(1-VT) Introduce a table that makes specific City-States not appear when a Major Civ is in the game.

[Hinin]

Following @adan_eslavo's idea on that topic, I would like to make a formal version of that proposal, with the detailed elements to facilitate its implementation and better expose its benefits.

Currently, the pool of City-States chosen during a game is randomized : the balance between different types of CStates is enforced by the system, but the CState themselves aren't. This has most notably been a problem with custom civs, who are forced to replace existing CStates with new ones quite often, which can cause compatibility problems with mods like Unique City-States.

I agree with adan_eslavo's solution, which I find quite elegant : a table with two columns (one CivilizationType, and one MinorCivilizationType) which simply make it so that, when a Civilization is present, all the MinorCivilizations associated with that Civilization in the table can't appear in the game.
Ex. : If Vietnam is present as a major civ, Hanoi can't be. Same for Canada or Louisiana and Quebec City.

This would also allow something interesting, which is to implement a far greater number of City-States in order to balance the number for each type (currently, there are about 2 times less Religious CStates than Maritime ones) without fearing compatibility problems with existing or future custom civ.

A modmod could even include CState versions of existing civilizations :
- Lutecia (Merchantile CS) when France isn't present
- Byzantium (Merchantile CS) when Byzantium or the Ottomans aren't present
- Bulawayo (Military CS) when the Zulus aren't present
- Edimburg (Cultural CS) when the Celts or Scotland aren't present
etc

I do think the idea in itself is quite simple (although I don't know if there is currently so kind of hard-coding possibly preventing such a thing to be realized), but would open the door to more variety in CStates and also prevent Major Civ / Minor Civ overlap.

Thanks for reading.

 

[CppMaster]

What's the problem with Major/Minor civ overlap? Is it purely flavor or does it impact gameplay too?

 

[Recursive]

Proposal vetoed.

Reason: This is not a proposal for a change to VP itself, but one for modmod compatibility. Thus it fails to meet the "about game balance or other mechanics visible to the player" requirement. This should be proposed on GitHub instead (and already has been). I'll also note that we don't currently know how to do this.