod rebalances building chains to make all building chains viable and have a purpose in the right situations. It also takes into account late game balance to ensure there is a challenge for the player for a longer time. This is done by making food more important and introducing opportunity cost when planning what buildings to build.

Design Principles

• Every building should have a purpose to be built and players should have interesting trade-offs for choosing to go one strategy over another
• Different cultures should play differently and try to encourage faction special buildings toward a different style of play
• Make more game systems matter
• Make changes for more realism if possible, but values should not

Mechanics

Food and Population
Food is a central theme in this mod.
Instead of having Imperial Cities everywhere lategame, players will need to be strategic in picking where and when to upgrade cities.
This is due to heavy food distribution penalties in order to sustain larger cities.
Individuals in the city are further away from where food is produced, increasing spoilage in transit.
Even today with refridgeration and transit most of what is produced from the countryside spoils before it reaches the city.

Players will want to keep some commandaries at City level (Tier 4-6) in order to provide enough food for their cities.
Players are recommended to set up Grain Storage networks which reductions in food distribution to adjacent provinces.
Note that Grain Storage Levels 4 and 5 no longer provide a bonus for the commandary they are built in due to technical limitations.
In addition assignments increasing food production and food technologies will now be of higher use.

The greater impact of food means a great way to weaken enemies is to attack and destroy their food infrastructure.
In additon, more population, and base income, is now in the countryside settlements rather than the main settlement.
This represents the historical rural nature of China for most of history.

Military Supply
Military supply is generally an afterthought in the base game, while in real life military supply is crucial to war.

Main city buildings now have a very high military supply penalty so armies on the offense now need to properly prepare.
The lower the level of the settlement the higher the penalty.
You can trap your enemies by giving them a level 1 city just like the Empty City Strategy.

Players can build Military or Food Infrastructure buildings that increase supply, use Assignments, leverage Skills or learn Reforms.

Corruption
It is quite possible to get very high corruption reduction modifiers in the game which makes corruption a non issue.
In reality, corruption is an every pervasive thorn that always needs to be tackled.

Larger and wealthier cities now have a greatly increased base corruption amount.
While smaller poorer areas see a corruption reduction bonus.

Players can send characters on Assignments to reduce corruption by 25-75%.
Most factions now have buildings that increase the Assignment Limit by 1.
Now you will be able to use more of the characters in your faction you have been collecting.

Labor Costs
More buildings in game now require upkeep, to simulate the cost of keeping them running.
In addition, buildings that may drive up or lower labor costs will see an increase in upkeep.
Now bonuses that reduce building/character upkeep can have an actual impact.

A related concept is government officials. Historically China had the smallest bureacracy per population of major societies of the time.
In game you will see this represented by faction-wide increases in the cost of administrative buildings for each one that is built. You can reduce this through building schools.

Income Categories
There are more income categories now used in this game. The categories, from early to late game, are listed below.

• Sustenance – Represents misc income with a finite value generally not modifiable
• Peasantry – Represents income produced by the countryside, such as food and farm artisan works, including income from trading in such goods (including luxury foods)
• Banditry – Represents income produced by raiding
• Industry – Represents goods produced in the city as well as hard resources such as iron.
• Culture – Represents luxury goods, city services, and other functions needed by the upper class (eg currency)
• Commerce – Represents a very limited set of goods that increases in value the more you have a monopoly on its distribution
• Silk – Similar to commerce, for silk goods
• Spice – Similar to commere, for spice goods

Peasantry
Peasantry is the easiest income method to setup, effective at lower tier Cities and great to provide a food surplus.
Peasantry also does not use many building slots which enables you to build schools, temples, or forges for faction-wide bonuses.
While it does not scale as well as other income types, it is the cheapest and most effective backbone of any nation.

Industry
Industry relies heavily on resource deposits to beat Peasantry. Industry will primarily be found in your Mid-tier cities.
Industry is the mid-game income, offering a higher return than peasantry at the cost of food and corruption.
Make sure you can sustain it before you industrialize because once you do labor costs will generally increase.

Culture
Culture is a sidegrade to Industry income at higher city levels offering unique bonuses such as corruption reduction, at the cost of lower flat values.
Culture also provides an option for areas without industry natural resources to build tall, although generally those areas are better used for food.
There are a few resources now which provide culture income such as Jade and Minting.

Commerce – WIP
Commerce has essentially no ceiling for profit in the new system, but is the hardest to get online.

Raw commerce income will primarily come from resource nodes (trade nodes, tea, etc) and commerce buildings no longer provide base income.
Setting up distribution centers inland will increase your commerce income factionwide instead.
Therefore having more control over resources increases the value of each distribution center.