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AI Limited Expansion - Saturated Empires

TWW2 is no longer getting patches or DLC, so my mods are also considered final and will not receive any more updates. Therefore I disabled comments on all of them to avoid constantly getting notifications for the same dumb questions that have been answered a thousand times already. Any comments or announcements I might make in the future will be posted under my collection here:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1766089433

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Makes AI factions expand only to a certain size and then stop taking more settlements, while still actively defending their territory. The limits expand as the campaign goes on, so rapidly expanding AI factions will be slowed down for a while, and then later become active again and try to expand their territory further.

Supports both Mortal Empires and The Eye of the Vortex campaigns.

Can be used with an existing campaign, but savegames made with this mod active are probably not usable without it.

Compatible with almost everything.


WHAT IT DOES

With this mod, major factions belonging to a common bloc will first act normally and fight and take more land. Their behavior, strength or chance of success is not changed by this mod in any way. But if and when they reach a common threshold of number of regions owned, they will assume a passive personality and stop expanding. Instead, they will focus on defending what they already have. They still build or maintain strong armies and react to threats and attacks, actively defending their territory.

For example, Naggarond, Cult of Pleasure, Har Ganeth and Rakarth constitute a bloc and share a common target number of owned settlements. Once they all together own this number of settlements, they all become defensive and refrain from further conquest.

If a faction or bloc loses settlements, because they were conquered by other AI or the player, and drop below their target number of owned regions, their personality switches again to one of the normal personalities, and they re-engage in expansionist warfare until they have once again reached their target.

After a certain number of turns has passed, the thresholds of the blocs increase, so AI factions can grow bigger as the campaign goes on, to match the player's expansion.

The result is that there can still be strong factions or blocs for the player to fight, but less of a monoculture of 1-3 extremely large AI superpowers and nothing else.

Many factions are not part of a bloc. For these, a limit can be set per race. If one of them does reaches that limit, they will also become passive. Limits for non-bloc factions are for every individual faction of that race, not for all of them combined.

NEW: Regardless of its size, an AI faction will always become active again if it has a border with territory owned by the human player! This will only affect that particular faction. So for example the Greenskins bloc might be generally passive because the various Greenskins factions own a lot of regions, but if the Bloody Handz share a border with the player, they will become active while the rest of the bloc remains inactive.


DETAILS / RECOMMENDATIONS FOR USE

With the Mod Configuration Tool you can set a custom target value for the different blocs, and a random deviation. The latter modifies the given target values to introduce some randomness and unpredictability into the campaign. The randomization happens only once after the first turn, and you see the results in the MCT settings, and adjust them at any time.

I recommend not setting the values too low. It should not be possible for several competing blocs to all reach their respective target. If many blocs easily achieve their goals, the map will be very inactive, because all the AI factions are happy with what they have and just sit in their settlements.

Successful factions/blocs often slightly overshoot their target, so set the target values slightly lower than the actual maximum number of settlements you want them to have. Because they still actively defend their territory, they often conquer a few more settlements close to their borders that they see as a threat. In most cases they go only 2-5 settlements above their target, but factions with long borders and many neighbors can overshoot their target by quite a bit.

This mod makes dominating factions stop their steamrolling at some point, but it rarely helps the weaker factions actually gain the upper hand and fight back. The strong factions easily defend against the others, unless you set their limits extremely low. To make other factions have more success, I recommend combining this mod with my other mod "Unnatural Selection Ultimate".

Limiting AI steamrolling without limiting the even easier player steamrolling is kind of cheesy, so if you don't want to cheese, I recommend my other mods like "Progressively Harder Expansion" that imposes expansion penalties on the player.

Very low target values often cause factions of a bloc not to confederate.

Factions that belong to the same bloc as a human-controlled faction are still affected, so if you expand past the target value, all major AI factions in your bloc will become passive. The player faction itself is unaffected.

Note that the diplomatic trait labels introduced by this mod are shared with some vanilla personalities. Some factions may show the "Restrained" and "Saturated Power" trait even though they do not have the special inactive personality from this mod. They only have the semi-passive personalities that exist in the vanilla game.


FACTION/BLOC DETAILS

Major factions are considered a bloc if they live in roughly the same area and are likely to confederate each other and/or are usually acting together. So the main Dark Elves factions are a bloc, because they live close together and usually either are allies and confederate, or kill each other early. Skaven on the other hand belong to several different blocs, because they live far from each other and usually act independently.

By default, the base target number increases by 20% (from the base value) every 25 turns. So for example, a bloc initially limited to 20 regions will be allowed to hold 24 regions after turn 25, and 40 regions after turn 125.