Howdy, folks.

Just wanted to drop a note about the status of the project and let you all know that an update to the mod has been posted. Apologies if anyone's saves broke, that's just how modding works now and it's not like there's a day and time I can be certain that everyone will not be in the middle of a game.

Feel free to skip to the end for a list of the handful of changes in this version, but I wanted to take a minute, since there are people who have downloaded this thing and hopefully enjoyed it, to discuss what it is I'm actually trying to *do*. I am not a game designer. I don't have an instinct for the minutiae of game balance. I may eventually take a stab at specific affinities or cultures, but there are other people who probably have or will have done a better job. In addition, the actual professional developers are still working on the game, and they might "fix" certain aspects better than I could. But in any case, in my opinion, there's a major problem that needs to be addressed before specific changes like that will make much of a difference, and that is that production trumps everything else to such a degree that there aren't really that many meaningful choices to be made when it comes to empire development. Here are my thoughts, I will order them as sensibly as possible but I do have ADHD so bear with me here.

1. Food: food is currently in a rough spot, because it exists to do one thing, which is create population. That's fine, in itself, except that district yields are so much better than worker yields that empty cities can still produce obscene yields without any investment in population whatsoever. I would like that to change. I understand that it's a game and as such is an abstraction, but it's still a gameified abstraction of real-life empire building, and in my mind the heart of every culture, empire, society whatsoever is the people. What I want is for population to be the most important factor in success. It's your people that *do* the things.
2. Production: right now production is indisputably the most important resource, to the point where there is no reason to build anything else. It's your economy, it's your military strength, it's literally everything you do. I would like other currencies to have more of an impact on the game. In my vision, production is the means by which you build the districts and infrastructure that allow your population to grow and produce better. That said, I don't want to completely negate tile yields, because I still want city and district placement to be meaningful, because that's fun and at the end of the day that's the point of any game.
   Honestly, it's a tricky balance and might take a while and some iteration to work out.
3. Money: I do like money conceptually as it is right now, as primarily an upkeep tool. However, it is simply not important enough as only military units require upkeep. This is why I added upkeep to districts as well. I feel like a flat 2 is overly simple and may not be the correct amount. I do also see people conceptualizing or building mods to give upkeep to infrastructures. I have not done this because infrastructures are already considered inferior to districts, and also with the current UI making the effects of infrastructure invisible to the player without doing a whole bunch of extra math work that shouldn't be necessary, I am trying not to mess with them too much. See below, however, for some thoughts on overall changes I'd like to make.
4.  Science: Science is good, science is important, but the issue is part of the main issue, and that is Collective Minds. I don't want to get rid of Collective Minds, I love the concept, and it's one that's been successfully implemented in other games. The ability to divert resources to supercharge your research, especially to play catch up, will be staying. However, as it is its possible to pretty much ignore science for most of the game, spending all of your resources to increase production, then use CM to convert that production to science. What I tried to do is change it to a mode of science investment, where gold per turn is converted to science to represent fully investing in science output. However, CM is currently split into two effects, one that disables production and money, and another that boosts the science. The second is editable, the first is not. As a placeholder, just because I recognize that this is an issue for many people, I left it essentially the same, but cut the science bonus in half. 
5. Influence: Influence is a weird one, because it seems to represent two different things, one concept roughly similar to "culture" in the later Civ games, and the other is your ability to exert your power on territories and other empires. I really like the second, the first seems nebulous. In addition, the Aesthete affinity currently flavors aesthete cultures as pacifist, when historically that's not necessarily the case, and they also often have the strongest military units of their era. Also, strangely, the game makes it so that if you don't care about what civics you're running, it's actually to your benefit to generate less culture than your neighbors, because osmosis events only affect the osmosed culture, and give free civics and science.
   There are a couple of things I'd like to do here.
   Firstly, change osmosis events. Science Osmosis should flow both ways. Civics Osmosis should also flow both ways, but with the difference that if you are the influencing party, refusing to change your civic should net you a bonus of some sort instead of a stability penalty. Third, some effect that only goes to the more influential culture that's purely beneficial and purely bad for the less influential culture. I'm thinking of perhaps a population steal or something similar.
   Secondly, to both decouple aspects of the game from production and to increase the importance of influence and give you something to spend it on besides civics (and hopefully create another meaningful decision point) I want units to be only constructible by purchasing with influence. Think of it as a conversion from soft power to hard power. This will, however, not happen any time soon, I've tried. It literally breaks the game. Like first time any player tries to found a city, game crashes. I tried to switch it to money purchase as a better than nothing situation, that worked technically, but broke the AI. They didn't know what to do with it and never actually made any units. Eventually the plan is for mod tools to be able to mod the AI, when that happens, it might be revisitable. But in the meantime we're stuck with units being a production thing.

*Increased food yield of coastal tiles to 2

*You can now build districts directly adjacent to a Harbor. Building additional districts off of those districts is still not allowed.

*It appears to be impossible with the current tools to edit Collective Minds and Land Raiser to anything that doesn't completely shut off industry or science, respectively. In the meantime, the bonus provided has been cut in half.

*Money buyout cost scaling harshly reduced, inflation is now calculated linearly by era instead of exponentially by turn count. I might do away with it altogether if it seems unnecessary, as increasing production costs could be considered to represent it equally well.

*Settlement food consumption also now scales more simply as between 6 and 10 per population depending on settlement stability, given the importance of population growth exponential gains that kick in so early hardly seem fair.

Oh dang, forgot to mention, I also increased the reward for pillaging lairs and sanctuaries in the Neolithic back up to 10

I've been thinking a lot on my own about all these topics.
As you know, I have chosen to focus on the usefulness of buy-out for food and money. To make it as efficient as production.
But my playtests show me that it speeds up the game, necessarily. The structure of the game is not designed for this, but I can try to adapt and I have targeted some necessary changes.
Increase the cost of Era stars. Alas, I am having trouble deciphering this. This is going to require me to do a test mod and a lot of test games to figure out how it works, unless someone gives me the information.
Note: I just finished a whole game, choosing only Money cultures. I have built only a very few Maker quarters. Most of the time I bought my buildings. The system works well. I need to be sure that it works for food too. And here, my food formula is not the best.

I dropped the Upkeep costs on the districts because it is a negative production. I would like to be able to create an "Upkeep" property like for the units, but I don't know how. I don't know how to create a new asset and have it referenced by the game.
I also dropped the Upkeep on infrastructure for potential compatibility concerns.

Your idea of removing the synergy from the base districts is very tempting. I haven't put it in my mod yet. The reason is that a lot of infrastructure will give that synergy, so the freedom to build wherever you want is not so obvious anymore.
The reason I'm probably going to use that is because it reduces the production of quarters. And so it inevitably values the production of workers.

I'm looking to make the Commons quarter a little bit different, and the modifications I'm using right now are not the best. I've given it a FIMS exploitation. That's good, but it's not realistic. I would like this quarter to have its synergy interact with anything other than just the core quarters. Or that it could give synergy to the basic quarters. Of course I don't know how to do that. For now, using the garrison is easier.

Regarding your change in the cost of districts. I am not trying to link it to the population, as you know I use another system. But I have a technical question and a request for help.
Apparently you are able to recognize the type of district in the formula. And so, for example, know how to link a maker quarter to the workers on the industry. I would like to know how to do that. I can think of some ideas like:
- A quarter of a certain type only increases the costs of other quarters of the same type.
- Only quarters of certain types increase the costs. This would allow for example, when a natural reserve is built, that district does not increase the cost of other districts.
I'm thinking more and more that this formula of increasing all districts by number of districts is a piece of prehistoric archaeology. This comes from the game Endless Legend, which could easily use this system, as all districts (almost) were identical. But I don't find it suitable for Humankind, a game where some districts have minor effects compared to others, and it screws up the overall cost.

Food, if you understand anything about it, let me know! My goal is the following:
- Remove any limitation on the number of citizens you can produce per turn.
- BUT, make the result of the food production more valuable than the fixed variables. So, make it so that a player whose food production is minimal can't often use "buy with pop", while a player who is an expert in food can abuse it.
- I don't know exactly how food works. I tweaked a formula and found a way to raise the maximum pop per turn. But deep down, I don't know how it works behind it. There are several variables with "Growth", GrowthNet, GrowGain, etc. I assume that one of these variables accumulates food until it produces a citizen and then resets to zero. And maybe to work, my system needs to change another formula as well.

Collective Mind, I don't know how to halve the efficiency, but I'm interested! This ability is a pain in the ass. Even when I play a scientific culture, I don't use it anymore for fairplay.

Osmosis: I don't plan to change this part of the game, but you hit the nail on the head. Sometimes it's better to be the one who suffers osmosis because it gives you bonuses.

Finally: I find that this mod tool has a flaw, you can't see the code of other modders. On Endless Legend it helped me a lot to see how others had done something.

Enchanteur wrote:

I dropped the Upkeep costs on the districts because it is a negative production. I would like to be able to create an "Upkeep" property like for the units, but I don't know how. I don't know how to create a new asset and have it referenced by the game.

Regarding your change in the cost of districts. I am not trying to link it to the population, as you know I use another system. But I have a technical question and a request for help.
Apparently you are able to recognize the type of district in the formula. And so, for example, know how to link a maker quarter to the workers on the industry. I would like to know how to do that. I can think of some ideas like:
- A quarter of a certain type only increases the costs of other quarters of the same type.
- Only quarters of certain types increase the costs. This would allow for example, when a natural reserve is built, that district does not increase the cost of other districts.
I'm thinking more and more that this formula of increasing all districts by number of districts is a piece of prehistoric archaeology. This comes from the game Endless Legend, which could easily use this system, as all districts (almost) were identical. But I don't find it suitable for Humankind, a game where some districts have minor effects compared to others, and it screws up the overall cost.

Food, if you understand anything about it, let me know! My goal is the following:
- Remove any limitation on the number of citizens you can produce per turn.
- BUT, make the result of the food production more valuable than the fixed variables. So, make it so that a player whose food production is minimal can't often use "buy with pop", while a player who is an expert in food can abuse it.
- I don't know exactly how food works. I tweaked a formula and found a way to raise the maximum pop per turn. But deep down, I don't know how it works behind it. There are several variables with "Growth", GrowthNet, GrowGain, etc. I assume that one of these variables accumulates food until it produces a citizen and then resets to zero. And maybe to work, my system needs to change another formula as well.

Collective Mind, I don't know how to halve the efficiency, but I'm interested! This ability is a pain in the ass. Even when I play a scientific culture, I don't use it anymore for fairplay.

Osmosis: I don't plan to change this part of the game, but you hit the nail on the head. Sometimes it's better to be the one who suffers osmosis because it gives you bonuses.

Depending on exactly what you're talking about with unit upkeep, right now the money upkeep formula is baked into the unit definitions, so all you have to do is change the numbers. Anything other than that the effect would have to be created manually and attached to the unit. I'll explain how I did that on the base quarters in a sec. Also, keep in mind that the game doesn't seem to keep track of the city the unit was created in so you couldn't like assign an Industry upkeep to the home city or anything without some serious fiddling, maybe not even then.

As far as recognizing quarter type, you can't really, but there is an imperfect workaround of sorts, which is worker slots. It's not going to be perfect, because the city center and infrastructures add worker slots, but you can get close to it by using the number of worker slots for the appropriate yield, and the total number of slots is the population limit property. You can also just go with the ExtensionDistrictsCount, but using the population limit will get you closer to a correct ratio. 

To split it out for each of the districts, it might be possible to create a new formula from scratch, but even if it is I didn't want to mess with that, so you can duplicate an existing one. To do that, you have to select the category of the item you want to duplicate (in this case it was the ProductionCost_Extension_Base_Medium, which is in the Rpn Industry Definition category, so you click on Rpn Industry Definition in the narrator and when you do it that way the top of the inspector will have a list of all the items on there. Select the one you want to duplicate, right click, select Duplicate from the menu and voila. In my case I duplicated it four times, renamed each one to identify the base district yield, and changed the formula for each. Then all you have to do is go into the Definition for that particular district and under the Construction Tab you'll be able to select the new one you just created in the Rpn Definition Reference under production cost. That was a very specific description but you can adapt it to pretty much anything where appropriate.

I don't really know how food/growth work either, tbh, all I did was change the food consumption formula. I will be digging in more but nothing as yet.

For Collective Minds, there are basically two city flags that are set when you activate the ability, one to disable production/money and one to increase science. The first is not exposed to us for editing at this point, but the science bonus one is Game Effect_City Flags_Science Mode in the SettlementDescriptor category

Hope any of that helps, and happy fiddling!

Yep, that's all correct. One of the ideas I'm toying with is removing a lot of the extra worker slots that don't come from districts, except for one of each on the city center (because you don't want your cities to go into starvation immediately when you make them). Not just to make the formula more accurate, but also to bring it more in line with the overall idea I mentioned in the original post, which is that districts are what you build to give your citizens a place to work, and infrastructure is what you build to make them more efficient. Of course, that would probably require a buff to the affected infrastructures, but one thing at a time. After all, I should probably stop messing with everything at some point and actually play a full game.

Look at that:

If I duplicate this effect, I should be able to create a new asset, name it the same except it say "CultureSynergy".

Then I make the Commons get +1 culture per adjacent district, instead of a flat +2.

I could also try to make the Synergy about Stability work for any district, instead of the basic ones.