Stop AI creating far away small cities

[Johnniecash]

I like to play historical maps and especially maps depicting Europe.

But a problem that occur from time to time is when the map starts to be crowded, yet the Ai has an indefinite need to build more cities. This results in the Ai sending away settlers half across the map to some empty tundra tile to build there. This creates in some regions a "balkanized" map with multiple civs holding 1 pop cities or similar fulfilling nothing but irritating my estetic mind

Is there some way to edit so the Ai will try to keep his country together without creating enclaves or sending his settlers half across the globe just to access the last buildable tile? Perhaps by editing corruption or some other factor?

I know it is all a long shot idea. But any ideas are most welcome!

Cheers!

 

[WildWeazel]

Stop AI creating far away small cities

kill them

They'll try to keep building as long as there is settle-able land outside of anyone's cultural borders, so the only ways to prevent them from doing so are (a) make most land un-settle-able (a common tactic is to only allow cities on a certain "optimal city location" terrain, although this generally only works for custom maps only); (b) make sure all terrain is covered by culture (again, custom maps); or (c) stop them from building settlers after a certain point, either by making settlers upgrade to something else with a certain tech or making them unavailable to all civs but spawned from a small wonder that goes obsolete. The AI does tend to raze cities that it captures when it is over the optimal city number (or some multiple of it) but I'm not sure if that will keep it from building new ones.

 

[Virote_Considon]

If you wanted this area useable by barbarians, what you could do is play around with the "Impassable by Wheeled" flag. What you do is put a big long line of some unused terrain, which is impassable to wheeled units and can't be roaded, along the border of the area you don't want to be settled. Make Settlers (and maybe most military units if you really want a lot of fun!) wheeled. Make barbarians unwheeled.

If you want to do this on a Europe map, you'd have to open up your conquests.ini file located in the Conquests folder (I assume your using Conquests?), and add the line NOAIPATROL=0

 

[Supa]

I used to have Toundra and Desert where you can't settle.

 

[jackdubl]

I adjust the corruption settings on my mods to keep some terrain open. You basically have to adjust the Optimal Cities down and the corruption up under the Corruption tab in the editor. In rough terms, the AI will build about 3 to four times the number of cities that you set as the optimal number(with corruption set at about 130%), but that will change depending on what you do with corruption. You kinda have to play with them to get the exact city numbers you want to limit the AI to, but that's how to do it.

 

[wolf_brother]

I used to have Tundra and Desert where you can't settle.

FTFY

But no, seriously, simply making Tundra, Desert and Jungles un-settable. I then take it one step further and make desert unpassable (except to camel units), and I raise the movement cost on tundra and jungles to match mountains.

 

[nick0515]

If you want to do this on a Europe map, you'd have to open up your conquests.ini file located in the Conquests folder (I assume your using Conquests?), and add the line NOAIPATROL=0

I may have missed something in the first paragraph, but what exactly does this do Virote?

Cheers,

Nick

 

[Virote_Considon]

It means the AI barbarians won't only move if there's a non-barbarian on a tile either directly SE or directly NW from them. On a Europe map, this is necessary, because large tracts of Russia (which I assume are those which Johnnie would want to be unsettleable) are in the NE corner, and thus the barbarians there wouldn't really move in that case...