Fun and Balance mod for EU4 1.7.3

Previous version of Fun & Balance mod works perfectly fine with 1.7.3 hotfix since it's an exe-only change and should be compatible with all the mods, but I'll use this opportunity to release a few minor features.

For complete list of changes, check this post for previous version. For reasoning behind them, check all the previous posts about the mod - however you're the final judge and you can selectively pick and choose whichever chances from the mod you like.

You can download it here.

Balance tweaks

Building monarch point cost reduced from 10 to 5. 10 was sensible if all these conditions were met:

• Your empire was at most medium sized (like Scandinavia)
• You had no extra sources of income (like with trade ideas)
• You had no significant discounts on build cost (like with economic ideas)

If any of these conditions were true, and especially if two or more were true, then building instead of being about equally constrained by money and monarch points became purely monarch-point constrained and money became irrelevant. Changing cost down to 5 seems reasonably balanced for most countries, and you can get it further down to 4 if you take quantity ideas.

Partial westernization (going up to Muslim tech) now requires no rebel-occupied provinces. Apparently Ming somehow manages to get required stability +2 even while half of it is occupied by peasants.

Return Subject Core CB

Coming right from Crusader Kings 2 - if another nation occupies cores which rightfully belong to your subject (vassal, junior PU partner, or colonial nation), you now get CB on them, at the end of monthly tick.

CB is relatively weak if you want to use it for anything else than returning subject cores. It gives 0 dip cost for full annexation, since that's the only one you can get subject cores from OPM, you'd still need to have your vassal occupy their capital to get the whole deal for 0 dip.

There's no way to press any other subject CBs like fabricated claims, holy wars etc.

More reformable countries

Almost every culture's primary country is now reformable. Conditions are pretty strict:

• you must have the right primary culture
• you must own and have cores on every single province of that culture
• admin tech at least 10
• not subject, not tribal, not at war, at least 3 provinces
• country you want to switch to isn't already formable in some other way (then use whichever way is already provided by the game)
• your current country isn't on blacklist (Holy Roman Empire, Papal State, Hindustan, Mughals, Spain, France, Germany, Byzantium, Bukhara, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, Persia, Great Britain, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Egypt, Vijayanagar) - it's here to prevent cycles of tag switching and other weirdness
• you can't form Muscovy, which is technically Russian's primary culture - you should try to form Russia instead
• you can't form Shun or Zhou - technically primary cultures of Han and Cantonese cultures - that would just feel really weird

Changing tag this way gives you centralization modifier for 20 years (+1 revolt risk, +10% tax), switches your idea group, and gives you 25 prestige. It's quite weak reward relative to effort, it's mostly here if you want to roleplay unusual scenarios.

Existing tag changing decisions are divided about switching idea group or not, and for some switches it makes more sense to go one way or the other. Here I'm switching it every time to provide you with a way out in case you start as someone with generic or otherwise really awful ideas.

AI will take this decision as well if condition are met. This doesn't happen often since conditions of controlling every province of given culture is pretty strict, but it happens from time to time. Naples forming Sicily is probably the most likely one to happen - and it makes a lot of sense as they were literally calling themselves "kingdom of Sicily" the whole time.

Everything is optional

As usual, all changes are independent from each other as much as possible, so you can cherrypick whichever changes you like and disregard the rest.

Compatibility with other mods

The mod is currently only guaranteed compatible with UI-only mods.

I've been asked multiple times about compatibility with CK2 imports, EVE, Extended Timeline, and other mods. Right now it requires manual merging, which shouldn't be too much work, and people have successfully done so.

I might someday write a script to merge these automatically and provide packages with both, but that's just a vague plan for now.