I've been trying to make a mod with little success to change how borders are handled.

What I want to do is make is so a city's radius is more or less protected from another's borders taking it over.

For example, you have a city, 4 tiles, another city

In this situation, I want it so that neither of those cities will ever 'steal' the other's land. I hate it when another city takes the land my city can havest from, but it can't use in any way. The land becomes useless.

I can think of a couple options to solve this.

1: Make it so the maxiumum size of a city's borders be the same or at most 1 greater than its economic radius.

2: I'm not sure how borders 'fight' each other for who gets the land, I know its pretty much more culture wins, but would there be a way for distance to also play a factor? Have it much easier for a city to 'defend' its 2 tile radius than for a city 4-5 tiles away to take the land?

The problem is, I can't even find in the xml files where border sizes are handled, let alone how to tackle the 2nd idea.

I just want a solution to these useless plots of land. I usually out-culture my neighbours, but the map just looks stupid with my country owning a huge useless track of farms and mines that give me nothing, but hurt my neighbour. If only there was a way to make border deals though diplomacy...

So, can anyone give me some tips of changing how the game handles borders and how borders "fight" each other?

Thread moved to main C&C. Please post only completed mod components in the Mod Components section.

If you ask your question here some others might be able to assist you. :)

1. You can reduce number of city cultural levels or make cultural expansion slower in Civ4CultureLevelInfo.xml

2. Borders 'fight' is more complicated question. The answer is, probably, in SDK, not in XML.

Thanks for the info.
I looked at that file but wasn't sure what to change to restrict the levels.

Let's say I wanted it so that cities borders could only expand 3 tiles, what exactly would I change/delete ?

the first entry is for no borders... then 1 tile.. then 2 tile and so on? Just delete the rest?

A simple solution that would involve alot of modding ,what about having units with the abillity to produce culture.in this way you could determin exactly where your borders stand and push a competitors border as well.