The more I think on this, the more I like this idea. Basically, it steals one of the good ideas from Civ5, declaring support for or against Civ's, and adds on it (secretly allying against a particular civ/group of civs).
I'm going to release Beta 2 soonish tonight, but I will work on adding this for beta3 for next weekend.
I am glad you like my idea.
Another thing I have noticed that the AI is pretty bad at times when placing cities. I have seen a few cities that, if only moved one tile left or one tile right, would gain access to 3+ resources. In vanilla BTS this isn't such a big deal, as cities weren't required to have the resource within the cities vicinity in order to build the buildings related to it.
That being said, I don't think that the AI weighs a resource properly for this mod. Might want to see if it is possible to edit the AI to see if you can weigh them differently.
If editing the AI in this way is either not possible or not practical, here I think is an amenable workaround which would solve the problem of the AI being too stupid to ensure that a resource is actually within a city vicinity:
Make each building which requires the presence of a resource be tied to the amount you have rather than vicinity.
Here is an example of how it would work, as I am typing hurriedly so I doubt it is totally clear...
It is the beginning of a game. I have two cities. I was lucky and my first city had stone in the vicinity, and I built a Stoneworker's Hut here before settling the second city. I am now ready for a third city, and get really lucky and place it next to a stone resource AND a marble resource. Now currently I would be able to get 2/3 cities with Stoneworker's Huts... The first and third cities. However, in reality I now have two stones and one marble. 2 + 1 = 3. Of course the way it would factor out is two cities would receive the stone bonus of the Stoneworker's Hut, and the third would only receive the marble bonus. The first round of resources allocated would not be that big of an issue, as the difference between the two types of bonuses are minute...
However, once your borders start expanding and you start gaining more stone/marble/obsidian than you have cities, you start to have a problem... What if I have 3 cities, one with stone, one with marble, and one with obsidian? What if I want all three resources to be diverted to my Capital, the city which would benefit most from the added production? With this addition I have mentioned, I could artificially ensure that the Capital would get all 3 by not building Stoneworker's Huts in the other two cities, thereby forcing the game to send the benefit to the Capital, the only city with the Stoneworker's Hut... But I think an ability to in some way control this would also help... However this to me would be a luxury, not a necessity.
That is how it would work, as the AI is too stupid to properly place cities with the appropriate resources within the city vicinity, something which is mandated by this mod.
As an aside, I don't think the RoM mapscripts give enough priority to the early-game resources. What the hell am I going to do on a continent with 10 oil, 10 coal, 10 bauxite ore, and 10 stone? Why can't it be 5 oil, 5 coal, 5 bauxite, and 25 stone? Truthfully I often edit my own maps after generating them, and apportion the appropriate resources to the appropriate locations, ensuring that all Civs actually have stone... However this is something the mapscript should do, I should not have to do this manually.
Oh and guys... Just go buy more RAM. I doubled my RAM from 4 to 8 just to play this mod. It's cheap as dirt and is by far the easiest piece of a PC to upgrade.
This is why we beta test!
Desktops only
