How to Mod border system

[baro]

I really don't like all the wasted land created by the way borders work.

For example, you have a city, 4 tiles, then another city. Often times one city has borders right up touching the other city, yet those squares are useless. You can't use them as there's no city radius, and the other country certainly can't use them since they arn't part of their empire anymore.

What I'd like to do is some how tweek the way borders work. Essentially I'd like to lower the max size of borders to that of a city's radius. That's the most simple solution.

Another would be to some how make a city's borders within its radius very 'strong' and past that very weak. So you'd almost never have a far away city eating into a city's primary resource-harvesting radius. Is this posible? Are either of my options posible?

Additionally I'd like to get rid of spys from my game as I find them nothing but a huge pain in the ass, every turn tons of my improvements are sabatoged and there's nothing I can do.

I'd also like to dratically reduce the air intercept chance of SAM troops and ever game I've played, sam troops apear before air power, and they are so powerful it makes air power useless. In fact if I could simply get rid of this unit all together I'd be happy.

 

[Macmatt]

Sorry, I don't know about borders but to remove those units, just delete the text in the xml that refrences the units you wnat to remove, that is in Civ4UnitInfos.xml and Civ4UnitTypeInfos.xml.

 

[GRM7584]

1) Spies are countered with spies. If you want to look around and make the sabotage mission more expensive/more likely to fail, it might be wiser to do that instead removing an entire facet from the game.

2) Removing the ability of borders to "attack" enemy borders makes culture useless. There are a lot of good culture mods on the modcomp page, however; you might look into Cultural Decay, which I think would alleviate your issues somewhat, but I could be misunderstanding what you mean.

3) SAM Infantry exist to give players without oil a better chance at surviving the modern age (but not by much). Check Civ4UnitInfos.xml and look for <iInterceptionProbability>. Tweak as needed. If you wanted to, you could also move their tech requirement up farther, so you'll get air units before SAM Infantry.

 

[Nodgene1]

Since we're on the topic of changing borders fundimentally...
Can I ask if it's been done, or possible to make culture borders "hug" land? So a map would look aesthetically like a political map and yet still work as culture does?