This small Remote Regions mod aims at making a very large expansive empire more expensive and the conquest of additional provinces not necessarily profitable but may actually cost you dearly financially and in terms of manpower. You therefore have to make the active strategic decision to arrive at the conclusion that expansion simply doesn't pay off any more but instead that your empire's natural borders have been identified and need to be established at the current frontiers. Or you decide, despite all this and out of pure pride, prestige and annoyance with raiding tribes, to keep expanding and conquer and therefore deliberately pay the hefty price for it in gold and in men, even when these regions to be conquered are too remote, too inaccessible, and too difficult to defend, secure and cultivate. (It also adds Winter May or May Not Be Coming, a random component to harsh weather; changing it from occurring pre-deterministically every four years into occurring stochastically each year with a probability of 25 percent (or 33 percent if previous year had harsh weather).)
In order to achieve this the mod introduces penalties in the form of region modifiers in the case of regions being very remotely located from any of the faction's capitals, and also increases the Administrative Burden for the same reason.
It is compatible with Field of Glory: Empires v1.3.7 and the mod itself is attached in zipped format at the end of this post. It is available for the 310 BCE as well as the 550 BCE 'Rise of Persia' Grand Campaigns, and thus the zipped file contains mods for both 310 BCE and 550 BCE.
As of v1.3.7, the region modifiers are applied as follows for each region:
1. The distance between the region and the closest capital of the faction owning the region is used as the starting point.
2. Thereafter, the distance is adjusted first through being multiplied to a factor, based on the region's terrain:
- Plain: 100% (i.e., retaining its original value).
- Steppes: 103% (i.e., increased by 3%).
- Hill: 106%.
- Forest: 109%.
- Desert: 112%.
- Marsh: 115%.
- Mountain: 118%.
- Alpine: 121%.
- adjacent to Coastal Water: 100% (i.e., retaining its adjusted value).
- adjacent to River but not Coastal Water: 108% (i.e., its adjusted value increased by 8%).
- None of the two above: 116%.
- No modifier. lower than 30 000.
- Remote Region I. 30 000 - 75 000.
- Remote Region II. 75 000 - 135 000.
- Remote Region III. 135 000 - 210 000.
- Remote Region IV. 210 000 - 300 000.
- Remote Region V. 300 000 or higher.
(Factions without any capitals will receive a flat Remote Regions region modifier, equivalent to that of Remote Region II, for all its regions, and furthermore, all its regions will contribute 100% more to the faction's Administrative Burden compared to vanilla.)
For better visuality and understanding which distances may be relevant for situations, each red and blue line represents a distance of 100 000 in the game. Thus, across the map below (slightly cut off, compared to the game), west-to-east, the total distance is 1 000 000, and north-to-south it is 600 000.
As can be seen in the examples below, the distance between Rome and Tarentum is a bit less than 100 000 (i.e., around 70 000 if measured in more detail) and the distance between Rome and Byzantium is slightly more than 200 000.
Changed or added files:
Scenario.bsf
TEXT1.txt
DATA/MODIFIERS.csv
DATA/UI/TEXTURES/MODIFIERS/MOD_Icon_Custom_RemoteRegion_I,II,III,IV,V,X.dds
DATA/SCRIPTS/Events_Plugin.bsf
DATA/SCRIPTS/Faction.bsf
Zipped files for FoGE containing 310 BCE and 550 BCE available for downloads:
- v1.3.4 as of November 2, 2020.
- v1.3.7 (for human players only) as of May 4, 2021.