BarbCiv's settle down radius

[tebriz]

I am back to play this awesome mod after 5 years! Thank you very much for all the work you have done in last years! I am extremely happy to see Revolutions component finally implemented in RI!
Even if I find RI really polished, one thing that I have noticed not to work "perfectly" is related to spawn of new civilizations from barbarians. This situation happened in few games I have already played:

- When a barbarian city forms new civilization, the new civilization automatically takes not only that city (+ closest barbarian cities, which would be totally acceptable), but a big number of barbarian cities spreading quite far from each other and even separated by existing civilizations. Basically, these barbarians cities are situated almost half or 1/3 continent away from each other. It feels very unrealistic and illogical. I would like to mention that I am playing on Huge size Terra map.

Which file and what line should I modify in order to modify/fix it? I would like to narrow the "spawn radius" or just limit the new settled civilizations to only one city. Whatever. Please help me in this regard, I don't want to play with BarbCiv option off.

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

There is no simple way of doing it without slowing the game dramatically. Currently it just checks per landmass, not calculating any distances. Any distance calculation would have to be done per each barbarian city vs each barbarian city, which would be a performance nightmare.

 

[tebriz]

Thank you for quick answer! But what do you mean by “it just checks per landmass”? Does it mean that all barbarian cities currently existing on the continent/island will be given to the new civilization when it spawns?

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

Yes, exactly.

 

[[Y]]

There is no simple way of doing it without slowing the game dramatically. Currently it just checks per landmass, not calculating any distances. Any distance calculation would have to be done per each barbarian city vs each barbarian city, which would be a performance nightmare.

(following reply is for curiosity purposes only and not expecting any code changes)

What if the check was done differently, where each turn each barbarian city has a (very slim) chance to civilize, and if it succeeds, it pulls in all other barb cities within X tiles (X probably varying with map size)?

 

[Walter Hawkwood]

It would probably result in settled barb civs that would be even more underwhelming than they are today, since most of the time they would start with 1-2 cities, and not particularly developed ones at that.

 

[[Y]]

It would probably result in settled barb civs that would be even more underwhelming than they are today, since most of the time they would start with 1-2 cities, and not particularly developed ones at that.

Are you sure? I never investigated in worldbuilder, but I imagine they currently suffer tremendously due to maintenance costs from both number and distance of cities, which can be a huge whammy if their cities aren't sufficiently developed economically. The widespread nature is also horrible for diplomacy; I know I end up declaring war on most barb-civs because one of their cities happened to be a barb city I was about to conquer, and I wasn't going to give it up just because their territory marker has a new color.

I know one trend I tend to see is a barb civ pop up, usually at the top of the charts, and then very quickly drop towards the bottom. This could also be a biproduct of my settings, though, as I tend to play on the largest map size with ~25 starting civs, which doubles down on the problems I mentioned.