I want to change how close the game places civilizations at game start

[LeHam]

So recently I've tried filling up an entire Earth map with 20 major civs and 41 City-states. Unfortunately, the game keeps placing civs in inhospitable places such as the Arctic. I've looked at the whole map and I think it is because the game tries to place the major civs a certain distance away from each other and city-states.

I want to change that. I've already lowered the minimum city range from 3 to 2. So, would changing "MIN_CIV_STARTING_DISTANCE" in GlobalDefines down from 10 be enough? Or do I have to change the map script itself? Are there any other ways to get the game to place the civs better?

 

[Zerkeras]

I suppose you could edit the Earth map using the Map editor in the SDK. I think (been awhile since I've used it) that you can add specific civilization starting points to tiles on the map directly. That way you could place all the civilization starting points that you want, and keep them out of inhospitable zones. You could even make it so an in-proportionate number of civs start in Europe as opposed to say, America, for realism.

 

[LeHam]

Huh, okay. But what about letting the game randomly generate the map, though? I'm going to try changing CIV_MIn_Starting_distance, and see if that works. However, the game also isn't placing all the city-states it should.

 

[LeHam]

In the GlobalDefines.xml. I know that MIN_CIV_STARTING_DISTANCE is the minimum tiles away civs must be, but I don't know what the "STARTING_DISTANCE_PERCENT" means. I looked it up on the wiki and it's not there, either

 

[whoward69]

I've looked at the whole map and I think it is because the game tries to place the major civs a certain distance away from each other and city-states.

That's only part of it. It also takes into account the "size of the region" (ie how many land tiles there are) and the "fertility of the region" (ie how much food those land tiles and adjacent coastal tiles produce) divided by "the number of civs already in the region multiplied by the number of expected cities for a civ (which varies by map size)", and at some point, especially with a very large number of civs and CSes, those "inhospitable" arctic starts are going to look better than squeezing another civ onto a lush landmass.

 

[Rob (R8XFT)]

Moderator Action: Two threads opened about, essentially, the same topic, therefore the threads have been merged.
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