Request: City "big fat X" on map

Hello All,
I had a graphic request. I'm not sure if it is even possible, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

What I was thinking of is having the maximum city size (the "big fat X") be presented on the map as a little red line. The point of this would be when deciding where to place cities, I want to place my cities so that there is as little overlap as possible, and it's a pain in the arse to put the settler where you *think* might be a good spot, then look at all the squares like 5 times to figure out how many squares it will overlap (if any).

What would be cool is that every city already placed would have a red outline of the "big fat X" as the civlopedia puts in. What would also be cool is to have settlers do the same. So when you have a settler where you want him, he will present on the map the big fat X in red, even if the city won't use all those squares yet.

Would this be something that would be possible? What would be REALLY cool is to have this toggle on/off with the grid toggle.

Let me know if anybody has any ideas.
Thanks!

This is easy, there is no need to produce a map, to get no overlap at all but use optimum space you go like this.

• Move 3 squares to the north, south, east or west.
• Then followed by north-east or north-west if you went north, SE or SW if you went south and so on.

It is easy to see this because if you send a settler out to that particular position, its borders would just fit nicely with the borders of a culture 10 city (the fat X). Although since the cities are placed in a rather "unorderly" way like this, there is definitely going to be some unused squares between about four cities plaecd in this manner. There really is no way to use EVERY square.

Hope this helps.

It would be easier if I had a no brainer like "Duhhhh, gee George, which way did he go George. Duhhhh, overlap the red as little as possible, duhhh"

That was supposed to be along the lines of that old cartoon with the big dumb cat and his friend George.

Anyways, if it would be possible, I think it would be awesome if somebody could do that.

Thanks

Sometimes when I want to do that, I set the culture border increase to like 70 so most of the cities have a radius of 1 or 2. Then the culture radius will be similar to the city radius. I find that annoying too though.

Doing what you want in the game itself, would involve programming, and Firaxis hasn’t released the code as open source! So I guess you’re out of luck. Not only you but me too, and many others who need that feature.

So if Firaxis is reading this, please give us some kind of means by which we can mark a map (with a city radius or just an X), and then show up those marks whenever we want, by the use of some hotkey, just like we do with the Ctrl+G, for showing up the grid.

Well, but speaking about what I did, I wanted that *so bad*, that I did something to allow me to plan my cities, while I was still playing Civ 2 – ToT, last year.

I did a set of Photoshop images, with a Fat-X (Radius) shape, that you can put in a screenshot of a civ 3 map and then plan your cities.

Take a look at this thread if you want it:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18384

Happy Civing.

Hey Silvagem,
Glad to see somebody else out there is super anal about how cities are layed out.
So that would require the actual code huh? Bummer.
I figured it might, since it doesn't seem like something that can just be "added on", but it was worth an ask

I will check out that photoshop thingy.
Thanks

Oh, I don't want to lose the tradition carried over through all these games -- let's see now... left hand covers the left city... right hand covers the eastern one... oh, no, wait I have a city down there too, let's see... if I can just twist my thumb a bit...

Razorwing: HAHA That is exactly what I'm talking about.
I guess it is a bit of tradition though, hehe.
Thanks for the good laugh. You said exactly what I was trying to say.