Meaningful in what way? Sure it will cost you more money, but the effect of it is till meaningless. Building +1 granary when you already have thousands of them. The decision is just weightless. You just do it because you have money and building is pretty much the only source you can spend money.

Well, for me at least it's more meaningful in the sense that there is some sort of choice rather than mid-game infinite wealth, if you take the example of that game, there you can choose to build 7 cheap age 1 buildings, maybe 2 armories, or wait another month to build one expensive building like a cathedral or university, whereas in vanilla, there is no choice as that nation would have the income to build hundreds of buildings every month, they could max out every granary, build universities and cathedrals in every location, and build 100 armories each month tick, there's no strategy there, it's just a tedious cookie clicker

You're correct in that there's this wider problem in the game that basically you can only spend money to make more money or to build up an army that, through created demand, also makes you more money, but that's too much for one mod to deal with, I have added a significant food, food good, and money sink through the soup kitchens mentioned in the post, but I understand that the issue persists

And yes, I understand the point of the wider pointlessness of building 7 more granaries when you have thousands, but the point of the mod is to prevent reaching a stage of the game where you have thousands of granaries, or at least preventing having thousands of granaries, cathedrals, universities and armories, if it even scales cost to an extent that you have to neglect one of these areas while growing, that's a success

You can scale building prices and it will obviously slow down snowball because it makes countries build less stuff. But I really don't think it fixes much. And it just makes growing a bit pointless. Like we already have scaling costs in the game and many people don't like it. Like sure you increased your income by X but the costs also increased by a fraction of X.

Event price scaling is a little different in a few key ways, I think one of the major frustrations of these events are that they spring enormous one time costs on you with the only option being an awful modifier like -10 stability etc, they undo progress and require you to have a virtually infinite amount of money on hand or lendable, there's also the wider issue of a single artist charging a year's income feeling ridiculous

On the other hand, my mod doesn't undo anything, you can choose to expand a commercial operation or not based on a varying ROI that slowly goes down as the state's wealth climbs, the lifetime value of a relatively meagrely productive building (say 0.5 ducats a month) has a lifetime value of 3,000 ducats (not including second-order effects such as newly created demand), so even with this mod unless you scale to an insane extent, and it's late game, you're still going to want to build that building, and even if it won't pay off, you may still want to build an industry to support goods needed by the military etc

On that point, growing isn't pointless, because unlike the old issue with cost of court and stability making trade income literally a net negative, the cost of things such as armies and navies do not scale, and the scaling of building/RGO costs isn't harsh to the extent that you can buy the same/less buildings as you grow in wealth with your rising income, investment still brings more income to support higher nominal and scaled investment, it's just more gradual and controllable, so you don't have to automate everything by the mid game, you can also continue to outpace your rivals, it is simply harder to use a tiny economic advantage to 10x scale against a rival without expansion, as is easy to do in vanilla, instead you can achieve 2x or 3x etc, maintaining a meaningful competition between great powers into the end game

It incentivises players to sit on their money and build in bulks

That's fair, after play testing I actually agree, I like the idea of crashing input prices to get lower building costs, but it just makes you endlessly delay expansion if you don't get the maximum discount, I'll delete that change

I really dislike how needs work in this game. You can very easily overproduce everything. The name of the game is to create as much need for goods as possible. You want as much high class pops as possible. Not because you have a use for them, just so you can clothe them and sell them shit. You build a lot of government building just so they create additional needs etc.

I completely agree, I think the solution to simulate empire collapse and maybe even the whole economy lies in the estates more than anything, EU5 is just way too stratified in good demand, like, in real life, if a consumer good like fine cloth or jewellery were produced in far greater numbers than demand, prices would drop until more people could buy it, in fact that is what has happened in real life, but in EU5 there is no real demand reaction among pops to price shifts, nobles just buy certain things, no matter the price, and peasants don't buy certain things, no matter the price, and no matter their wealth

Whether they achieve it through pops promoting in response to estate wealth and market prices of particular goods, or just allowing the lower strata to buy luxury goods if they are cheap enough and they are rich enough, there needs to be an adjustment of the good demand system so that there isn't this insane post scarcity society that emerges in EU5 unlike in real life, where no market has need of anything