C2C Fixed Borders is too weak

[Stoklomolvi]

Having played C2C for about a week now, I must say that I very much enjoy the comprehensiveness of this mod. It's quite nice to be able to have a game that truly lasts for an eternity; it's boring to most people, but a prehistoric eternity game gives me the flexibility to mould my civilisation to perfection.

However, initially I only got this mod because it featured fixed borders. I searched far and wide for mods that incorporated this feature, and I found only two: RoM with AND, and C2C. I played a test round of C2C on normal speed settings starting at prehistory, and upon researching Monarchy I quickly switched to that tech (I ignored despotism) so that I could claim land on my little island. Much to my dismay, C2C used the same system that RoM did at some point, which was that culture could change even if civilisations had fixed borders. Using a cavalryman to go around claiming tiles, I found that leaving a tile left it neutral by the next turn, forcing me to either cover the map with forts or keep an utterly massive number of units across the terrain. Deciding to go the Russian route and building kreposts/forts across the landscape, I covered a fairly large area with them, and that worked out for a bit.

It only got worse. I had fixed borders, and I settled a colony on another island that turned out to be populated by a couple other civilisations. They had cities that bordered my colony, and we all had fixed borders civics (they were also monarchies). Being that I had realistic cultural expansion enabled, I shared a border with another civilisation along a long river, which stopped our mutual cultural expansion. Eventually, however, the other civilisation popped past the river, and slowly accumulated culture on my side. After he had around 60%, the tile flipped, reverting to his control, even though we had fixed borders. I find this to be extremely aggravating. I can't possibly have soldiers on every tile I share with another civilisation, and I can't sacrifice useful tiles with forts to keep them from flipping. In addition, it turns out that forts can flip too. My colony, with is relatively weak culture, lost a fort that I had built nearby to prevent a resource tile from flipping to enemy control. The enemy city had simply too much culture, and the fort was lost.

Eventually, that colony was reduced to the small 3x3 radius around it, and I had fixed borders! Even if I did not keep soldiers on every tile, and the other civilisations had enormous cities around it, I do not think that I should be losing tiles; I still led the game in every aspect besides power, and the game mechanic forced me to lose tiles that otherwise should have been mine in a fixed borders setting. It'd be like France losing tiles of southern Algeria to the Malinese simply because the Malinese have more cultural influence, or China losing inner Mongolia because there are a lot of Mongols living there; culture should be irrelevant in the late game, as culture does not define political borders.

I understand that Koshling wanted to weaken fixed borders to enable more cultural play, and that many others wanted the same. However, I do not, so I attempted to change the CvPlot.cpp calculateCulturalOwner() function to prevent tiles from simply flipping back and forth due to culture. I could not figure out how to compile the file into the CvGameCoreDLL.dll file that is required by BTS, so I decided to post here. I would highly appreciate a simple tweak that would enable toggling between "hard" fixed borders and "soft" fixed borders, which would be the fixed borders system before and after V19 respectively. I simply want a way for me (and the other civilisations) to claim tiles and hold them with or without cultural influence, as that is how political borders work in real life.

If that's not possible, could someone with the ability to compile the CvGameCoreDLL.dll file swap out the CvPlot.cpp that is included in the C2C source files with one that I've altered slightly? I really want to restore the old fixed borders functionality.

Thanks!

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

It can be done. RoM is the place where Fixed Borders was introduced so only it and mods built of it will have the feature. Which is c2c.

Yet another option. We really need that screen that pops up on custom build with all the c2c options grouped in meaningful ways and with meaningful information. Perhaps with a few simplistic defaults. Something like the Full of Resources screen that pops up whenever you have that set and go to custom options.

 

[Thunderbrd]

I would want consent from others for any push to the svn that may ensue after such a change. I have to agree with much of your assessment... fixed borders that aren't fixed? I don't really get it either but haven't cared enough to ask myself.

 

[Sgtslick]

You want to be able to claim a tile whenever a unit moves into it and have it yours forever unless you are at war and an opposing civ takes it off you? Much prefer current system. Each to his own.

 

[JanusTalaiini]

You want to be able to claim a tile whenever a unit moves into it and have it yours forever unless you are at war and an opposing civ takes it off you? Much prefer current system. Each to his own.

Not that I have a horse in the race, as it were, but the way you describe it DOES sound fairly close to how land grabs worked in the real world.

 

[Koshling]

I would want consent from others for any push to the svn that may ensue after such a change. I have to agree with much of your assessment... fixed borders that aren't fixed? I don't really get it either but haven't cared enough to ask myself.

Only if you do it as a non-default (that won't get any particular AI work) option. The fights over fixed borders from AND that resulted in it being wekaened were monumental, and I don't plan on reliving them.

 

[strategyonly]

I would want consent from others for any push to the svn that may ensue after such a change. I have to agree with much of your assessment... fixed borders that aren't fixed? I don't really get it either but haven't cared enough to ask myself.

Only if you do it as a non-default (that won't get any particular AI work) option. The fights over fixed borders from AND that resulted in it being weakened were monumental, and I don't plan on reliving them.

I agree, lets not make any irrational decisions based on one statement.

 

[Smikis]

personally native system was too easy, fixed borders were just limiting and bleh, and this one is about right, i was actually loosing titles next to my CAPITAL to another faction second town ( so no not capital ), it forced me to invest into some culture,

and with another town iwas able to claim plot with iron on it ( ye i didnt had iron ) with mass cathedrals for huge culture bonuses , instead of going to war with faction that was friendly to me, and much smaller
( those are on deity, so maybe culture would be easier on lower difficulties, but it isnt too hard, and culture is one of main things to get when you establish new town, esp if you are close to other civ borders, first the winner..

i remember AND fixed borders, you could ignore culture all together, it wasnt good it was stupid, practically removing one game play aspect

 

[dusckr87]

You want to be able to claim a tile whenever a unit moves into it and have it yours forever unless you are at war and an opposing civ takes it off you? Much prefer current system. Each to his own.

There was one instance when I did want it to work that way in one of my games. Barbarians would keep spawning in a certain tile unless I claimed it/stationed a unit there, and culture would never claim it. I didn't want to keep a unit there to prevent the spawn, but claiming it and then leaving was useless.

 

[Koshling]

There was one instance when I did want it to work that way in one of my games. Barbarians would keep spawning in a certain tile unless I claimed it/stationed a unit there, and culture would never claim it. I didn't want to keep a unit there to prevent the spawn, but claiming it and then leaving was useless.

It's not meant to be free. If you don't think it's worth committing a unit it cannot be very important.

 

[dusckr87]

It's not meant to be free. If you don't think it's worth committing a unit it cannot be very important.

I agree, and it was a situation that rarely comes up. But in this certain situation it was annoying to keep a unit stationed there (it was a coast tile that was the only tile that barbarians could spawn on, so they always would without the unit). Not a big deal, but I didn't like to "waste" the unit (and this was an early game before I realized how borders were "supposed" to work so at the time it seemed a useless command to me*).

*and may to others not familiar with it until they actually try it as I don't think it is explained very well in-game

 

[ls612]

Let us not refight the Fixed Borders battle. That was fun enough last year, and we don't need to go through that again.

That said, I think that now Fixed Borders are much less important than they were in AND. And that is good. Before, any civic that did not have fixed borders was losing out on so much that it was essentially worthless. Now Fixed Borders are much less OP.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I agree with Koshling. The FB battles left scars. Don't want old wounds opened up again.

JosEPh

 

[MaXimillionZero]

You can claim 9 tiles with a single fort, which doesn't need to be garrisoned after it's built, and doesn't cost any maintenance. So as long as you can spare the worker turns you can do fairly large landgrabs.

 

[ls612]

You can claim 9 tiles with a single fort, which doesn't need to be garrisoned after it's built, and doesn't cost any maintenance. So as long as you can spare the worker turns you can do fairly large landgrabs.

And if you don't garrison the fort or protect your workers, a single enemy unit can wipe out that investment pretty fast.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

You can claim 9 tiles with a single fort, which doesn't need to be garrisoned after it's built, and doesn't cost any maintenance. So as long as you can spare the worker turns you can do fairly large landgrabs.

I have seen the AI do just that.

 

[Stoklomolvi]

You want to be able to claim a tile whenever a unit moves into it and have it yours forever unless you are at war and an opposing civ takes it off you? Much prefer current system. Each to his own.

Well yes, exactly. If one nation is overbearingly powerful culture-wise and has virtually 100% culture in every tile of a particular city belonging to another nation except in the city itself, and both nations have fixed borders, the nation owning the tiles initially should still be holding the tiles. Culture should be thoroughly meaningless in terms of tile ownership; city flipping can be assumed to be the result of revolutionaries, but one nation would never willingly cede control over territory to another without some kind of war or subjugation. For instance, a single Belgian outpost along the coast of Congo basically could mark the entirety of the Congo as Belgian territory. No amount of culture can seize the remainder of the Congo away from Belgium, even though Belgium is a tiny little country in central Europe. It can't possibly afford to station troops or build forts on every other tile of jungle.

I realise that many people like cultural play, and I understand that. I would simply ask for someone to be able to compile a version of the dll without the weakened fixed borders.

It's not meant to be free. If you don't think it's worth committing a unit it cannot be very important.

That may not be true. If two nations each have one large city bordering the other, and there are a couple of tiles in the middle that are not so important that they warrant troops but could nevertheless be beneficial, fixed borders would nominally mean just that; the borders would be fixed. As it is, the borders could flop back and forth, which could upset the growth or production of either city. It makes no sense for culture to play such a large role in countries with defined political borders. You'd never see the borders in the middle of Africa during the early 20th century shifting because culture did not define those borders.

I didn't know how much of a fight there was over the strength of fixed borders, or that there was a fight at all, but I did find that you were the one edited the code based on your comments in the CvPlot.cpp file. Do you know how to get the source code to compile into a usable dll? I've been struggling with that for the past two days.

 

[Koshling]

I didn't know how much of a fight there was over the strength of fixed borders, or that there was a fight at all, but I did find that you were the one edited the code based on your comments in the CvPlot.cpp file. Do you know how to get the source code to compile into a usable dll? I've been struggling with that for the past two days.

this link is still pretty accurate: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=405444

With the linked version of visual studio installed opening the project file, setting the build to 'final release' and building should work.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ah... I wasn't around for that fight. I was wondering why the mechanism had seemed to change. I had always thought it was working just right before, even though I would rarely choose to play with the option because I LIKE the culture interplay. But for a completely realistic approach, why didn't we leave the old method as an option? Honestly, I LIKE the new method and the way it becomes a blend of both, but eliminating the old seems... I dunno, outside of the spirit of it.

And I'm not meaning to spark up a fight nor argue for any changes, except perhaps for the ability to enable the old method as an option (I'm curious about the 'ai problems' this might present... on first consideration, it sounds like it would take quite a bit of ai work to make the ai cultures want to grab for land in this manner...)

Nevertheless, its not high on my list of desired adjustments as I usually prefer what we have generically and I wouldn't want to change it without enabling the ai to understand the change, which would be a complex nightmare I'd think.

 

[StormLord-711-]

This would complicate the matter, but for an utterly realistic approach I think the borders would have to remain completely fixed, while holding on to territory that is highly foreign-cultured would cause rebelliousness in nearby cities. Perhaps before this happens you could be asked at some random interval if you want to cede the territory in question rather than deal with the rebelliousness. It would be like a minor version of the events that happen when you hold on to a foreign city and it rebels: if you don't cede the territory, it could lead to war, or at least cause a falling out of relations between states.