Hi all, I am releasing an early version of the Population Mod I've been working on. I believe it is in a playable state, but might still need some balance adjustments. You are more than welcome to comment about it and suggest improvements or modifications.

It can be downloaded from Skydrive in that link (Wincustomize link will take some time)

http://sdrv.ms/ZNjeWa

MOD DESCRIPTION

Motivation:

This mod started because I felt that, despite being a great game, Fallen Enchantress does a poor job simulating population. I wanted to make Population more meaningful while making the game deeper.

Objective:

The objective is to expand the population game mechanics. The objective is not to change rules just for the sake of changing. Modifications in this mod are supposed to bring a new dimension to the game and make it deeper while keeping its essence.

Highlight of the Most Relevant Features:

• Population is more important for a city output than its level. Level still is significant, but does not mean everything.
• Each building requires some citizens who will run it. All building’s requirement will add to become the city’s required population.
• Cities without the required population will have a penalty to their resource output.
• Cities with more population than required will generate a small extra of gold/research/production depending on their specialization.
• The amount of research/gold/production generated directly by the city depends on population rather than being a fixed number. Each citizen produces a small amount which is bigger the higher the city level.
• Unrest reduces city’s growth. To compensate, low level cities generate an extra unrest reduction.
• Tax is modded to come in increments of 5% and be more flexible.

Installation instructions:

First, backup your DATA\ENGLISH folder and then copy the files there, overwriting the existing ones. To recover the original game, restore your backed up files.

How Required Population Works:

Each building in the city, each grain and each material needs people to work on it, according to the following table:

By adding all those requirements we obtain the number of required citizens. This number is then compared with the actual city population. If there are less citizens than required there is underpopulation. Underpopulation reduces city output by the percentage of missing citizens. As an example, if the city requires 50 citizens but the population is only 40, then underpopulation is 20 and city output will only be 80% of normal.

If the city population exceeds the number of required citizens, each citizen generates extra gold, research or population depending on city specialization.

Why there is such thing as a “Population Requirement” unit instead of calculating directly citizens:

This makes easier to change this number if I see that 15 citizens per normal building are too many / too few.

Construction Points:

There is also a concept called Construction Points. Basically it represents free and unassigned citizens. Buildings require Construction Points to prevent AI (and newbie human players) from digging itself into underpopulation. Food producing buildings however don’t require Construction Points. So, if your city is underpopulated you can only construct food producing buildings.

City Research / Gold / Production output affected by population:

Instead of generating a flat output depending on the city level, each citizen generates the following output:

Why there are 6 levels of cities?

I wanted to raise level 1 to level 2 threshold from 50 to 100 citizens, but the AI was not handling it well, so there is an additional level 2 which only purpose is to have the correct AI tag so the AI does construct food improvements.

Unrest affects growth

Each 1% of unrest reduces growth by 2%. Notice that at 50% unrest your city does not growth, and beyond 51% the city does lose population. This represents citizens abandoning your nation as they believe they will have better opportunities somewhere else. To help the AI during the early game, lower level towns produce unrest reduction.

What’s left to do?

• Values need to be confirmed or corrected to provide an enjoyable gameplay.
• Introduce food upkeep for army units
• Who knows?