u/RealHustleBones

Project Caesar shipped, and then with each patch turned into less of a fun game and more of an irritating chore — complacency, diseases that never go away, granaries that don't fill, subjects you can't play without but also don't benefit from having, annexation costs more inflated than the price of gas, truces that drag on forever. Stack all these together and the game has no momentum.

This mod puts it back. It is, overwhelmingly, a revert mod: it returns specific values to where they were at 1.0.4, or at least before the big nerfs in Rossbach and Echinades. If I read a patch note and my immediate reaction was, "Wow, this is going to suck to play with," or "Wow, this is an arbitrary change made to slow the game and/or the player down and there's nothing comparable or better in its place," I made an adjustment. Where I changed something that wasn't a straight revert, it's labeled below as a creative tweak. If a change was a genuine improvement or a bugfix, it stays.

What it reverts:

- Complacency — Disabled. No complacency build-up, no research/cabinet penalty, no prestige malus for a peaceful map.

- Disease immunity decay — influenza, measles, smallpox, and typhus no longer bleed away your hard-won resistance. Plague and malaria lethality returned to pre-1.2 levels.

- Food decay — stored food no longer rots from winter, storms, or just existing. Both the weather-based decay and the flat global decay added after launch are removed.

- Subject penalties — the cabinet-efficiency malus on vassals, fiefdoms, dominions, and tributaries is gone. So is the decentralization drift you get just for holding subjects.

- Annexation cost — reverted from the inflated 200-base back down.

- Truce length — back to 3 years (15 → 5 for scaled truces).

- Enforce culture & religion — the 10-year cooldown and the minimum-subject-tenure gate are both removed.

My own personal tweaks to unchain the fun:

- Centralization — at launch this value carried a war-exhaustion/counter-espionage profile; 1.2 swapped it for a flat subject-loyalty malus. I replaced that malus with +10% research speed.

- Colonial nations — diplomatic capacity cost cut hard, so a colonial empire doesn't eat your whole diplo budget.

- Pronoia — given a small cabinet-efficiency bonus. Vanilla pronoia never had one; this is a tweak, not a revert.

- NEW: Improve cultural opinion (subjects) — the absurd 50-year cooldown on asking a subject to improve their cultural opinion is cut to 5 years. It now has a prestige and gold cost so it isn't free to spam.

- NEW: Culture capacity cost — accepting and tolerating cultures is much lighter on your cultural capacity. Coring a multi-culture empire is no longer the nightmare it was.

Compatibility:

Right now, this mod is built and tested with 1.2.3. But, given the amount of files the mod touches, it may become unstable or even unusable in later versions. I'm very new to making mods and I have a pretty intense work schedule, but please let me know at any time whether something is broken, gets broken, or if you just have an idea. Have fun.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3723705552