Last night, I was playing a game, and my cities couldn't produce enough gold to keep me out of the negative. this was partially due to a lack of gold mines, as well as the fact that the Merchant building only multiplies gold collected from structures (gold mine) at this point, but not tax income...
I've spent the greater part of this morning trying to figure out what the ingame variable for Tax Income is. I ended up going another way, and assigning gold revenue to the cities, with the amount produced each turn scaling with the size of the city. I copied the K_CityHubs.xml over to the Mods/Data folder, then modified each city level with a <Attribute>Gold</Attribute> addition, with the higher levels producing more gold.
Specifically, I've added these lines to each of the 10 (5 Capital, 5 Normal) city levels in the K_CityHubs.xml for now, just above the level cap notation line.
<!--Produces some gold-->
<GameModifier InternalName="L1_Gildar">
<ModType>Resource</ModType>
<Attribute>Gold</Attribute>
<Value>2.0</Value>
<PerTurn>1</PerTurn>
</GameModifier>
<!-- Level-up Cap -->
I went with 2/4/6/8/10 bonus gold, but it probably should be more like 1/5/25/100/125 to reflect the 'city max' levels. Also, I don't know if L1_Gildar is proper notation, but the production is appearing in my city window at least.
I also noticed that bonuses are added together, not multiplied by each other, in the gold production window (saw a 20% bonus and a 30% bonus from city leveling in the window, and a total multiplier of 50%). So my calculations in the library versus 4 studies thread are WRONG. But I digress...
Of course, I'd need to mod the F_CityHubs.xml as well, but mostly I'm just happy it works.
My cities are pumping out roughly twice as much gold as they did before, which actually is kind of pleasant, and I'm in the positive income this time around. The merchant building only multiplies the assigned gold revenue, but at least now it's doing SOMETHING.
If I planned to keep this, I'd go through and nerf the goody hut gold rewards appropriately, to balance it out. However, Derek said they'd be fixing this soon in the changelog, so no need to get too excited.
Have any of you modder types been able to figure out what the tax variable is? The merchant bonus should probably be applied to <Attribute>Tax</Attribute> instead of <Attribute>Gold</Attribute>. CityLevelUpBonuses.xml would need to be similarly modified to affect 'Tax' instead of Gold.
OR, if you could do a
<Attribute>Gold</Attribute><Value>Population*.1</value>(Whatever the Population variable is, and however you'd write that)
conversion in the CityHubs .xml, then the game could modify the tax income directly, hence there would be no need for a separate hack.
Yeah, I know the Stardock guys are on this. I'm just curious as to how you'd do this. I like learning new things!
