On second thought here, I am second guessing some of my own suggestions from last post...
It is somewhat odd that the mod would be able to extend borders past the 5 rings a nearby would naturally grow (I think?), but I agree it might cost a lot to check for "city owned by player within 5 tiles". I think that itself would be enough to stop most exploits.
After reflection, I'm leaning away pretty hard from any city range checks for general capture/release (there is however a range check in v4's handling of razing cities, and tbh this seems to add a pretty heavy/noticeable resource hit already when activated) -- I think the v4 change to capturing tiles adjacent-to-owned-only should be sufficient to reasonably limit exploits, and avoids further tying up resources from this mod.
I would be fine with only letting melee units only (for both land and sea) be able to capture tiles; just like how it works for capturing cities.
I've reflected on this previously, though I had forgotten about this when I posted last in this thread: making the conquer function work on melee-only (for either naval or land) will imo create a niche role for these units, and likely diminish the AI's unintentional good use of this feature despite being unaware of the mod. ie human will know to send melee units specifically to areas where tiles need to be captured, but AI will continue to rely on the VP unit mix w/o any consideration for the mod. I think the current state where most land units are able to capture tiles, is perhaps a key design element that gives the mod a balanced feel; conversely making niche capture roles for only some units may unbalance this dynamic. I am leaning away from melee only captures, to the no-sub-capture for naval (and of course existing v4 change to no recon/siege captures for land).
The main issue with this idea is that lake tiles can never be captured, which is probably why adjacent capture was included in the first place, and we'd need to find a fix for it, whether by allowing embarked units to capture or by letting adjacent capture stay. I don't normally think of a group of units in a transport being able to project force, but maybe that would be good enough. What normally happens in the mod to the center of a 3x3 lake after land units have captured the lake adjacent tiles?
Good point. My memory of the granular details of how this plays out in game with this mod is a little shaky, and I cannot easily test rn (no steam, modbuddy, civ 5 on this pc). I know for sure that current state in both v4 and original mod allows land units that occupy land tile on edge of lake (or ocean for that matter) to capture adjacent tile regardless of whether that tile is water or land (assuming all other checks satisfied). In a 3x3 lake, once all the coastal lake tiles are captured, the center would be subject to the mod's "encirclement" function, and should typically be flipped the next turn. In game, I think I have noticed some oddities with this function that sometimes leave a small pocket of disconnected tiles, but generally encircled plots are reassigned.
There is a lua hook for checking if tile is a lake, though I cant recall if it works completely as expected (some vanilla things in lua have been deprecated by firaxis expansions and/or VP's changes), and even if it does, it will fail when there are lakes that exceed the game's definition of lake (iirc VP assigns any group of contiguous water tiles up to 10 or so as a "lake", whereas a slightly larger group of water tiles are treated same as any ocean tile, even if they appear as more of a lake or inland sea to player). All that said, I think it will be "good enough" to allow land units to capture only land tiles + game definition of lakes, and this can be accomplished with relatively trivial changes to v4 mod.
There is a scenario that comes to mind as I think through what changes this will impart in-game. Consider two warring civs separated by narrow sea of at least 3 width, where naval borders are adjacent but no land borders are. In v4 of this mod, either faction cannot capture any opposing tiles without first capturing city on opposing land mass. Even in case of 2-width sea, a capturing land unit would have to make landfall and successfully survive a turn to create an owned beachhead.
If we change to allow naval units to capture water tiles, capturing tiles on opposing land mass will be much easier again, w/o a city capture first necessarily, as player is able to create a "path" of adjacent tiles in water that will eventually allow land units to start flipping land as soon as they disembark on opposing shore. Is this desireable? I think I personally prefer the v4 dynamic in this regard, as it makes a naval invasion somewhat more onerous on the invader, requiring a successful land offensive before any tile capture.
There are possibilities of limiting naval to capture only ocean, or only coast, etc. -- but each of these likely comes with odd functionality and compromise to the desired effect. Thoughts/comments on this?
