Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
Is it possible to change the cost of settlers?
Settler cost
- Thread starter Thalassicus
- Start date
Maniac
Apolyton Sage
Just a wild guess, but you might try out ADVANCED_START_CITY_COST in GlobalDefines.xml. IIRC that value was used in Civ4 to determine settler cost based on certain variables like the starting era.
Spatzimaus
Mad Scientist
No, you can't just add a fixed amount to a single Settler unit. You CAN change the cost of all settler-type units in your game.
The base Settler's cost depends on two factors: the population of the city that will result from its founding, and the free buildings included in that city.
Specifically, it's all in GlobalDefines:
ADVANCED_START_CITY_COST (84) is the base value.
ADVANCED_START_POPULATION_COST (150) is the amount you pay per extra population. So if you start in a later era, where all cities start at size 3-4, then you're paying 300-450 extra.
NEW_CITY_BUILDING_VALUE_MODIFIER (-60) is the final one that matters. What this says is, if you're in an era where each city starts with a free Monument (cost 40 hammers), add 16 to the cost of the Settler (60% off, hence the -60). Any game where you start in the Medieval or later will have a Monument in every new city. Games starting in the Industrial will have a much larger list of free buildings, which make Settlers in those games extremely expensive.
There's also a small addition for visibility, and they've added an _INCREASE variable to most of these to allow you to make them semi-exponential, but those are the basics.
If you set the Settler's unit Cost to anything other than zero, then it becomes a fixed cost regardless of start era, which can obviously be extremely broken for late-era starts.
Unfortunately, since these scalings are in GlobalDefines, it means that you can't make multiple settler units in a mod, with different power levels and different costs, without making all but one of them a fixed cost. Very annoying.
The base Settler's cost depends on two factors: the population of the city that will result from its founding, and the free buildings included in that city.
Specifically, it's all in GlobalDefines:
ADVANCED_START_CITY_COST (84) is the base value.
ADVANCED_START_POPULATION_COST (150) is the amount you pay per extra population. So if you start in a later era, where all cities start at size 3-4, then you're paying 300-450 extra.
NEW_CITY_BUILDING_VALUE_MODIFIER (-60) is the final one that matters. What this says is, if you're in an era where each city starts with a free Monument (cost 40 hammers), add 16 to the cost of the Settler (60% off, hence the -60). Any game where you start in the Medieval or later will have a Monument in every new city. Games starting in the Industrial will have a much larger list of free buildings, which make Settlers in those games extremely expensive.
There's also a small addition for visibility, and they've added an _INCREASE variable to most of these to allow you to make them semi-exponential, but those are the basics.
If you set the Settler's unit Cost to anything other than zero, then it becomes a fixed cost regardless of start era, which can obviously be extremely broken for late-era starts.
Unfortunately, since these scalings are in GlobalDefines, it means that you can't make multiple settler units in a mod, with different power levels and different costs, without making all but one of them a fixed cost. Very annoying.
Thalassicus
Bytes and Nibblers
Thank you for the assistance, that's exactly the info I was looking for. 
Darkhour
Warlord
so in other words you can adjust the scaling cost on advanced start but not the initial starting cost in the ancient era? Am i reading this right?
Spatzimaus
Mad Scientist
No. The 84 IS for the Ancient start, and you can tweak that. It's only in the later eras that cities start with higher costs for population and free buildings.
What I was saying was this: in my mod, I have the Settler unit, in the Ancient Era, and a Colony Pod unit at Globalization that's better in every way (3 MP, all terrain 1 MP, can paradrop, has 50 combat strength). The problem is that there's no way to have both costs vary with your starting era; they either have to have exactly the same cost, or one of them has to be an absolutely fixed cost (which has obvious problems in late-era starts). So since I couldn't make the Colony Pod cost X+200 or something like that, I had to give it heavy resource requirements instead.
Darkhour
Warlord
ok cheers spatz
