Animals and Barbarians.. a cultural option.

I'm always a bit dubious about animal disapearing in cIV and in FfH particularly.

AFAIk, there are still (some) man eating lions /tiger in the actual wilderness, way much time after those lands are claimed by nations. the only places those dangers disapeared is when man is installing in the place, creating towns, cultures, ...etc.

IIRC, each plot is assigned a "cultural value" that is a percentage, modified by cultural output of a city.

I would propose to use this mechanism to allow animal to spawn in claimed but not worked wilderness in civilized empires and thus have more barbarian and animal spawn in the middle game.

principe :
-give a increase of wilderness culture to some tiles, terrain, improvement, features.
-this improves animals life time.

use :
-when tile has more than X% of wilderness culture, animal can move on it. (instead of being bared of cultural barriers)
-when a tile has more than Y% of wilderness culture, the tile counts toward barbarian tiles for creation of animals and they can be spawned on the tile.
-when tile has more than Z%, the tile counts toward barbarian tiles for creation of barbs units.conclusion :
-life is rendered a bit more difficult for workers as animals can wander for some time into cultural borders (claiming a land is not the same as
domesticate it).
-animals exists a bit more longer
-animal are not forzen or expulsed or killed just by a new border extension.. they have some few turns to get away...
-animals still cannot enter city tiles, and animals are quickly pushed out of cultivated areas.
-forest, desert and jungles are wilder than bare flatlands, for a longer time

issues :
-no reduction of barb spawn /animal spawn with removing FoW. (only that you see them comming from farther away and reduce there spawning ground)
-no way to know where your worker can move safely.

Do you have any comments ?
I would like to have something like that in FfH.. (I can always ask )

That would make hunter type units useful for a longer period of time. I always thought it was sad that the second you saw a barb unit you knew the animals were to be no more.

that's why I proposed that.
but maybe too complex to be reallistic.

I'd love this Even now in our world sometimes a Moose just happens to wander into town Or Badgers get into your trashcans.


It would lead to more people stacking a move 2+ unit onto each worker, and an advantage to the Luichirp defensive workers. Because even if there isn't an animal there NOW, within the 8 turns it takes to build that road, one could pop up right next to your worker.


Main issues I would see with it are:
1 - Do animals/barbarians spawn with 0 movement? If not, your undefended worker could be captured without you EVER seeing the opposition.

2 - Does a Barbarian unit have to "build" a city, or does the city Spawn? If they spawn, you have to make sure they cannot spawn inside of your cultural borders (actually I think I might oppose the idea of strict Barbarians spawning in cultural borders. Just animals seem appropriate).

3 - If it is animals cannot enter a WORKED tile (the ones actually giving hammer/food to the town) then they could still spawn right next to the city, though not attack the city at all. But this would remove a tile you can move a citizen to if you need to shift production. Need to keep them out of the entire "Fat Cross" of the city.

4 - In world builder there are stronger versions of each animal. I remember Kael mentioned his desire to create more powerful animals to make later tech Recon types more useful, and possibly make certain sections of the map into "wildlands" which a non-advanced civilization simply cannot enter. If this does go into effect soonish, these stronger animals could absolutely wreak havoc inside your borders

xienwolf said:

Main issues I would see with it are:
1 - Do animals/barbarians spawn with 0 movement? If not, your undefended worker could be captured without you EVER seeing the opposition.

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I have thought about that, not written, true, animals should spawn with 0move

2 - Does a Barbarian unit have to "build" a city, or does the city Spawn? If they spawn, you have to make sure they cannot spawn inside of your cultural borders (actually I think I might oppose the idea of strict Barbarians spawning in cultural borders. Just animals seem appropriate)..

Click to expand...

in my proposition, barabrian can only spawn in un-FoW tiles, but wild tiles count for their spawn rate.
I am not a modder so I can only propose a mechanism and hope some of it may be taken/used

3 - If it is animals cannot enter a WORKED tile (the ones actually giving hammer/food to the town) then they could still spawn right next to the city, though not attack the city at all. But this would remove a tile you can move a citizen to if you need to shift production. Need to keep them out of the entire "Fat Cross" of the city..

Click to expand...

if you produce culture in the city, (therefore have a fat cross and not a square) the ratio wild/culture would quickly decrease. and that would be the work of units to free the land for workers..

4 - In world builder there are stronger versions of each animal. I remember Kael mentioned his desire to create more powerful animals to make later tech Recon types more useful, and possibly make certain sections of the map into "wildlands" which a non-advanced civilization simply cannot enter. If this does go into effect soonish, these stronger animals could absolutely wreak havoc inside your borders

Click to expand...

not really, as a strong empire will have high cultural input around his core cities... so animal wouldn't be able to move there. but frontier-type cities... just in developement... with low cultural output ?? those would have a very hard time if the encounter stronger animals.. (but that's what rangers and beastmasters are for)

Ah yes, I had forgotten about the cultural set for Wildlands by the time I responded. I'm not quite sure how well that would work out as the mechanic for this. I think that in order for the game to assign culture to a square, it has to be inside some border, and you cannot use a settler in any borders but your own.


What could work almost the same way is to have a cut-off point for specific cultural values to each square. So once you have >25 Culture points it stops counting toward Barbarian spawning. >75 stops counting for animal spawning. >150 Animals can no longer enter space.


Numbers would have to be shifted possibly to account for cultural value reductions at a distance from the city. But as I understand the mechanic, your city adds the culture it produces split evenly among the outter ring of its culture range. So the closer your city to the cultural border, the fewer squares your culture is split among and the more points you put into that tile to make it "yours."

Without another Civ pressed up against you, this means as soon as you apply even 1 point to the tile, it is 100% yours. Hence using raw numbers instead of a % value of ownership to set where animals can move and which squares still count for them to spawn.


But if of course there was a way to assign actually cultural points for the wilderness in each tile without blocking settlers from forming new towns, that would be nice because it would mean if some area remained untamed for a few hundred turns it would now take MUCH longer to tame it, since the wilderness has been able to build up some "culture" points in that location. (and it might help to keep barbarian trait players at peace with the Barbarians much longer, since now the Barb/Wilderness will have a large culture score of their own).

yep..
but raw culture points would mean animal would be able to enter city square unless these are high culture cities (3rd-4th ring)

about culture :
when you raze an enemy city... or conquere it..
I thought the tiles of the razed city still had the cultural value of the former civ...but the tiles are no more his if the neighbouring cities do not have the tile into their culture rings...
the culture they applied on the tile does not disappear.. if they build a city nearby or retake the city, the tile will be their again. as strong as before for opposing your cultural conversion of tiles...

and normally you should be able to settle in that land.

am I wrong or not ?

that's the mechanism I proposed for wilderness culture : culture that is not into a border.

most difficult would be adding cultural value to terrain /improvement /features...

You are right. I forgot about city flipping, there is some data retained on cultural value, without a border being set. Not sure how the mechanic works then, but sounds like it could be feasible.

The town square is going to be a sticking point, unless building a town can reset the culture score for that single square in addition to placing a new town.

You could just have an if statement check to see if there is a town there (i think).

While we're fooling around with animals in town, I'd like to see a change to the Carnival/Jailbreak scenario that lets the animals automatically escape to outside the town's cultural boundaries. As it is, they tend to make suicidal attacks. If they got free, the player would have the possibility of recapturing them.

I personally love this mechanics. I don't know how easy will they be for coding. Maybe this could be simplified somehow like this:
- All animals can spawn in a certain kind of tile (forest / jungle for most of them, ice / tundra for polar bears) no matter if it is inside cultural borders but always at least two tiles away from cities.
- Animals will not attack cities.
- Animals will tend to escape cultural borders if possible.
- Removing a forest / jungle will add chances that an animal unit is spawned in nearby tiles.

Maybe this is too hard, I am not sure...

or maybe just : tiles without improvement nor road count as animal tiles for numbers and spawning.
animal can walk into cultural boundaries but not in fat cross/2 tiles from cities
removing a forest/jungle can create an animal in nearby tile

it would really simplify my proposal... but maybe a bit difficult for the game (fat cross check already exist when moving settlers (blue tiles)... maybe this can be used for animal mvt).