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Additional Mechanic Complexity

Have you ever played VIP and thought, "This is really good, but I wish it strayed a little further from vanilla in its execution?" Have you ever bothered a modder so much that you started to get anxiety and just decided that you should do it yourself? Did you want to add so many changes that it fueled you to learn the basics of the mod tools and had you regretting that life choice for the next 8 months because you're a grad student who just wants to play Humankind but every time you tried out your own mod you found an issue in the ancient era? No? Just me?

This mod changes multiple aspects of how the game functions to add additional strategic complexity. It is very much intended to be used with VIP, and while it can be used on its own I don't recommend it. The load order is intended as: VIP first, AMC second.



What it do:

Large Empire Balance: Currently, HK has little to no wide vs tall style, spamming cities is always the best choice. VIP corrects this a little, but AMC aims to take a more drastic approach. Each new city after the capital now applies a 6% money, science, and influence penalty on the empire, as well as a -10 stability penalty on each city. There is a similar but less harsh (-0.5%) per territory penalty applied as well. For each new administrator (the new title for city cap), money, science, and influence receive a 3% bonus on the empire, and the same is applied to cities for food and industry per administrator under the administration cap. There is also a +5 stability bonus per administrator on cities. This is both a balance choice and a narrative one, with the city cap now renamed to administrator cap to suggest that having extra administrators on hand not governing a city helps the empire as a whole (this change replaces VIP?s under city cap influence buff.) Cities will now have a -15 stability penalty per territory distance from the capital except when within 2 territories. This can be reduced with research effects, down to -5. Some technologies also give stability buffs to slightly counteract this.

Food: Food in vanilla HK is a borderline pointless resource. To fix this, all FIMSI districts are now limited by the population residing within a city. A city can build new districts when under their cap, but if it falls below the cap for any reason the city will suffer a penalty per district over its limit (think of this like abandoned neighborhoods inviting instability from lack of use). 1 new standard FIMSI district can be built per 3 new population. In addition to the district changes, units now cost food divided among each city, with their formula roughly being ?(gold upkeep cost + 6) / 3?. Each new city after the capital will add 10% to this cost. To compensate for these changes to a degree several infrastructures have been modified to increase the average food yield of a city.

Stability: Stability has two main problems in HK. It is not hard to maintain, and it gives little incentive to worry about between the 30 and 90 thresholds. To fix this, I've added the usual Endless 4X styled stability modifier. Cities will now provide anywhere from -50% to +25% food and industry based on how close or far its stability is to 0 and 100. Likewise, a similar -30% to +30% is applied to science and money based on the empire stability. In addition, districts of the same type will now cost 2.5 stability per adjacent district of the same type (this equates to -5 stability for two adjacencies, -10 for 3, etc.)

Conquest: Copying VIP's narrative event for capturing independent people's cities, capturing opposing cities will now initiate a similar event which forces the conqueror to choose between various costs and penalties to continue to maintain their control over the city. This is done to help balance the aspect of players effectively stealing cities during war, which presently has little downsides.

Territory Design Philosophy: Much of vanilla HK tends to feel very arbitrary in its penalties. Territories are grabbed with plans often spanning centuries, EQs are arbitrarily limited, cities are ridiculously difficult to merge. AMC aims to resolve some of the arbitrary rules by making city merging considerably cheaper and city founding considerably cheaper. The city merge will still be costly for cities of extreme infrastructure disparity, but the default for cities with few territories and equal infrastructures are much cheaper.

Pollution and Electricity: Humankind's default pollution is rather uninspired in my opinion, and I am not a huge believer in VIP's "pollution is inevitable" philosophy. Pollution is the end result of greatly improved industrial capacity, and AMC aims to make the game reflect this. Much of VIP's extractors pollution changes have been left in tact, but the pollution on districts from tech unlocks have been removed, and many infrastructure's pollution effects on makers quarters have been reinstated. Instead, starting in the industrial era, some infrastructure benefits are partially or primarily dependent on their cities having power generating infrastructures. Coal and the new Oil plant infrastructures will add a powered status at the cost of extra pollution on makers quarters, while Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, and Solar plants will provide power with a reduction in pollution generation. Nuclear grants regular pollution reduction on all makers quarters, while renewables have benefits depending on the position of industrial zones in relation to certain terrain types. There are now also pollution effect mitigations relating to certain techs, which help the offset the downsides to pollution necessary for timely industrial revolutions. These changes aim to make pollution a choice, albeit one that is very hard to pass up, that players opt into. Choosing not to destroy the planet is admirable, but it will come at the cost of passing up some very serious industrial improvement.

Miscellaneous Changes:

-4 new civics have been added, which add both flavor and empire management options.

-Several Cultures have had their LTs altered from VIP and Vanilla for theming purposes. The Egyptians, Nazca, Garamantes, British, Argentinians, and Soviets have all been altered.

-All Unit Upkeep buffs have been slightly altered to allow for the food upkeep to work correctly, which does not change any of their functions except the Salted Beef. Salted Beef now reduces unit food upkeep by 2%, and Soviet Weapons now reduced unit gold upkeep by 2%.

-Some civics have been slightly altered, for narrative purposes and to allow them to be more impactful. The government prerequisites have also been reverted from VIP, for narrative purposes.

-Era progression now requires 2 stars in the Neolithic and a progressive 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 in the ancient, classical, medieval, early modern, and industrial eras. This is both because the addition of Together We Rule added a few more stars to pursue, and to stabilize game progression.



I may have missed some changes, and some UI bugs exist which I cannot solve using the mod tools.



A compatibility patch for Vanilla Improvement Project, Culture Super Pack, and Additional Mechanic Complexity can be found here: https://mod.io/g/humankind/m/vip-amc-csp


I would highly recommend turning off the auto-save function while playing with this mod, I have not yet fully proven it to be the cause but there is a save corrupting error which I believe may be caused by it. If you do this however, DO REMEMBER TO SAVE OFTEN AND GET IN THE MINDSET OF SAVING REGULARLY SINCE YOU CAN NO LONGER RELY ON AUTO-SAVES. In multiplayer, all players in the game need to turn off the auto-save function as well.


Many thanks to DoktorKain, Shakee, FreeThinker, and Uncle2Fire for their help in many aspects of this mod and helping me learn the mod tools in general. Also special thanks to DoktorKain, Monoolho, and Oscar (Elhoim) for letting me steal their code for the purposes of this mod.