QUESTION: Barbarian Spawn Rates {adjusted city vs unit spawns}

[peyoan]

Hi.

Quick Question for anyone who might know.
Is there a way in the XML to adjust the relative frequency of barbarian city spawning and unit spawning separately?

I am creating a mod for myself that has smaller/slower step-wise progression, realistic population models, and large scale; therefore I do not want the traditional spawn rates as the barbarians will overpopulate the earth far too quickly. I can adjust the barb city distance to prevent/keep far away city-spawning altogether but that is not the ideal fix.

Also, i'm looking to include the Revolution mod which would then allow these barbs to form civs later on. So i really need to be careful about the number or frequency of barb city spawning; however I'd like to maintain a reduced but still competitive rate of barb unit spawning.

Ok, that is all. Thanks!
-Peyoan

 

[BobTheTerrible]

Civ4handicapinfo.xml defines a bunch of different things for the different difficulty levels. Among the things it defines are the chances of a barbarian city appearing, the # of barbarians per unowned land tile, number of defenders present in a barbarian city, and one or two more. Remember you have to adjust the the levels for each difficulty. Also, keep in mind barbarian cities are hard-coded to spawn when the avg number of cities per player is 2 or greater, you'll have to go into the SDK to change that.

How are you planning on achieving the rest of your mod? This is something I've been trying to do for myself, so I'd be interested to see what you're doing.

 

[peyoan]

The principle I am shooting for is a GIANT map with very slow step-wise progression. I am adding many techs as intermediate steps to allow for smaller changes over time rather than large jumps (always hate that getting certain techs or combos, ie first to macemen, gives a huge advantage).

The population model is the focus really. Cities grow in line with their population growth rates (this is easy to simulate, I am aligning the food-required for city-size growth to the year progression to represent accurately the old world growth rates). So the time will elapse in blocks of years at first (it takes a while to go from your starting 1000 people to build up a sizeable city state and then expand outward) but then slow to a time scale of months and eventually weeks far into the game.

Since troops are a function of able-bodied populace, a generic warrior unit can be produced through food production (like settlers/workers) to simulate their removal from the citizenry. Then depending on the gold stocks, resources, and specialized buildings these base-units are upgraded to all other war units. When a unit is disbanded in a city it returns the food it required to the stocks.

Additionally the worker type unit does its normal jobs but can also settle a cottage (can't be built or used by a city). These "minor cities" grow and provide income (tax) to the civilization whose borders they fall under. The real benefit is that in wartime, villages or towns can produce resistance units randomly (ie peasants in ancient era, serfs, militia, partisans, etc era specific). These exist as a irregular force that is rapidly conscripted when invaded (can't send them out of your borders though at this point).

And a bunch of other things like resource dynamics, fat cross city screen, and adjusted move ratios for different units and terrains.

The emphasis is on a giant map, realistic population growth model, and step-wise research. I would probably extend the distance for barb cities while increasing barbarian unit spawns (or premade map: impossible barb city distance and just plop down the barb cities in advance).

Scenario Goal: Celtica (many tribes, romans, germanics); Far East (ancient japan/china/korea)
-peyoan