Editing settlers?

[Lord Ben]

I'm looking at the civ5units.xml and trying to change the cost of the settler and worker down by a lot to try and spur the game to grow a bit faster, I like starting out in Renaissance or industrial times and playing on Marathon but it takes forever to expand the empires at those levels so I wanted to reduce the cost of the settlers and workers.

I found this bit where it says the worker costs 70 but I don't see a way to edit the settler? Where is the cost?

<Class>UNITCLASS_SETTLER</Class>
<Type>UNIT_SETTLER</Type>
<Moves>2</Moves>
<Capture>UNITCLASS_WORKER</Capture>
<CivilianAttackPriority>CIVILIAN_ATTACK_PRIORITY_HIGH_EARLY_GAME_ONLY</CivilianAttackPriority>
<HurryCostModifier>20</HurryCostModifier>
<Domain>DOMAIN_LAND</Domain>
<DefaultUnitAI>UNITAI_SETTLE</DefaultUnitAI>
<Description>TXT_KEY_UNIT_SETTLER</Description>
<Civilopedia>TXT_KEY_CIV5_ANTIQUITY_SETTLER_TEXT</Civilopedia>
<Strategy>TXT_KEY_UNIT_SETTLER_STRATEGY</Strategy>
<Help>TXT_KEY_UNIT_HELP_SETTLER</Help>
<Requirements>TXT_KEY_NO_ACTION_SETTLER_SIZE_LIMIT_HARDCODED</Requirements>
<Food>true</Food>
<Found>true</Found>
<CombatLimit>0</CombatLimit>
<UnitArtInfo>ART_DEF_UNIT__SETTLER</UnitArtInfo>
<UnitArtInfoCulturalVariation>true</UnitArtInfoCulturalVariation>
<PortraitIndex>0</PortraitIndex>
<IconAtlas>UNIT_ATLAS_1</IconAtlas>
</Row>
<Row>
<Class>UNITCLASS_WORKER</Class>
<Type>UNIT_WORKER</Type>
<Cost>70</Cost>
<Moves>2</Moves>
<Capture>UNITCLASS_WORKER</Capture>
<CivilianAttackPriority>CIVILIAN_ATTACK_PRIORITY_LOW

 

[Spatzimaus]

Settler costs are determined by three global values, all set in GlobalDefines. They're basically the sum of three separate values in that file: a flat amount, plus an amount for each extra population the city starts with (which happens in games starting in later eras), plus a fraction (default 40%) of the building cost of each "free" building a city gets.

So you can alter the costs of Settler units by changing those values, but you can't create a second Settler unit that costs more than the old one, unless you want the new unit's cost to be completely flat (which will break spectacularly in late-era game starts).

 

[Lord Ben]

Know what those are called?

In the few games I played it seems like the AI sort of builds 4 cities and stops for a long time instead of continuing to expand. Or I spend the first 3 hours of the game hitting next... ugh.

I'm sort of just playing around and trying a couple things. I'd sort of like to be able to play within each era instead of spending the entire time building a few buildings and then it's gone, or building my roman legions to conquer my neighbor than the legion is obsolete. Switching to Marathon is about the right tech speed but it takes forever to build anything or clear terrain, etc.

A standard game with construction times with a marathon game when it came to tech advancement would be my ideal goal, but I really don't know how to go about doing it. I remember in civ3 or 4 finding a setting that changed a standard game to the marathon level of techs and then playing that way with no time limit. It was lots of fun and I'd like to do the same in civ5.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Know what those are called?

Not offhand, I'm at work. Try searching for one of the many previous threads on this topic; I know I posted a detailed answer to this same question a month or so ago, with all of the key names in it.

In the few games I played it seems like the AI sort of builds 4 cities and stops for a long time instead of continuing to expand. Or I spend the first 3 hours of the game hitting next... ugh.

Changing settler costs won't affect that at all. The AI's decision on whether or not to expand is based on a lot of factors, like how much spare Happiness each empire has and whether it considers any new city site to be both rich enough to develop on and close enough to defend easily. It's not stalling out at 4 cities because it thinks the cost of making the unit is too high, it's stalling because it's switching Grand Strategies from an expansion phase (where Growth and Expansion flavors are valued more) to a more balanced phase.

I'd sort of like to be able to play within each era instead of spending the entire time building a few buildings and then it's gone, or building my roman legions to conquer my neighbor than the legion is obsolete. Switching to Marathon is about the right tech speed but it takes forever to build anything or clear terrain, etc.

There are a lot of mods that already adjust this sort of thing, because as you noted, changing game speeds doesn't really change much as you're still spending the same fraction of your time doing each activity. The main difference is in the control over combat, being able to take more actions in a single war; this doesn't really help the problems you've described. In my own mods, I slowed down the effective research rates by reducing the benefits of research-boosting buildings, changing the prerequisites of certain things so that you couldn't beeline for key techs as easily, raising the costs of Research Agreements, and so on; the cumulative effect was to make the existing game take ~50% longer without any massive imbalances.

You can obviously try this sort of thing yourself, but the general problem you're going to run into is that just changing any one single part of the game will cause a lot of other things to break. Make units cheaper, and suddenly the AIs go bankrupt from overproducing units. Remove Research Agreements, and suddenly the AI will have a ton of spare gold on his hands and will rush nonessential things more (where a player would save the extra for when he wants to rush a lot of things at once), or will be more willing to make unwise gold-for-luxury deals. That sort of thing. So you might be better off looking into the most popular balance mods, like VEM/UP, and trying one of those for a bit until you get a better idea of how the game's systems are interconnected.