Islands, Citystates, and Map Generation

[DragonGreen]

In the Rise of Mankind mod for Civ4, when you discovered certain key technologies, your settler unit would be upgraded to a colonist, bringing an increase in production cost, but also a larger base city upon settling. These upgraded settlers came with a basic set of buildings and a slightly larger population, giving them a headstart good enough that they would be viable within a close future.

I do not know if something similar is possible with the current tools, but concept-wise, I do not think an upgraded settler once you research astronomy is outside of TBC's scope.

When I start the game with a later era (e.g. industrial), the founded cities are bigger and have several buildings from start.

So I suggest it could working?

 

[Tomice]

Sneaks suggestions sound very appealing, all of them!

In fact, I've suggested a strategic food ressource months ago, don't remember what spoke agianst it, however. I guess there was something more than just "too much work" and "too much change from vanilla".

The advanced settler unit is really interesting, too. I've played a lot of Terra games in Civ4, and back then it really took ages for those new cities to catch up, they were a burden for centuries, instead of the eco boost they were for colonial powers in real history. So it'd be realistic, too. I guess colonizing was never really worth it back in civ4 in pure gameplay terms (it was fun, however).
Sadly, I haven't played enough long-lasting terra games in Civ5 yet, so I don't have prrof that the problem ist similar here, but I guess so.

Finally, different eco buildings for coastal cities sound very interesting as well. I just fear this would really go beyond the scope of this mod. We could make some existing buildings incompatible/exclusive (as it was mentioned before) however, and boost their effect accordingly. This way, the player could choose if a coastal city just happens to be on the coast without really being oriented this way, or if the city really is a classical harbor city.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Proposed Solution 2:
A larger and vastly more gamechanging solution would be to develop a system in which bonus resources are consumed in a way akin to strategics. This would allow on the macro level what we already do on the micro. Rather than having simply farm tiles feeding cities, we could in fact have cities that exist only to feed other cities.

This could be implemented via creating buildings that consume Cows, Sheep, Deer, Fish, Stone and Wheat, and perhaps even luxuries.

An example would be creating a Grain silo building that consumes 1 Wheat similar to Factories and Coal. The silo in turn would provide 2 food or so. In turn, bonus resources would need to lose their inherent tile bonuses, as these bonuses would move to the city in which they were consumed, rather than produced.

In this way, one could theoretically build a supercity anywhere with a large enough cottage economy. I would avoid letting the AI trade the resources, as I doubt it could handle the concept, but it should be able to grasp that it can consume these resources in cities it wants to grow.

This is something I've wanted FOREVER in Civ but does depart quite a bit. Kinda like having freighter in MOO2. Would be interesting too if your trade routes could be blockaded, cutting off the imported food.


Could cities settled after a certain tech in the game automatically be given some building that provides "new world" style boosts, but the building is completely unbuildable by existing cities? That might be one possible workaround.

 

[Maniac]

This may only work on some mapscripts and for some islands, and I don't know if modders have sufficient access to a pathfinder to achieve this, but just in case...

Let the gold you get from mutual Open Borders with another civ vary depend on how long it would take for a theoretical unit with one movement point to move from your capital to the other player's capital. If your two civs' cultural territory borders each other, you'd get the maximum amount; the further apart, the less profit.

Some modifications to the theoretical "movement speed" and pathfinding:

1) Movement cost within your own territory and that of the target player is zero. This is because the AI wouldn't know connecting your two civs with a road would increase profits.

2) You can not path through the territory of civs you don't have open borders with or city states you're not at least Friends with (unless you're Greece - then you can).

3) You cannot path through unexplored plots.

4) The path can only switch between water and land in a coastal city with a Harbor. In AI territory a Harbor is not required - only a coastal city.

5) The movement cost through water is the same an embarked unit would get, including tech boni. You cannot move through Ocean without Astronomy. The usual water-related stuff.

6) This is the rule that would make island cities special: for each "turn" you have to path through neutral cultureless territory, the plot's movement cost is increased by an exponent 1.xx (depends on playtesting). When the path moves through someone's culture again, the exponent is reset to 1. This has as a consequence that if there are two continents with an island between them, open border profits with the other continent would significantly increase by founding a city on that island.

I have no in-depth knowledge of how pathfinders work, so I can't say if it's possible to make a pathfinder understand that, because of the exponent, a less direct path through an island's culture is in fact shorter than a direct route.

Also, this may need an interface to prevent confusion. Is it possible to mod the trade route overlay of the strategic view??

 

[Tomice]

@maniac: wasn't it the complicated trade route calculation that caused extensive loading time between turns (as one major reason) in Civ4?

Nevertheless, foreign trade is a concept that is underepresented in civ5 so far, so I'd like to see some additions in this regard.

 

[Maniac]

@maniac: wasn't it the complicated trade route calculation that caused extensive loading time between turns (as one major reason) in Civ4?

The slow turn processing speed in Civ4 was IIRC caused by recalculating tradeplotgroups multiple times by turn every time a city's culture changed, or a road was built/pillaged, some plots were blockaded... Fortunately what I'm suggesting is much simpler: just calculate the modified length of the path between the capitals of all players. If for instance there are 8 players, then 7+6+5+4+3+2+1=28 calculations need to be made. The effect shouldn't be more than like having an extra 28 units on the map decide how to move somewhere.

 

[Thalassicus]

I would really like to implement international trade routes, and your proposal sounds like a fantastic idea. I actually have experience with network routing from my SE courses. Doing a ptp connection of capitals would be easy due to the fact the network and path-costs are all known in advance, and the network is small.

One way to make it really fast and efficient is a distributed and dynamic algorithm, like used for the Internet. Trade routes don't historically change in an instant after all. The trade route could be linked by nodes (likely cities), and each turn, each node in the network analyzes its neighbors and updates accordingly. If a node is cut off from all routes it'd disappear. This could give a very realistic and fast-executing trade system.

I have no idea how much work it might take to create such a system however (at least ten hours and maybe upwards of fifty), so I'm going to focus on simpler solutions first.

 

[moysturfurmer]

Maybe if colonies (founded w/ colonist as opposed to settler) acted as puppet cities (without the extra unhappiness, and a smaller increase to culture costs) but generate a lot of unhappiness if their cultural borders touch the borders of your "main" empire (until you annex it into your empire, at which point it turns into a normal city). That way, you can found colonies far away from your empire on the continent you're already on as well (ala Europeans in India), should any land be unclaimed by the time you unlock whatever tech would unlock colonization.

 

[Thalassicus]

The concept of intentionally founding puppets is an interesting one... a way to increase resources and gold without slowing policy generation.

 

[Maniac]

One way to make it really fast and efficient is a distributed and dynamic algorithm, like used for the Internet. Trade routes don't historically change in an instant after all. The trade route could be linked by nodes (likely cities), and each turn, each node in the network analyzes its neighbors and updates accordingly. If a node is cut off from all routes it'd disappear. Nodes would likely be cities. This could give a very realistic and fast-executing trade system.

Cool. An advantage of using cities as nodes is that it becomes easy to identify which cities are responsible for making a trade route possible. Then you can hand out the money that is lost from two trading civs not bordering each other, to the intermediary third-party cities/civs. You'd get something like caravanserays and cities along the Silk Route.

 

[gunnergoz]

I've long wished for a colonist type unit that establishes cities that are from the beginning more or less independent from the mother country but still a part of it. Sort of like making your own puppet city states, which would add to the mother country's prosperity and donate resources but if their unhappiness gets too bad, could go rogue and revolt against the mother country, possibly to the extent of forming a new AI nation or joining an existing AI empire. There would have to be downsides to the colony, beside the extra expense of the colonist unit - perhaps requirements to have military occupation, provide missing resources, extra unhappiness in the mother country due to immigration, etc. Not to mention that you might not be able to direct what is produced in the colony, just like in a puppet.

As an aside, I also like the idea of a tourism industry tech with its own buildings that can vary geographically - ski resorts in cold areas near mountains, beach resorts on islands, family resorts (think Disneyland) in urban areas of existing cities. The latter might be the result of an entertainer great person who could be generated by points from having various entertainment buildings in your empire. Such buildings would mainly generate happiness of course. But if you did have colonists as in the above paragraph, there may well be a need to offset unhappiness in the mother country from the colonial process. (See, it all goes together after all )

 

[mitsho]

Yeah, the Colonist=Unit available with Astronomy that builds Puppet States, seems to be a easy solution. The Question is wether it's possible and wether the AI will understand to use them. The AI which imho at the moment builds way not enough cities. (Is that my personal impression?). Additionally, Coastal Buildings like a Custom House could make luxury ressources more valuable (sort of like the Commerce Finisher, just not happiness-related).

 

[Thalassicus]

All settlers cost the same, because settler cost depends on the starting era (not a fixed value like other units). I like the idea, but I'm not sure how we could create a settler that forms puppets right away with our current modding tools. Most of the tools only work in combination with the user interface.

In other words, it'd be easy to do for the human player, but I can't think of a way to do it for the AI.

 

[Sneaks]

Gangler already developed a mod that allows all cities to be founded as puppets with the option of making it an abroad only option. Its called Puppet Empire. However, it does only work for the human player.

 

[gunnergoz]

Thanks, Thalassicus. I figured it was too much to hope for but nice to know why it is impractical.

 

[Thalassicus]

Islands less than 10% the size of the largest landmass on the map are now rich in coal and stone, and more frequently have atolls nearby. This will hopefully make the effort required to settle these remote locations more rewarding. I chose to do coal and stone because these resources scale linearly to empire size. Each city founded to acquire 1 coal is basically self-supporting, and the stoneworks helps production and happiness for 1 city.

 

[Sneaks]

Stone might be more iffy now. Apparently stoneworks will no longer be buildable in cities on plains in vanilla.

 

[Thalassicus]

That was technically added with the Stoneworks a few months ago. I chose to drop that requirement because the #1 thing I ask myself for everything is, "Is this fun?" Such an arbitrary requirement for the building is not fun, and had little gameplay impact anyway.