City State Expansion - Extra Cities

Hi all

I'm not entirely sure if this has already been done, or, if it was, successfully, but I've not long uploaded a mod "Minor Civs" to the Workshop that allows City States to have additional cities.

I found part of the Lua code quite some time ago, but haven't been able to find it again, so apologies if I've doubled-up a mod, oe part of a mod here!

Anyhoo...

Each city state can have a maximum of 3 cities, including any they may conquer. The new cities are spawned (rather than settled) when a requirement is satified and they can only be placed on the same continent as the first - they were too prone to springing up in places the city state had no knowledge of if there was a lack of space on home turf.

So far, it's been working well. The only unfortunate part, is that the city names are random and not linked to the first. I had originally tried to group some together - Phoenicians, Huns, Anglo-Saxons - as that was more the intention of the mod at the time, but although this did work, I couldn't get around persistent TXT_KEY issues, which left the new groups of Minor Civs making a mess of the screen, grr!

Might prove interesting for Terra maps and those that feel more confident taking on city states than major civs

Ps, have I posted this in the right place?

This is pretty neat! I can't help you with the naming woes, unfortunately, as I'm not a modder for this game.

But I'll be sure to check it out. I'd been wanting something like this for a while.

PR0927 said:

This is pretty neat! I can't help you with the naming woes, unfortunately, as I'm not a modder for this game.

But I'll be sure to check it out. I'd been wanting something like this for a while.

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Cool

I'd been messing with it on/off forever and, like I said, not sure whether it's all been done already, but hopefully it'll prove interesting if nothing else

Did you get any further with this mod as I would like to add it to my little mod?

Regards

Riker13

Sorry for the minor bump here.

This is very interesting daviiadams. I had a couple of questions for you if you don't mind?

1 - Is there a way to enable expansion for some City States but disable it for others?
2 - You say that the new cities are spawned when a requirement is reached. What is the requirement? Or is that user defined in the XML or Lua files?

I'm not experienced with Lua (in fact I've only just started on XML) so can't help with the naming issues either I'm afraid. Hope you're able to work something out.

Riker13 said:

Did you get any further with this mod as I would like to add it to my little mod?

Regards

Riker13

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I'm working on things on/off, generally when there's a eureka moment, though I'm in the process of doing interviews and moving home, so not getting as much time testing ideas etc.

There's one particular aspect I keep returning to (the way new cities are founded), though I have to admit to being reliant on spotting similar pieces of code and applying the techniques to what I'm doing, which can get frustrating when you're "nearly there", grr!

Keroro said:

Sorry for the minor bump here.

This is very interesting daviiadams. I had a couple of questions for you if you don't mind?

1 - Is there a way to enable expansion for some City States but disable it for others?
2 - You say that the new cities are spawned when a requirement is reached. What is the requirement? Or is that user defined in the XML or Lua files?

I'm not experienced with Lua (in fact I've only just started on XML) so can't help with the naming issues either I'm afraid. Hope you're able to work something out.

Click to expand...

I had originally expected the prohibiting of city states to "found abroad", along with a settler unit requirement, would create a natural restriction on which city states were likely to have the option to found additional cities.

I can get them to produce settlers, but yet to get them to found, so have had to leave the spawning situation as is until that's been figured out.

The requirement is this:

First city must have a population great than 5 when divided by the total number of cities in the city state group.

For example, when the first city reaches a population of 6, it founds a second city (6/1 = 6, which is greater than the threshold of 5). In order to produce an additional city after that, the first city needs to reach a population of 12 (12/2 = 6, which is greater than the threshold of 5).

There's an added restriction imposed; That if the total number of city states in the game is equal to, or greater than 12, they are each restricted to just one additional city. Less than 12 in the game and they can found two.

There are niggles that need working out with this - immediately spawning new cities if they lose one, for example - and restricting particular city states would more than likely come down to defining which traits can expand, or perhaps different rates for different types of traits etc.

glad you made a limit of the city-state. Had 2 other civs and 3 civs of city state...took a "peek" and most the map had alot of city-states.

Mars83 said:

glad you made a limit of the city-state. Had 2 other civs and 3 civs of city state...took a "peek" and most the map had alot of city-states.

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Hopefully it will work a bit better for different sized games/maps/players with the restrictions, though, as previously mentioned, I'm not clear on how problematic losing a city could be with a new one being immediately spawned as a result.

There might have to be additional factors involved, city happiness say, that dictate whether an additional city is produced.

I was a playing a Tiny sized Europe map with your mod (Industrial era start), and since there were 8 city states, they quickly took most of the unclaimed lands. Of course, settlers in advanced starts are expensive for major civs, but I still felt that the map became really crowded with each city state having 3 cities each. In total, they had twice as many cities than all major civs combined... On Small, Standard maps and up this is be fine (only 1 bonus city for a CS), but the smaller the map, the more cities the CS's have and the map quickly becomes a bit cramped.

And on a side note: whenever a Mercantile CS has its new city spawned, they get another unique luxury, or a second copy of Jewellery or Porcelain. Since I'm also using the "More Mercantile" mod which effectively quadruples the amount of unique mercantile resources, this can go a bit out of control

But overall it's a great mod and I've been using it for extra flavor since it came out

janboruta said:

I was a playing a Tiny sized Europe map with your mod (Industrial era start), and since there were 8 city states, they quickly took most of the unclaimed lands. Of course, settlers in advanced starts are expensive for major civs, but I still felt that the map became really crowded with each city state having 3 cities each. In total, they had twice as many cities than all major civs combined... On Small, Standard maps and up this is be fine (only 1 bonus city for a CS), but the smaller the map, the more cities the CS's have and the map quickly becomes a bit cramped.

And on a side note: whenever a Mercantile CS has its new city spawned, they get another unique luxury, or a second copy of Jewellery or Porcelain. Since I'm also using the "More Mercantile" mod which effectively quadruples the amount of unique mercantile resources, this can go a bit out of control

But overall it's a great mod and I've been using it for extra flavor since it came out

Click to expand...

I think I can sort the map size issue from referencing the GameDefines and then setting restrictions accordingly, but have yet to test that.

I may be able to restrict Mercantile CS' to only having one additional city under any given situation, though as they're a G&K addition, need to be careful as to not break the mod for those that don't have, or use, the expansion. I've avoided specific references for that reason so far, but will see what's possible

Added a distance limter, which (so far) stops an additional city being spawned if the chosen plot is too far from the initial city state.

Still testing with different size maps mind you...

I tried this mod before you limited the distance the City States (CS) are spawning their cities and I have to say it went a bit out of control. The map size was small though so that forced the CS to spawn their cities wherever they could so they ended up all over the place and limited a lot the expansion of the civilzations. I will have to try now with the distance limit, I'm sure it will improve the game. In any case itmade the game much more interesting! Up to now I have been doing a few games where I removed all the CS because I found them more annoying than anything else, but with this mod it makes them fun again! Thanks for this mod .

Glad this mod is playing nice w/o the G&K

I have g+k and the only problem is that costs do not rise with city state allies. When you ally a city state with 3 cities and 11 resources...

also, when austria pays 500 gold to annex 3 cities loaded, it gets silly. So the best fix, i believe is to have the costs of allying a city state slightly increased and austria should have to pay 500 gold per city the city state owns. This cost should also increase by 100 gold per era, which would even itself out by the end.

Besides that, i use it with CSD and they work nice together, i have always enjoyed your mods and this one as well.

All comes back to the compatibility aspect, Austria not being a vanilla civ. Bumping costs could also come undone by another mod making the same change too.

I'll have to figure out a cunning plan...

Hopefully the distance limiting curtails the splattered spawning effect. From what I've seen so far, city states are not likely to found an additional city in denser areas of major civs, which should work well with different map/player sizes.

Due to the latest patch is this mod still working or is it broken?

Mars83 said:

Due to the latest patch is this mod still working or is it broken?

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As far as I know, it's still ok

I'm trying figure which CS mod is broken as i can't access the City-State civ. can't donate or stop unit spawning.

Mars83 said:

I'm trying figure which CS mod is broken as i can't access the City-State civ. can't donate or stop unit spawning.

Click to expand...

Have you tried it as the only mod enabled, with the same issues? I'll have a try myself anyway, as I've not used it a lot recently, due to mission testing was with the constant redownloading of mods pre hotfix

I never don't do it just the one. The minium would be 5 mods.