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Specialist Groups

A small mod that adds variety in city development by introducing a think called "Specialist Groups".



This rather small Mod adds specialist groups to the game. What are "specialist groups"? Well. Specialist groups are what makes a city unique on this new planet. What makes it special. It's what a city is good at. What the world knows it for. Some cities might have the best scientists in the land, others might have great Traders, and that one city might even be known for its friendly people living in idyllic suburbs.

Whenever a city is founded, it is assigned a random specialist group. The group then demands access to a certain number of a specific tile improvement. Most of the time that will be an advanced improvement, but it might be a basic improvement as well. You can track the specialist groups in all of your cities in a new UI Popup that can be accessed by pressing the little + Button in the lower right corner of the screen.

If the city works as many tiles with the specific improvement as required, it gets a major bonus, usually to the yield(s) that the improvement is associated with, but there are some exceptions.


The other day I was thinking about two things that I don't quite like about Beyond Earth:
- all cities are more or less the same.
- there aren't many reasons to use a diverse range of improvements, instead, players are incentivised to unlock one of them and spam it everywhere (or just spam farms everywhere)

So this mod tries to tackle both of these issues in a way that adds some interesting gameplay. If players want to make their citizens happy, they need to unlock and construct a number of advanced improvements. These improvements, as well as the bonuses to usually one or two very specific yields then make the cities feel more specialized.

This has the downside of not allowing players to choose how to specialize each city, but that is part of the design. Like the randomized terrain, specialist groups are meant to put players into unique situations every game, instead of allowing them to always play the exact same strategy. Different specialist groups will be available every game, and that will lead to different opportunities. Players also have to think about whether the specific population type of a given city fits their overall plan, or whether they should ignore it on a case by case basis.


This mod does not override any game files, so it should be compatible with most other mods.


Unfortunately, there is no way to force AIs to place specific improvements, so the AI will not make active use of this system at all. If it happens to meet the requirements of a specialization, it will still gain access to the bonus like the player, but it will not try to actively fulfill requirements.

- Background Image used: Star Citizen (Video game to be released somewhere around 2025)
- The UI was created by heavily referencing and partly copy-pasting code from framedarchitexture's Greatest Cities Mod. Give it a try if you haven't already, it's great. :)