Forts Block Citadels

[Tekamthi]

This idea was floated as an option for some counter-play for citadels, and to mitigate the lebensraum tunneling exploit. See this thread, or this one, or this one.

There is a lebensraum fix in the works, but the effect here may not be bad gameplay even once thats implemented, as a form of counterplay to citadel. I had thought of building this into the hex conquer mod, as its concerned with similar things -- but there's already enough going on in that one. On its own, just a snippet, but here's the "mod":

• Citadel cannot be built within 2 plots of an unpillaged fort
• Plots with unpillaged citadel/fort cannot be purchased (ie by america or any other mechanism that allows purchase of owned tiles)
• pillaging disables these effects until repaired to unpillaged state

can tune these features as follows (default shown):

Basic testing completed, seems to work as expected in a single test scenario. Please report any issues encountered. Also, does it need to block any other kind of plot acquisition? I can't remember all the ua's right now....

 

[hokath]

Personally I've modded Lebensraum 2-tile effect out anyway, but on the question of land stealing more generally, it is infuriating when a nice Fort gets stolen by the Citadel getting plonked down.
2 Tiles might be one-too-many though, will have to see how it feels in the game.

 

[Tekamthi]

but on the question of land stealing more generally, it is infuriating when a nice Fort gets stolen by the Citadel getting plonked down

agreed; and i still have a sour taste from many years ago when america bought my citadel, late in a close game

2 Tiles might be one-too-many though, will have to see how it feels in the game.

if we only want an adjacency block, there may be more efficient ways of doing this -- however you can tune the iNoCitadelBuildRange to 1 if desired, should work just using a little more cpu than other possible methods.

we've discussed a few different ways of implementing this idea... what worked for modmod is to block the build itself, rather than make the plot somehow immune (i dont think the latter alternative is possible outside of dll -- also, AI would waste GG's if it worked as a plot immunity -- I tried to re-flip fort plots after citadel but it led to crashes). However it all becomes unblocked if the blocking fort is pillaged, this is the balancing mechanism i've pinned this on...

In this regard, if i were to develop this further, my current thought is that we'd make other ways to pillage the fort... eg. killing unit in the fort auto-pillages it, or a siege/air unit can pillage it via bombard etc.

 

[hokath]

Air Pillage from Civ IV was lit

 

[Tekamthi]

Air Pillage from Civ IV was lit

Will need suggestions on how to make this work right.

I don't think we can make a plot bombard work within modmod territory ie can't just have air units able to attack improvements on their own... We could have something like each time an air unit attacks a unit stationed in a fort, the fort becomes pillaged... This would be reasonably AI accessible BUT it would probably make it too easy to pillage forts imo, and would create some backhanded motivation to leave forts ungarrisoned. We could layer in additional conditions, but we don't want ai to have to pick a specific attack order or have to do anything it doesn't already do... So picking the right conditions to pillage will be all-important

My best take so far is to set it up as a temporary condition, ie attack the fort by any means on turn x, it then becomes pillageable by any siege or air attack on turn x+1... That way you get one turn as defender to try to mitigate