In the attempt to write code for this that comes into affect after a certain portion of the game has been played either being able to call the number of empire plans that have passed (best option I can think of) or the number of winters that have passed (okay, but then it is also subject to winter harshness) seem preferable to using the number of turns that have passed on account of the various game speed settings. That said I have no idea if there is a way to access that, if the game keeps track of it (I know it does for number of winters but that's a lot less useful), etc.

In particular:

1) Does the game keep track of the number of empire plans that have passed?

1a) If not how might one try to implement this?

2) If so, is there a way to call that information in the code. For instance "$(CurrentTurn)" calls the number of turns that have passed. Can that be down instead for the number of empire plans (a much more reliable version of 'relative time' not subject to game speed)?

2a) If yes to 1 but no to 2 is there a way to define a command that would do this?

3) If the above are not implemented, would be hard to implement, etc. then is there some other way of keeping track of how far the game has progressed that isn't subject to game speed?

Some example uses for this would be creating mods that progressive increase the AI difficulty, causing events to occur based off of how long the game has gone on instead of the number of techs researched by the active player or player in the lead, etc.  But those are just a few off the top of my head and it seems like a very useful tool in general for creating mods.

My apologies in advance if this is something I should have been able to find out on my own. I'm a fairly inexperienced modder but I'm trying to get better/more experienced. In any case, thank you for your time in responding to this, whenever you are able (to whoever responds)