[Mod] TradeWarPolitics for the MegaModPack

[ThreeOfMe]

Dear friends of The Guild 2 Renaissance,

based on my supporting work in Fajeth's MegaModPack I have decided to create my own mod.

Some of you may be familiar with my previous work -- the improved trading routes in the MegaModPack. Since I like the economic side of the game, I wanted to find a solution for the sales counter of workshops.

So I implemented a complete rework of the sales counter of all workshop buildings. And I would like to share that work with you. You're welcome to use or leave it, but I'm glad for any suggestions and bug reports.

So are two download links with feature list and other details:
https://github.com/threeofme/tg2ren-twp
ZIP-Download[github.com]

https://www.nexusmods.com/theguild2renaissance/mods/4

The Mod is based on Fajeth's MegaModPack 0.95 and even contains some post-release fixes from Fajeth. Thanks and hail to Fajeth for his work!

EDIT
For those of you interested in beta releases, check out the current development branch on github:
Github-Project with Readme[github.com]
ZIP-Download[github.com]

Best Regards and Enjoy!
ThreeOfMe

[Ictiv]

Oh and I feel like and idiot, I forgot to ask something that's been in the back of my head since I read your ReadMe a while ago.

You mention that the Initial Nobility Title can now be set with your mod, and that it can be set in "config.ini", where we should look for ""InitialTitle".

Now I assume this is a new check you've put in, since config.ini contains no such line, and neither the master nor develop branches come with a config.ini since yeah you probably don't want to mess with people's settings.

However, I'm not sure if I should add "InitialTitle" to just the start of the file before even [GFX], or if you set it up so it's read on a difficulty AI/player basis, and needs to go under the "[INIT-PLAYER-X]" sections with difficulty settings.

Given the stability of the base game already I elected not to experiment with it until I know where to put it, since I don't mind the early game grind that much anyway.

(Also on that note, while it will become obvious the moment someone plays first, it might be nice for first time installers if you specify in the read me if "2" equals Yeoman on Lesser Citizen, if it counts from 0 or 1 basically.)
(Or maybe I'm a complete idiot that that isn't even what you meant by Nobility Title, though I'm not sure what else it would be.)

[ThreeOfMe]

Ictiv a écrit :

Hey, first of all I'm amazed how quickly you released the latest patch, so massive kudos on your performance so far.

Since I think it might help track down a SIM decision making bug, I'll describe the details as closely as I can observe.

[...]

It seems their AI knows that it's supposed to stay in the council hall but it neglects to weed out objectives that take it outside of council hall. So they do those objectives and then go straight back to council hall only to pick another task outside it. Might be the same issue as the mediator/judge glitch you've fixed in last hotfix, but still wanted to give a rundown on my observations in case they mean anything.

Can't guarantee the Rogue bit is relevant, but since I only saw them go straight to work, I thought it might be.

First off, thanks for your feedback! Is this happening after the latest patch? I build in checks for council meetings, trials and duels in that. Though there may still be loop holes. If it really happens at full hours, it might be connected to building AI and not the dynasty AI. Tricky :)

Does it happen each time? Should be able to test it then.

DarkOmegaMK2 a écrit :

So one way to do it is, for example:
-Select Horse cart from farm1
-tell him to pick 20 wheat, 20 meat and 20 flax (farm1 marked as important waypoint)
-select "resupply" at werehouse for 100 wheat, 100 flax and 100 meat. (marked as not important so that it doesn't stick around)
-select local market and sell al 75-100% sale ratio (market not important so it goes back to farm1 right away and restock)

and then repeat this process on the rest of the farms. What would you say of this?

Sounds good to me. If you ever flood the market with too many goods, it may run in circles without dropping much -- but that should take long and you can increase the stockpiles.

[Ictiv]

DarkOmegaMK2 a écrit :

ThreeOfMe a écrit :

Yes, except for (4). The cart will move to farm3, realize it's done with the order and head back.

Options I would consider here:
* Build a warehouse. Use trade routes from farms to warehouse for supply and sell any extras at the market. Supply any other workshops from the warehouse.

* Specialize production in each farm. Trade routes then need only include the farms that produce the item in question.

* Move resources between farms. Technically, it's like using the farm closest to consumers for storage like a warehouse. Now, supply routes need only go to this farm.

* Supply the main consumer (say, tavern) directly from the farms. Store more resources at tavern than you would need and supply another workshop directly from there. So technically, use a workshop as intermediate stoarge.

Ah ok i get it now, so all these three farms i centralize them on one point, either one farm or one warehouse (i keep forgetting this is a practical building) or one workshop, that way i don't affect the production of my farms themselves.

I guess i'll go with the warehouse since that it's literally it's only job, to store things and i build one anyway for trading with the counting houses.

So one way to do it is, for example:
-Select Horse cart from farm1
-tell him to pick 20 wheat, 20 meat and 20 flax (farm1 marked as important waypoint)
-select "resupply" at werehouse for 100 wheat, 100 flax and 100 meat. (marked as not important so that it doesn't stick around)
-select local market and sell al 75-100% sale ratio (market not important so it goes back to farm1 right away and restock)

and then repeat this process on the rest of the farms. What would you say of this?

Personally the way I do it when I get to a point I need a dedicated warehouse, is that my production businesses (ones whose stuff I want to reuse elsewhere) do not actually "Resupply" the warehouse, they just straight up unload until they have either 0 on them, or if I want to keep some in the cart for use elsewhere, to whatever that extra amount is I still want to use.

The reason for this, is that then I have a cart bought for the warehouse itself (you can buy carts for your warehouse, whose job is basically:

Step 1) Load full of warehouse stuff
Step 2) Resupply stuff to warehouse at 100. (Same dialogue, you don't need to send him to the warehouse twice) This basically makes sure that this cart never dips the warehouse below 100 aside from a split second at most.
Step 3) Send it to market and unload.

This works, because while having the production carts straight up unload would cause the warehouse to fill up, since I have an extra cart whose job is only to empty out the surplus about 100, that won't actually happen. Unless I've put the warehouse way too far away from the market, but even in that case the production carts will either move on and do another round if I set the unload step to "unimportant" and come back once my sale cart feed up some room, or they'll wait out my sale cart and finish unloading once he picked up his next round for the market.

[ThreeOfMe]

Ictiv a écrit :

However, I'm not sure if I should add "InitialTitle" to just the start of the file before even [GFX], or if you set it up so it's read on a difficulty AI/player basis, and needs to go under the "[INIT-PLAYER-X]" sections with difficulty settings.

(Also on that note, while it will become obvious the moment someone plays first, it might be nice for first time installers if you specify in the read me if "2" equals Yeoman on Lesser Citizen, if it counts from 0 or 1 basically.)

The setting relates directly to the file "NobilityTitle.dbt". So it should be a value of 2 or higher.

Here is what I currently use in my development settings on hardest difficulty:

[INIT-PLAYER-4]
HasResidence = 1
Workshops = 0
Money = 4000
Married = 0
InitialTitle = 2

[INIT-AI-4]
InitDelay = 1
HasResidence = 1
Workshops = 1
Money = 4000
Married = 0
InitialTitle = 2

There is one AI- and one PLAYER-block for each difficulty (easy 0 ... 4 hard)

EDIT: Updated readme with this information.

[ThreeOfMe]

Ictiv a écrit :

The reason for this, is that then I have a cart bought for the warehouse itself (you can buy carts for your warehouse, whose job is basically:

Step 1) Load full of warehouse stuff
Step 2) Resupply stuff to warehouse at 100. (Same dialogue, you don't need to send him to the warehouse twice) This basically makes sure that this cart never dips the warehouse below 100 aside from a split second at most.
Step 3) Send it to market and unload.

Interesting combination, haven't actually tried that before :)

[Ictiv]

ThreeOfMe a écrit :

First off, thanks for your feedback! Is this happening after the latest patch? I build in checks for council meetings, trials and duels in that. Though there may still be loop holes. If it really happens at full hours, it might be connected to building AI and not the dynasty AI. Tricky :)

Does it happen each time? Should be able to test it then.

From what I can tell on Github's timing, yeah. I downloaded it yesterday after seeing you post this:

ThreeOfMe a écrit :

Updated beta on github. Changes:

* burglary: added check for building owners and diplomatic state
* f_CreditMoney: always credit to workbuilding, not workers
* send cart and traderoutes: set movespeed to run
* bugfix: availability of medicine was ignored on treat target
* decrease chance for inferno, but include workshops
* bugfix: calculate affordable amount of items to buy
* bugfix: removed call to unused medicinechest
* bugfix: dyn member should not look for spouses
* enable king to vote on treasurer
* bugfix: no idle measures just before trial/duel/election
* increase city income (taxes) to handle increased repair costs
* removed log error for CocotteIdle

If there was an update since then, I might have missed it but I think it's the latest version.

As for whether it happens every time, again it's not all SIMs that do it, and it's not always the same SIMs. Best method I managed to work out for spotting which ones will wander off so far, is that I don't think I yet saw one leave unless they spent their entire time in the council hall standing around.
From what I noticed not once did a SIM who walked up to another and started giving the random chatter about the election then leave.

Maybe there is an AI trigger that allows for that set of idle interactions and that trigger just never gets set on the ones who wander off?


EDIT: To be precise on "I donwloaded it yesterday", accounting for time zones:

The zip I downloaded was downloaded 1 day and 13 hours ago.

[ThreeOfMe]

Ictiv a écrit :

Maybe there is an AI trigger that allows for that set of idle interactions and that trigger just never gets set on the ones who wander off?

EDIT: To be precise on "I donwloaded it yesterday", accounting for time zones:

The zip I downloaded was downloaded 1 day and 13 hours ago.

Good hunch there, I'm trying another fix. It's up on github, but untested.

I try to keep the readme up-to-date with the stuff I post here, see the changelog for the beta. Timing sounds good.

EDIT: Fixes for tonight:

* bugfix: sales counter should offer mussel soup
* bugfix: alias not found for employees in creditmoney (cancels medical treatment)
* bugfix: check presession and pretrial behavior on AI (should fix AI running away from sessions, requires testing)

[Mr. Bear]

Ictiv a écrit :

DarkOmegaMK2 a écrit :

Ah ok i get it now, so all these three farms i centralize them on one point, either one farm or one warehouse (i keep forgetting this is a practical building) or one workshop, that way i don't affect the production of my farms themselves.

I guess i'll go with the warehouse since that it's literally it's only job, to store things and i build one anyway for trading with the counting houses.

So one way to do it is, for example:
-Select Horse cart from farm1
-tell him to pick 20 wheat, 20 meat and 20 flax (farm1 marked as important waypoint)
-select "resupply" at werehouse for 100 wheat, 100 flax and 100 meat. (marked as not important so that it doesn't stick around)
-select local market and sell al 75-100% sale ratio (market not important so it goes back to farm1 right away and restock)

and then repeat this process on the rest of the farms. What would you say of this?

Personally the way I do it when I get to a point I need a dedicated warehouse, is that my production businesses (ones whose stuff I want to reuse elsewhere) do not actually "Resupply" the warehouse, they just straight up unload until they have either 0 on them, or if I want to keep some in the cart for use elsewhere, to whatever that extra amount is I still want to use.

The reason for this, is that then I have a cart bought for the warehouse itself (you can buy carts for your warehouse, whose job is basically:

Step 1) Load full of warehouse stuff
Step 2) Resupply stuff to warehouse at 100. (Same dialogue, you don't need to send him to the warehouse twice) This basically makes sure that this cart never dips the warehouse below 100 aside from a split second at most.
Step 3) Send it to market and unload.

This works, because while having the production carts straight up unload would cause the warehouse to fill up, since I have an extra cart whose job is only to empty out the surplus about 100, that won't actually happen. Unless I've put the warehouse way too far away from the market, but even in that case the production carts will either move on and do another round if I set the unload step to "unimportant" and come back once my sale cart feed up some room, or they'll wait out my sale cart and finish unloading once he picked up his next round for the market.

Sorry for the late response, thanks for the tip, i'll try this after i try the more traditional approach, since i dedicated all my warehouse carts for counting house trading.

[Ictiv]

Alright, bit of an update after messing around with the new hotfix.

It looks to me elections are fixed. Had 5 or 6 elections, kept an eye on the number of attendees, and there was only one case of someone running off, but that might have been intentional, I'm not sure. I caught a glimpse of a world bubble reading something like "Well it looks like [...] (couldn't read the rest before it/they disappeared)", so if there is a chance for a candidate to just give up and leave, this might have been it.

As for trials, I'm not so sure. Only had 3 trials so far. In all 3 cases the jury pulled a disappearing act. This isn't entirely game breaking, since the game then appoints the two guards in their place, but it does take out a bit of the buttering up jury members aspect of the game.

Finally also on the topic of trials, the accused themselves were difficult to gauge.
The first one ran off just before the trial was supposed to begin, but I wrote that up as possibly a logical choice, because they also were suffering from Leporsy at the time, so treating that having a higher priority than attending the trial might make sense.
The second accused stayed around without issue and got his just punishment.
The third one, incidentally the husband of the first accused bolted towards the door around 8:50, but was still in the entrance lobby when the clock got to 9:00 and then he got the "attend trial" task and got teleported to the usual spot by he game once the cutscene started.

Not sure if he was trying to make a run for it, as he had very low health and also his crimes were borderline enough for the death penalty, so again, might have just been the AI acting normally there.

[Mr. Bear]

Ok so, after playing with the newest update here's my report:
1.- So turns out that, after playing the outdoors beggar rogue, the "running randomly bug" is actually still present, but it is much MUCH less frequent now even when things get crowded. I'm noticing it happens around the vicinity of the town hall mostly.
2.- After taking over a thieves guild and setting them to pickpocket, my thieves would happily pick the pockets of buildings, i saw one trying to reach into the pockets of a market and another one reach into the purse of a clothing store... so... yeah...

[Kitteh]

Hi, I think I found a bug regarding counting house offer for cities. For example it says 60 Wines offered from Hamburg but when you check the market in Hamburg it's just 0 same with other cities if it offer something for good prices but when you check it's just 0. Im playing on ur latest beta from github on a clean install with a new save. The pop up header writes Hamburg is selling raw materials.

[Mr. Bear]

A little of a suggestion this time, this is about the mercenary guild. As a Rogue (or any other class in this particular mod for that matter) i very rarely use the mercenary HQ and when i do i just use it to scare away the pickpocketers but that's like "last priority" task on my order. Now, i haven't really used the building properly, so a lot of what i'll say here might be applied already:

1.- Make the relation penalty for tolling -1 instead of -5 so that the measure is a sort of "light risk, light reward" kind of deal, you still are getting disliked but it's not immediate feud anymore as it is originally.
2.- Add a new set of three abilities to the buildings so that when you buy them, new mercs will spawn with better gear each time, in the same sense like your house thugs where they will get a dramatic price increase, but spawn with armor, better weapons, etc etc. I realize this could be exploited to just hire mercs and take their armor off if you had the money but no craftsman... but... you can do this with your thugs anyway, so it's pointless.
Here's my suggestion:
Lvl 0 - Default:
Dagger

Lvl 1 - Farm Contract
"You managed to secure a contract with the local farm so that you are supplied with leather equipment..
A proper mercenary must certainly look like one and this is as good of a start as any. Your mercenaries will get access to leather related products. The cost of newly hired mercenaries is sure to escalate accordingly to account for their new equipment."
Dagger
Leather Doublet
Leather Gloves

Lvl 2 - Craftsman Contract
"After some haggling, the local craftsman has decided to supply your mercenaries with equipment for a cost.
Your mercenaries will get access to chain related goods as well as better equipment in general. Just like before, the cost of newly hired mercs will go up even further, it's all worth it thought."
Short Sword
Chain Armor
"That one basic helmet which i forgot the name of"
Leather Gloves

Lvl 3 - Guild Contract
"The most prestigious of all contracts, a contract with the guild itself has been secured. Only few can manage such privilege.
Your mercenaries will get the best equipment that is available to the land, however the cost of each new mercenary increases astronomically so your pockets better be deep enough."
Longsword
Plate Armor
Full Helmet
Bracelet

I think this would make the mercs HQ considerably more desirable and more worthwhile for both an honest and a malicious rogue alike.

[Kitteh]

Hi found another bug, on map Hansa theres ai ship belonging to their gabled house made. It just sits there on land on top of the ai gabled house. Maybe ai got command to make the ship from their house like cart or something.

[ThreeOfMe]

Thanks for the feedback to the latest patch. I found another check to include for pre-trial situations. Didn't quite find the time for testing it -- maybe someone has a savegame of the situation?

I think I've located the bug in offer/need events of markets. Worked for me, at least.

Pickpocketing of buildings should also be fixed now. This filter-system is pretty neat, but it's also a terribly undocumented mess.

I like the mercenary idea. I had added escorting and patrol to them to make them more versatile. Additional armor would be nice, though upgrades and hiring would have to come at quite a price.

I'll have another look into the random-runaway-bug.

Oh, latest fixes on github:
* bugfix: don't pickpocket buildings
* bugfix: AI should not leave before trial
* bugfix: kontor/market events cancelled early

[Mr. Bear]

ThreeOfMe a écrit :

I like the mercenary idea. I had added escorting and patrol to them to make them more versatile. Additional armor would be nice, though upgrades and hiring would have to come at quite a price.

Yeah exactly, recruitment with equipment included but also a steep price increase, in the similar fashion like thugs.

Also got a bit of an idea for the robber baron, because right now it causes more harm than good. I don't know if it's even possible to do so i'll just throw it in here to have a starting point.

1.- Robbers should have a toggle on the building or themselves for the waylay action. This toggle, when enabled, will ignore carts that belong to "Neutral" and upwards and only attack enemy factions.
2.- When waylaying, there is a very small chance that the affected dynasty will immediately send a "non aggression treaty", this sounds weird but here's the logic behind it: You basically cause so much damage and your reputation as a scumbag is such that, out of fear, the former enemy dynasty doesn't want to mess with you, therefore they plea for non aggression. This way a cruel and malicious rogue can actually get away with being a respected, corrupted scumbag.

I realize that these ones might be extremely gimmicky and might not be possible at all to implement in the game, but i think we should start somewhere as to what to do to make that building actually practical.