A mod to limit empire size?

[Czacki]

One thing has always made me annoyed about civ4: the fact that spamming cities was not only valid, but also (if done right) powerful.

I mean, I'd love my perfectly specced & managed 8-9 cities to come on top of 30+ spammed cities in the long run, but NOPE not going to happen. (I don't mean crappy AI towns, but cities put without "much love").

Sooo... how about something to discourage & limit the city spam?
Perhaps anyone has an idea how to mod in a formula that would make exponential growth of the penalty for number of cities? so that going beyond the so called 8 would be a massive pain?
Or maybe flat -gold penalties to put a wall at, say, 10 cities that you can't overcome naturally (something like -100 gold upkeep for 9th city, -500 for 10th one and -1000 for the 11th one so you just bankrupt if you overexpand?)

THat would make quality important again.

Of course it would be nice if it was also possible to make the AI respect the rule & not overexpand, but without creating a blatant disproportion between players (who make good cities) and AI (who makes terrible ones).

Any ideas? Maybe it's been done already? (BTS)

 

[ThorHammerz]

Modifying the maintenance formula in the DLL would be your best bet if you want to "discourage" the ICS.

 

[Ajidica]

If you want to stick with .xml, it is pretty easy to reduce the maintenance reduction from courthouses, make them more expensive, and move them back in the tech tree. Same can occur with the Forbidden Palace/Versailles. Courthouses could also be made into a limited building (like national wonders).
Individual buildings could add small maintenance penalties, so that when a player tried to improve those miserable little hovels it would increase their maintenance costs. Of course, AI weights would have to be adjusted to avoid bankrupting the AI.

 

[ThorHammerz]

Individual buildings could add small maintenance penalties, so that when a player tried to improve those miserable little hovels it would increase their maintenance costs. Of course, AI weights would have to be adjusted to avoid bankrupting the AI.

Just to expand a little on this point: you would modify the flat yields into negative integers (i think that's how it works if you want to slap 'flat maintenance' on something...? Unsure if the Civ4 DLL imposes a lower limit for what integer gets passed through).

Spoiler :

<YieldChanges>
<iYield>0</iYield>
<iYield>0</iYield>
<iYield>-5</iYield>
</YieldChanges>

But you will have a tough time finding a balance between making growth entirely unfeasible (since in the base game, resources/yields are scarce enough as it is....), or entirely negligible. Making expanding into a super-power a non-viable option in its entirety is also not good, as it will more than likely cripple the AI even further (and the AI is not exactly very..... intelligent, even with K-Mod).

Also, it is not the AI weighting that needs to be adjusted (unless you're putting a ludicrously high flavors for grocers/markets/banks as a sort-of-to-compensate-workaround): you will need to write a ''Does this building cause us to go into negative gold? If so, can we lower our slider (not below a certain amount) to get back into the green?".

Although the Civ 4's base system of preventing a no-penalty-reckless-ICS is moderately decent enough as it is (compared to Civ5's shitfest): you could try to modify the XML file (I forget what it's called now ) that controls the maintenance paid for Civics to emphasize more on number of cities.

 

[Leoreth]

Slapping additional costs in some way to buildings is an idea I have also toyed with, but I would advise against it if your goal is to discourage ICS. As Soren Johnson notes in the Civ4 manual, you want people to improve fewer cities over founding many unimproved cities. Extra costs for buildings encourages the latter because improving a city with buildings is associated with costs that might not pay off.

Actually many of the more successful players on higher difficulties I've seen don't bother that much with buildings because the initial hammer investment takes its time to pay off compared to just making settlers or military units for expansion. Extra building costs would just exacerbate this problem.

The maintenance formula already is exponential but you sure could play around with the coefficients to make it steeper so that optimal empire sizes are closer to numbers that you prefer.