How do you get the AI to build cities in badlands?

[HughMungus]

Hi,

New to this part of the forum.

Just used a map generator to produce a map that's lots of mountains and deserts. I have 4 cities. I just flipped over to cheat mode and saw that all the AI civs still have only one city per civ. How do you get them to build cities in less-than-perfect conditions?

TIA!

 

[Catfish]

This has been recently covered in a number of threads, both here and at Apolyton. You'll require the MapCopy utility. See this thread for use and download links. Make a copy of your map file, change all the "badlands" tiles to grassland (or plains) in the Civ2 map editor and then using MapCopy, import the fertility values (only) into your original map. The fertility values refer to the map block in the mp, scn or sav file, not the food values in rules.txt.

 

[HughMungus]

So it is possible to play a map that's less-than-fertile and get the AI to actually build cities in less-than-optimal conditions?

Originally posted by Wobbegong
This has been recently covered in a number of threads, both here and at Apolyton. You'll require the MapCopy utility. See this thread for use and download links. Make a copy of your map file, change all the "badlands" tiles to grassland (or plains) in the Civ2 map editor and then using MapCopy, import the fertility values (only) into your original map. The fertility values refer to the map block in the mp, scn or sav file, not the food values in rules.txt.

 

[Mercator]

Wobbegong said it all.

In savegames/scenarios, each tile has a fertility value.This fertility value has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the rules.txt.

Normally, only grassland and plains (or whatever you renamed those to) get fertility values (terrains with rivers also get a small bonus) high enough so that the AI will build on it.

But as Wobbegong said, it is possible to edit them to some degree with MapCopy, or simply by using different terrain slots.

So if you use the Desert slot for some terrain with huge amounts of food, the AI won't build cities on it. Similarly, if you make Grassland completely barren, the AI will still build cities on it. Cities that will likely starve, or never grow beyond 1.