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Hadrian's Building Effects | Better Vanilla Attila

THIS MOD IS...
* COMPATIBLE WITH ALL CULTURE PACKS, INCLUDING SLAVIC NATIONS.
* FOR THE GRAND CAMPAIGN ONLY. IT IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH NON-GC DLCs.
* SAVE-GAME COMPATIBLE (Fresh start recommended for best experience).


For those of you who want an even-more-faithful to vanilla experience that still emphasizes the values of Building Effects, Hard Building Effects is now available, complete with full description of the differences between this version and that one.



This is a Grand Campaign mod for Total War: Attila. If you are familiar with the game's mechanics and don't want to read a full page of details, the mod does the following three things.

• Systematically reduces food consumption
  
• Adds sensible public order bonuses to certain buildings
  
• Removes nonsensical public order penalties & reduces squalor penalties

The result, in essence, is a grand campaign experience that is faithful to vanilla mechanics while still reducing the most unrealistic deck-stacking elements inherent to the core game.



So, having read that last part of the above... what does "deck-stacking" mean?

Deck-stacking is a cardplay term for situations in which the game is set up with the odds against you. If you're playing with total conquest in mind, Total War: Attila stacks the deck against you in three key ways:

• Merciless attacks, particularly when playing as the Romans. This includes Attila himself.
  
• Climate change at routine intervals, forcing strategic adaptation as the game progresses.
  
• In a world of scarce resources, high level buildings are incredibly costly to maintain.

The mod leaves the first two completely intact, but addresses the final item on the list, BUILDING EFFECTS, by doing the following:


Food consumption is the most punishing mechanic in Total War: Attila's vanilla ruleset.

Even if you fully re-establish the Roman Empire, it is impossible to fully upgrade all of your buildings by the time climate change has run its course. This is because food consumption doubles with most upgrades. Food consumption at L4 of most chains, particularly regional capitols, is simply too staggeringly high to afford, forcing you to pick and choose which cities and structures get their final upgrades.

This can lead to... underwhelming total victories.

To curtail this effect, the mod chops virtually every building-based food consumption requirement in half; sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less.

The result is a campaign that starts out less punishing for the first shifts in the climate, but still forces you adapt in the same ways as climate change grinds down upon the world. You still have to keep a watchful eye on your food production as in vanilla, but the endgame will be more forgiving when it comes to being able to fully upgrade.


Buildings such as trade and spice ports now provide sensible, small bonuses to public order, as it is within reason to expect populations to be contented when living in a vital center of trade. These replace penalties present in the vanilla game.

For those who choose not to dismantle legacy Roman tech: As the game takes place at the inception of the dark ages, aqueducts are even more a shining beacon of civilization. Public order bonuses in response to the construction of aqueducts have been amplified. This provides a small incentive to hold on to legacy technologies without requiring it (this can be useful in conjunction with mods that remove the disabling of legacies).


In a vanilla campaign, upgrading farms can reduce public order in a province by up to 5 points. What?

No, really. What?

In a period of history where food was scarce, public order very probably had a positive relationship with food production, not a negative one. To create a healthy compromise between this thought and the vanilla rules, public order penalties on farms and other resource production buildings have simply been removed, with the exception of outdoor buildings where citizens' lives may be disrupted by industrial noise. This removal or public order penalties also applies to several workshop-type buildings.

Squalor penalties to several workshop-type buildings (ex: Potters, Pewter casters, Tanneries) have been reduced, but not removed. Squalor penalties for most buildings have generally been scaled down similarly to food production; a Level 4 grain farm now only stacks up squalor by 3 instead of 5, and a Level 3 grain farm stacks it up by 2 instead of 3, et cetera.

However, squalor penalties to outdoor industrial facilities (ex: Quarries, Mines, Gem Mines) have been retained, even slightly increased in some cases, as it's harder to control the dusty mess when these are built in a town.


To help offset the slight cushion created by these changes, squalor penalties for damaged and ruined buildings have been scaled up across the board, amplifying the filth generated by damaged or ruined buildings and increasing the work required to compensate for them until they are repaired or removed.



I'd like to acknowledge benjy619 for creating the "Easier Building Effects" mod. I played using his mod for several campaigns, enjoying the basic changes it made to the Attila experience while quietly lamenting how it nerfed some of the challenge of the core game.

When I set out to make this mod, I built it from the ground up using his changes as a template and guide, so credit and gratitude is due to him for some inspiration. If you have experience with benjy's mod, you will find this a similar, but more challenging experience, as well as more faithful to the vanilla Attila experience.

And lastly, but certainly most importantly, I'd like to thank my viewers and fellow Total War players for encouraging me to post this mod after seeing it in action!



As I mentioned at the top of the description, this mod is featured on my YouTube channel.

• If you would like to see the Building Effects mod in use, the Eternal Empire series is a full Eastern Roman Empire campaign featuring this mod and others.
  
• Click here to watch the Introduction.

• v1.2 - July 9, 2016 - Tweaks to a few buildings' public order penalties not adjusted in initial version & updates to description to reflect errors indicating that certain squalor penalties had been completely cut (was never the case).
  
  
• v1.0 - May 11, 2016 - Slavic Nations Version released / Initial upload