Save the wilderness campaign

[Mesix]

Best way to make resettlement more slow is to raise many times city maintenance cost - both from number and distance. But then well have some strong balance changes of civics and sprawling trait and lose some possibilities. Then not sure what to do with colonies.

Then you will be able to kill AI civ with maintenence just founding cities near its borders and gifting them to it. AI is not very smart in accepting such gifts. You can do it even now though it is more complicated and risky.

The City States civic allows for huge empires of sprawling cities with almost no maintenance costs.

 

[TheJopa]

I hink the "pop has reached x" natices should be removed. They are really useless, and get annoying after a few games. I was tired of them in vanilla too, but they are especially inappropriate in FfH.

Just remove them in options. I think it's Sid's Tips option, one that also removes 'congratulations, you have built your first mounted unit' messages.

 

[TheJopa]

I still think that they should implement the idea of making certain terrains unownable and even impassible to most civs until certain techs (but not the same techs; passibility should come before settleability, and I'd prefer if recon units could move through such terrains sooner then melee or siege units)

Yeah, lands that are impassable, and when you research tech x your reckon units can move in, and when tech y is researched rest of troops, including settlers, can come. And that wilderness can spawn animals and other interesting stuff.

 

[it-ogo]

Did someone have full-size game in rainforest map? Is it a solution?

 

[xienwolf]

Trend in fantasy is that each 'race' has only 2 or 3 cities, and a Journey of DAYS between each other. Any mechanic that can result in this would be amazing.

Can it be hard-coded that no settler can build a city more than X tiles (set by map size) from the capitol? Then if you more the Cap you can expand a lot, but that means you invested significant time in doing so, and are thus allowed. Otherwise the territory allowed is restricted.

 

[Tyrs]

I'm not sure I like the idea of impassable terrain, cause I like to send out a unit or two to "adventure" in unowned lands. Maybe terrain that is impassable only to settlers? is that doable? Then you'd still have barbarians coming out of the wild, but it wouldn't get expanded in to

 

[TheJopa]

I'm not sure I like the idea of impassable terrain, cause I like to send out a unit or two to "adventure" in unowned lands. Maybe terrain that is impassable only to settlers? is that doable? Then you'd still have barbarians coming out of the wild, but it wouldn't get expanded in to

Personally I hate that both in vanilla and in FfH world gets explored too quickly. Very soon I have entire map and also Civs meet too fast. And scouts travel millions of miles away from their cities.

 

[xienwolf]

In the post taht Nikis-Night pasted, discussing an idea that was in the works (maybe), it was proposed that only certain unit-classes (like recon) would be able to enter various terrains at low level tech, improving to melee/archer and maybe adepts at mid techs, and finally on late tech unrestricted access.

Also it was proposed to have a "fringe effect" so that a small patch of the terrain was still passable, but a large swath could only barely be entered into. That way a single Tree square couldn't block a choke-hold to half the continent, but you would be left with only the borders of a gigantic forested area explored, and no idea what lies inside.

 

[Cuteunit]

I may be going out on a limb here, but if you really hate empire building so much, why not play on Huge, Marathon, with just a few civs? Presto, gigantic WTH tracts of land between you and the next guy no matter what you do.


Limiting growth would just be silly stupid, there's no other way to say it. I can just imagine how not-fun having only 3 cities until the 400th turn would be. Talk about an idea that must sound better in your head than it would in practice.


Want even slower growth? turn on No Settlers plus Barbarian World so you can warmonger for your few, non-ideal cities. Raging barbarians a plus here. I played a game like that the other day and ended up with 250ish barbarians of differrent flavors killed before I fell asleep and never felt like resuming that game again.


Complaining about rapid expansion when you're playing on Quick is like complaining about your car going too fast if you floor the pedal...

There is something I'd enjoy seeing though, when it comes to the wilderness. For another thread.

 

[Lord Bayushi]

Just to be clear, I have no problem with vast empires populating the map, that's Civ, mod or no. But in a dark fantasy setting, there should be tracks of wilderness within every empire's boarders that still hold dangers for the surrounding areas, be it dark forests that travelers don't return from known to be home to goblins or desolate peaks said to harbor the undead.

Sure, realistically an empire would fund parties of explorers, military ventures, and even go so far as to destroy a dark wood to ensure it's population is secure, thus in Civ your culture boarders edge out the capacity for barbarians to spawn within your boarders, but this is a genre based mod, and in that genre those things just don't happen because the adventure options for said areas of untamed wilderness are inherent to the feel of the setting. That is what I feel is missing, and that is what I would like to see preserved, if possible.

I think that the wild world should remain until the end of the game, always providing you with reasons to be on your toes, and also adding to the feel of the game and allowing for some interesting quest and event options to boot. I would like to see it be the case in a marathon or epic game just the same as I would like to see it preserved when playing on quick.

 

[Arwon]

An idea: What about radically limiting cultural border expansion? If cities could never expand further than the fat cross, that would certainly leave the world a bit more open.

...and an exception for the Kuriotates would make them very flavourful.

 

[xienwolf]

Could be mildly interesting. Maybe a slightly less severe limitation where you only expand your cultural borders on every other level of culture? Then it'd still grant you the fat cross on the first one, but you have to wait an insanely long time to get the next bump up.

And from what I am understanding, the Kurio are supposed to expand their borders two tiles for every cultural level? Seem like something along those lines from the few early comments in the Bug Thread.

As for my previous idea about only allowing settlers a certain distance from your capitol, it would at worst limit you to 5 cities, but ideally be a bit less restrictive meaning you could manage 9 tightly clustered cities on a Huge map. And I always play on Marathon/Huge, but still wish the map wasn't filled in so much/fast.

Some Multi-Tile special terrain that cannot be settled, and spawns barbarian/animal/demon units even if inside of somebodies cultural borders would be an interesting touch, coupled with some events forcing you to send in adventure parties, stealing fortified units from nearby towns, or spawning hordes of baddies all at once could be very fitting to the Dark Fantasy Theme, in Lord Bayushi's type of idea.

 

[Cuteunit]

In my other thread I posited an idea for having frequent inside-border events you have to deal with militarily to keep your improvements running. Plenty of potential there... a giant spider suddenly taking up residence in one of your woods, undead coming out of one of your mines, werewolves terrorizing your farm, etc.

also posted some ideas for adventure targets in the world at large.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I was just thinking about the limited unit movement again, and I remembered how much I hate the way ships can't move in the ocean.

Could it (and the other new limited movement terrain) be made so that you can move through it so long as you can get across in one turn? or so long as your line of sight shows the whole path through it? I would suggest the Civ III mechanic of losing units in harsh terrain, but I wouldn't want to lose a hero that way (not that a few dangerous events for units in the Hinterlands is a bad thing), and I doubt the AI would handle it well.

 

[Cuteunit]

what about dramatically increased chance for barbarian units to spawn near units outside your cultural border. Like banditry sort of.

 

[Mesix]

Just to be clear, I have no problem with vast empires populating the map, that's Civ, mod or no. But in a dark fantasy setting, there should be tracks of wilderness within every empire's boarders that still hold dangers for the surrounding areas, be it dark forests that travelers don't return from known to be home to goblins or desolate peaks said to harbor the undead.

Sure, realistically an empire would fund parties of explorers, military ventures, and even go so far as to destroy a dark wood to ensure it's population is secure, thus in Civ your culture boarders edge out the capacity for barbarians to spawn within your boarders, but this is a genre based mod, and in that genre those things just don't happen because the adventure options for said areas of untamed wilderness are inherent to the feel of the setting. That is what I feel is missing, and that is what I would like to see preserved, if possible.

I think that the wild world should remain until the end of the game, always providing you with reasons to be on your toes, and also adding to the feel of the game and allowing for some interesting quest and event options to boot. I would like to see it be the case in a marathon or epic game just the same as I would like to see it preserved when playing on quick.

I think you might be onto something here. This could be accomplished by allowing barbarians to spawin inside cultural borders. This would allow animals to spawn for the entire game (making carnivals a lot more useful). It would also make the dark fantasy world a lot more dangerous, and keep players on their toes with more military units devoted to keeping the peace within the empire.

Perhaps this idea could be tried out as a check box in the map generator. When creating a game you could select "Untamed Lands" with a mouse over that reads "Barbarians can spawn inside cultural borders." This would just be another option like "Barbarian World" or "Wildlands".

 

[Mailbox]

If you did something like that, it would be nice if they didn't spawn within 1 tile of a city or fort. That would also add more value to forts.

 

[Ur_Vile_Wedge]

Would there be a way of keeping anyone but recon units (and I suppose noncombat units like settlers and workers and maybe the initial disciple units) from say, leaving the cultural borders (maybe allow them to travel on roads?) of any civ?

Combine with tough and nasty barbs and you now get something that is *Really* hard to expand, at least until you can get guys like hunters or maybe rangers, which are not exactly easy techs to get.

Maybe with one of the more advanced techs, you could explore with any unit/

The idea, hpefully is to integrate something I saw in a nice little strategy game called EU2, that you need dedicated explorers to go outside the "comfort zone" of your civs.

It would make expanding really, really hard, esp if you can get the barbs to spawn like they do in Age of Ice and they're out hunting your scouts, who of course, aren't all that tough against non-animal enemies. Expanding? You'd need a small army of scouts just to get the settler out, and of course, it will be hard to reinforce the new outpost.

 

[xienwolf]

Could be an enjoyable minor tweak till they can work out special terrain that is limiting. Just to see what it is like if for no better reason. Initial warrior would need a special promotion to allow him to move around till he reaches your decision for a first city of course.

 

[Mesix]

Special terrain would be cool too. Maybe a dark forest that spawns barbarians inside cultural broders and connot be worked. A late tech or some sort of magic might allow you to change the dark forest to normal or ancient forest.