Capitalism 2 and Capitalism Lab Forum

Experimental Modifiers

Introducing a diverse set of Experimental Modifiers for the City Economic Simulation DLC for advanced users who wish to experiment with the simulation's underlying mechanics.

These experimental modifiers are unsupported and may cause unexpected behavior, but offer unprecedented control for those eager to tinker with the game's economic systems.

For the details, please see: https://www.capitalismlab.com/script_ex ... l_ces_dlc/

If you have created interesting scripts using these experimental modifiers, please feel free to share your scripts by posting them here.

Just had a look at these.

Here are some of my comments on these:

Initial City Population
I like this feature and how it enables you to set the city populations for all of the cities at the same time (without having to manually adjust it for each city). This should be incorporated as a main feature for the CES expansion (i.e in the normal difficulty setup).

Max City Population
Interesting feature that can cap the size of a city, can make certain aspects of the game more difficult (capped consumer demand for example).

Migration Rate Modifier
Interesting way to control how quickly a city can expand. I have tested it though and it does not seem to work. I can't see any difference in immigration/emigration rates even when I set it to very high or low settings.

Disable Local Economy
This has pretty big effects when turned off! I never really knew just how much those local competitors actually supported the city economy. Be careful with using this feature, it makes the economy more volatile and dependent on corporate/government contributions.

Firm Employment Effect
This does not seem to effect the actual number of people employed at the firm or the wage costs. I am also not sure if it is actually affecting the number of jobs in the city. At least I can't really see the difference.

Public Facilities Cost Modifier
This one seems very similar to the Public Expenses Index - is there a difference between these two?

Scale Up Consumer Demand
This is a pretty powerful feature, able to really boost the consumer economy. However I think this should be improved to allow a downscaling of consumer demand. I think the latter feature would be useful for mods with added consumer products such as RealWorld, etc as the whole map quickly fills up and perhaps reducing demand might slow things down.

Disable Generating Commercial Buildings
This one causes the city to start with no commercial buildings. However the government will still build these, I am not sure if this is intended or not. But it does give an advantage to private real estate companies due to the unfulfilled demand, it might also cause some issues with the city budget as the city doesn't have it's normal commercial building rental income.

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I haven't tried the scale down features but I am a bit confused by the wording of this:

While the population scale is approximately one-tenth of the base game, this allows for significantly deeper simulation of individual citizens and their behavior.

The default value is 4.

So does this mean that the population size is scaled down by 10, but various other things such as Firm/Farm/Workforces are only scaled down by 4 in the base game (and other things like cargo and production are scaled down by 2)?

Stylesjl wrote: ↑Sun Mar 30, 2025 10:42 am Migration Rate Modifier
Interesting way to control how quickly a city can expand. I have tested it though and it does not seem to work. I can't see any difference in immigration/emigration rates even when I set it to very high or low settings.

The description for this modifier has been updated on https://www.capitalismlab.com/script_ex ... l_ces_dlc/

Below is its updated description. So whether there will be more migration depends on other factors and this modifier alone does not entirely control it.

Migration Rate Modifier=<1 to 500>
It adjusts the rate at which people migrate to a city. The default value is 100, with lower values leading to a slower migration rate. Its primary effect is to amplify the city’s quality of life rating when determining migration. The formula used is:

Quality of Life for Migration = Actual Quality of Life × (Migration Rate Modifier / 100)

Note that there are other factors limiting the actual migration rate such as the supply of housing.

Stylesjl wrote: ↑Sun Mar 30, 2025 10:42 am Firm Employment Effect
This does not seem to effect the actual number of people employed at the firm or the wage costs. I am also not sure if it is actually affecting the number of jobs in the city. At least I can't really see the difference.

I tested a game with a value of 50 and there are more Job Openings and the unemployment rate is lower.

Stylesjl wrote: ↑Sun Mar 30, 2025 10:42 am Public Facilities Cost Modifier
This one seems very similar to the Public Expenses Index - is there a difference between these two?

In version 11.0.57, Public Facilities Cost Modifier has been changed to Public Facilities Setup Cost Modifier. It now only affects the setup cost of public facilities.

Stylesjl wrote: ↑Sun Mar 30, 2025 10:42 am Scale Up Consumer Demand
This is a pretty powerful feature, able to really boost the consumer economy. However I think this should be improved to allow a downscaling of consumer demand. I think the latter feature would be useful for mods with added consumer products such as RealWorld, etc as the whole map quickly fills up and perhaps reducing demand might slow things down.

In version 11.0.57, Scale Up Consumer Demand has been changed to Consumer Demand Modifier
It has a range between 10 and 500, with 100 being the standard value.

Stylesjl wrote: ↑Sun Mar 30, 2025 10:42 am
I haven't tried the scale down features but I am a bit confused by the wording of this:

While the population scale is approximately one-tenth of the base game, this allows for significantly deeper simulation of individual citizens and their behavior.

The default value is 4.

So does this mean that the population size is scaled down by 10, but various other things such as Firm/Farm/Workforces are only scaled down by 4 in the base game (and other things like cargo and production are scaled down by 2)?

Yes, your understanding is correct.