Custom Control Effects
Make control matter.
Customize the control (public order) system with 30+ effects to choose from, configurable at every control tier. The goal is to make the control system meaningful and impactful, tailored to what YOU care about.
Save game safe – change the values via MCT or add/remove the mod whenever.
There are many excellent public order/control mods out there that offer a curated experience based on the mod author’s vision. This isn’t that – this is a toolkit for you to make your own vision.
Sure, do it.
Awesome — let me know how it goes.
Go for it.
Nah, sorry, you can’t.
…
just kidding, go do it.
Better yet — do them all at the same time.
Because it all routes through MCT, the mod is a canvas for building the stories that you want to tell. Make it a gentle flavor layer or a punishing stability economy, then evolve it over time — your call.
The vanilla system is locked down from a dynamic modding perspective. You can change the values in the database (as other mods do) but there isn’t a way to script the system to apply dynamic and more complicated effects while maintaining transparency for the player.
So I stepped around that by layering transparent bars over the existing control system, zeroing out the vanilla effects, then applying my own dynamic effects and wiring them to the tooltips and control systems in order to maintain the cohesive feel of the vanilla system. You can still hover over the bars and the province effect icon to get all the information about what’s happening in the province, but now you can change the values to your liking.
Each control tier applies its own bundle of effects. Tiers ship with vanilla-matched defaults but every value is editable. Most changes take effect immediately, some take effect on the next turn.
Core Effects — applied to each province by control tier:
- Control per turn
- Settlement growth
- Province income
- Trade goods production
- Construction cost & construction time
- Recruitment capacity
- Army recruitment cost, replenishment, and upkeep
- Movement range
- Separate control of your movement and enemy movement inside your province
- Settlement vision range
- Agent success chance in your province
- Separate control of agent success chance against you and your own agent success chance
- Corruption resistance / susceptibility
- Positive values reduce all corruption (except your own) by the specified amount per turn
- Negative values increase all non-zero corruption (except your own) by the specified amount per turn
- Faction-wide control & research rate — each province contributes a small amount that stacks across your whole faction
- Up to a configurable cap in the default page of the MCT
Race-specific Effects — retaining vanilla’s specific race effects so their unique flavor is preserved:
- Dark Elves — slave building usage
- High Elves — additional income & extra recruitment capacity (on top of base effects)
- Kislev — Ataman experience per turn & climate immunity
- Chorf labor not configurable – this system is an extra level of hard coded in the back end – couldn’t cleanly change it but I may try again later
Adjacent Province Effects — a fully owned province’s control tier projects onto its neighbors:
- Onto your own/vassal neighboring provinces — growth, control and income
- Onto enemy neighboring provinces — growth, control and income
Expansion Effects
Two extra systems layer on top of the tiered effects. Configure control bonus/penalty based on the number of provinces you hold and their distance from your capital.
- Empire Size — a faction-wide control effect that grows with the number of provinces you own.
- Empire Reach — per-province control effect for provinces near to and far from your capital.
- suggest pairing with the Change Faction Capital mod to be able to reassign your capital.
Example distances are shown in the MCT description to give you an idea of distances in the game when you configure the settings.
AI overrides
By default, the AI uses the same values as the player but each system and tier comes with fully independent override values so you can tune the player and AI experiences separately.
Disable rebellions If you want.
Have ideas for other effects? Leave a comment and I’ll evaluate if it’s possible/practical to implement.
Here’s the tricky part – I mentioned earlier that to make all this work I had to zero out the native control system effects. This means if a mod overwrites or adds effects to the base system, they’ll still be active when used with this mod. That’s a confusing experience but nothing will break/crash. The solution is a very simple submod that zeros out whatever the other mod does to the control system in the database but I won’t be the one to make that submod.
Multiplayer
I have no idea but I’ve heard bad things about the MCT in multiplayer. Sorry, I’m just ignorant to multiplayer compatibility.
Absolutely critical for this mod
- General — master settings, per-turn control offset for human and AI, faction effect caps, and a How It Works guide.
- Expansion Effects — Empire Size and Empire Reach tuning, with their own AI overrides.
- Control-tier pages — one page per tier (Absolute through Weak), each with Core, Race-Specific and Adjacent effect sections plus matching AI override sections.
Every slider is labeled with its unit (%, flat). AI override sections have their own enable toggles, so you can apply the system to the player only, the AI only, or both.
Enjoying the mod? A thumbs-up is the clearest signal I’ll get that this kind of work is worth continuing.
Next up is an overhaul of the rebellion system as well as maintaining my current mods.
I play with 100+ mods and prefer slower, more strategic campaigns, but the mods I make are built as toolkits — configurable enough to fit your playstyle, not just mine. Thanks to Gaming for Immersion for fostering this community.
This is a hobby — I have a full-time job and an infant son, so updates happen when they happen.
Give me as much context as you can so I can recreate the issue for myself.
Required items:
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Mod Configuration Tool - v0.9 Beta — Steam Workshop
