A bit of both. Basically, the educational level of the province will act as a general barrier for the complexity of buildings that can be built in the province, symbolizing the amount of higher level educated professionals in the province - skilled craftsmen and architects, literate clerks and accountants, that kind of thing. In a way, it sort of acts as a development "wall", but will also have meaningful effects in the kind of events that will fire in the province itself - things like, say, business success will be more likely in a province where there is a well educated population to support this. The number one source of education in a province will be temple holdings, which (much like in our timeline) serve as temple schools to provide education for the "masses" and will be able to host a large number of improvements such as seminaries, cathedral and monastery schools and, later, universities.
These will act as a supporting gate to go alongside the existing technology system; the population can be well educated by medieval standards, but if the thing they need hasn't been invented yet, you're not suddenly going to be able to build up a cathedral when your people don't know what a rib vault is even if they have the know how to build it.
Now, the way this can be implemented is actually rather easy. CK2 has a function in its events to add and remove buildings, with this one being the one that adds shipyards for the Norse...
Code:
any_demesne_title = {
if = {
limit = {
tier = BARON
location = {
port = yes
culture = norse
}
owner = {
is_feudal = yes
culture = norse
}
NOT = { has_building = ca_shipyard_1 }
}
add_building = ca_shipyard_1...and the wiki has documentation about a mirror function, remove_building. If the education level in the province is monitored by modifier (ie, the temple building causes an event to fire to set a modifier in the province like Education: Low), it can be added to holdings without being buildable by the player (you can set buildings to be just flat out impossible to build by having an impossible requirement) as a building that can be set as a requirement for other buildings and as a means for the game to identify different holdings with different levels of education in the province itself, and an event could be used to maintain it automatically by removing the existing buildings and adding new ones in to raise it up or lower it.
That let's you have literacy on a provincial level, and lets you marry a massive number of buildings to the educational level in the province itself. It's not so much about technology (which I'm taking it as it actually is: technology) but about the abilities of the population itself to carry out the work, and it allows certain buildings to activate or cease functioning without being destroyed when the population no longer has the expertise to operate them, for example.
I do think I'll add a few extra educational traits, but not to do with the regular educational system, but something to be layered on top - a sort of event system where a son or a daughter can be sent off to a temple school to learn, or go on to university and receive a classical style education in mathematics and art and history, something that doesn't really exist in the current game. That'd be a trait that goes alongside the regular educational system (you could have a university educated martial heir, for example, or a master of learning who only has a temple school education) and acts to strengthen it, whilst also making a good sink in the economy to keep coin flowing in and out of the player's coffers. That's a problem I've noticed in a lot of other building mods where they've added more money faucets but no money sinks to make up the extra income, which causes the economic balance to fall out of whack and leaves too much gold in the economy and lets you easily save into the thousands.
All this is pretty much doable, and actually rather easy to do. The hard part will be building the background events necessary to monitor the educational system's rise and fall, but that's not actually that difficult in its own right.
As for how the base game educational traits factor in, there's no real reason why you can't gate certain buildings behind them, as we know the game already has cultural buildings that work on a requirements list of cultures. Here's one:
Code:
#Welsh and English Longbow archery range
ca_culture_saxon_english_1 = {
desc = ca_culture_saxon_english_1_desc
potential = {
OR = {
culture = english
culture = welsh
has_building = ca_culture_saxon_english_1
}
}
is_active_trigger = {
ROOT = {
OR = {
culture = english
culture = welsh
}
}
}
trigger = {
TECH_CASTLE_CONSTRUCTION = 0
ROOT = {
OR = {
culture = english
culture = welsh
}
}
}
prerequisites = { ca_wall_2 }
gold_cost = 200
build_time = 730
archers_offensive = 0.15
archers = 60
ai_creation_factor = 101
extra_tech_building_start = 0.8
}That means that you can set a building to require a certain education or trait, but then have that building continue functioning for characters without that trait in the future, similar to how people can have one of the builder bloodlines in CK2 as it is now and build things like the Expanded Supply Depots and have them continue working even if they're not held by someone with the bloodline trait and who can't actually continue building down that line.
By that, you can tie education into the building system and make it a provincial thing at the same time, making it a lot more logical to pick things like stewardship or diplomacy educations even early in the game where martial would usually be king, simply because of what doors they open in provincial development - rather than there being just one truly viable path, there will a number of different ways to build towards success.
Good grief, this turned into a developer diary
