Expansionist Trait

[Predator145]

Many people think it's the worst trait while others think it's strong on a pangea with huts. I've revamped seafaring to make it less map dependent and would like to do the same with expansionist. Any ideas for that?

Something that could help them past ancient age would be nice. Unfortunately, the trait doesn't have building discounts coded in. I could give them a unique granary like building at 40 shields maybe? But then I'm afraid the AI would then still build a redundant granary because storing food doesn't stack.

 

[WildWeazel]

Assuming your regular granary doesn't already go obsolete, you can make it become obsolete with a no-era tech that provides the expansionist granary.

Cheaper or faster moving settlers are always nice, though you still have to take AI behavior into account. I would not recommend reducing the population cost.

Maybe a building that reduces corruption until better governments are available? That takes the edge off of having a lot of cities under despotism.

 

[tjs282]

I would not recommend reducing the population cost.

Just out of curiosity, why not?

In the early (epic) game, when building embassies or investigating towns, we often see the AI idling at Pop2, wasting shields, while it 'waits' for a town to grow to Pop3 to allow a Settler-build.

Making the Settler require only 1 pop-point (and/or more shields) would seem to be a good way of preventing that from happening...?

 

[WildWeazel]

Because when you build a city you get to work the city tile plus another, as if the settler's second pop point translates to a hidden citizen. At 1 pop point you essentially get a free worked tile each time you build a new city, and "infinite city sprawl" becomes even more exploitable. You may be able to balance it by tweaking other numbers, but by itself it's too OP