Sbrubbles’s Trade Rebalance
This mod aims to fix some issues around trade and economy and allow more historical patterns of trade, especially in regards to the pepper trade.
The mod ajusts trade distance defines (sea vs land), trade range, good trade weights, and adds a new sound toll in order to nudge the AI to initially import pepper from India to Europe through Egypt or Levant, then, once Portugal and others discover the Cape route, make it so that that route is the cheaper one for western europe.
Also, a lot of trade weights are modified to make for more plausible value-to-weight ratios. For example, in vanilla, gold is worth 10 and iron 3, and both have trade weight 1, meaning gold is 3.33 times the value-to-weight of iron, which is VERY low by historic (and current) standards. In this mod the value-to-weight is 11.11 times higher for gold vs iron.
A few other changes are made to make trade and the economy as a whole more interesting:
- Trade advantage from buildings is severely nerfed so that it’s easier to be number 1 in Trade Advantage using just ships (provided the other countries don’t also have ships)
- The Exploration CB now has a sister CB called Dominate Sea, which is the same except instead of superiority wargoal (win battles) you have naval wargoal (blockade). Use it to sink their navy (giving you better odds at having higher trade advantage) and extract reparations.
- Colonial nations not allowed to run "Forced Slave Conversion" because that liberates slaves, and the sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations require slaves.
- Production formula for plantations and slave centers adjusted to actually work (because of "effective supply/demand" mechanics, they often didn’t work). Also, they can’t be closed.
- Iberian nations get a few buffs to naval and trade range to allow them to reach India without having any African colonies (besides Canaries and Cape Verde) and do so around 1500. Other nations get similar buffs later.
- Small adjustments to good demand (saffron, tea and cloves lower, sugar higher)
- Reduced impact of good events (Triangle Trade, Spice Trade, etc)
- Once you discover certain sea zones, you receive an event that gives you full maps of the nearby markets. It’s a QOL of life thing, plus explorers would just buy maps and hire local sailors, so it makes no sense spending decades finding everything.
- Trade efficiency completely nerfed because it allowed dumb things like two markets shipping gold back and forth.
– I recommend using the "all pops can grow" mod because that makes things easier in regards to having slaves for plantations
– You can use mods that disable african colonization because naval range buffs cover that
– I want to look at weight of produced goods (especially ones that had famous trades like cloth and weapons), but I’m really not sure how to go about it. Given that most countries in europe have the required goods to make these things, I’m not sure there is a way to do it by just adjusting trade weight.
UPDATE:
Separated eco changes (building price change) to another mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3639860406.
