Suggestion/Potential Modmod(Mod): Forts Overhaul

[Big Heb]

As it currently stands, I find the Fort improvement largely worthless. The extra 25% defense usually isn't a good enough reason to make a fort opposed to any other improvement within the fat cross, and outside the fat cross it can most likely be easily avoided so the workers are better off building other improvements elsewhere. From my experience, forts get built when I am done building railroads and other improvements everywhere and have nothing else for the workers to do except build forts in the middle of nowhere.

With RFC DoC, stability, research and growth all put a downward pressure on city creation: you want to only control cities that will grow large and useful in time, and minimize the number you control but maximize what you get out of them. If an area of the map is largely useless from a production/food/growth perspective, and sometimes from a resource perspective, that area is neglected, even if it might have some historical significance or strategic purpose for existing.

These are some examples of cities or areas that I would be referring to. You wouldn't want to build cities at these locations, but they are nonetheless important as strategic and historical sites for canals, naval bases, outposts, territories, etc.

America: Guam, Puerto Rico, Pearl Harbor, Midway Islands, Anchorage/Fairbanks, Okinawa, Monrovia, Panama Canal
England: Suez Canal, Falkland Islands, Mauritius, Cook Islands, Yukon, Barbados
Turkey: Cyprus
Vikings: Greenland
Spain: Canary Islands
France: French Polynesia, French Guiana
China: Taipei
Columbia: Galapagos Islands
Portugal: Cape Verde

In prior time periods, they could be used to represent expanding empires' outposts, especially useful for the Romans, Russians, and Chinese as they fight off barbarians.

I don't know how many of these are (easily) implementable, but these are some of the rules of new forts as I could envision them:

Concept: City Lite
- Same as current forts, but you don't need to be in another city's cultural boundaries to have civ control over it
- When a civ puts military units on the fort, the tile instantly becomes a part of that civ's territory; foreign culture has no effect on it, but flipping due to civ foundation or revival will flip that tile/fort if it is part of a core area (to prevent player abuse)
- For most circumstances, a fort will NOT count toward number of city calculations for research, stability, maintenance costs, etc.
- A fort DOES have a distance from palace maintenance cost (unless you're England, which really was the civ that inspired this idea for me)
- There are no stability penalties for building forts on Foreign Cores or Contested areas, but there is a normal stability penalty for having forts in Foreign areas of the stability map
- A fort does not have workable tiles, and therefore does not produce food, hammers, commerce, culture, espionage, research, or anything else a city does, and does not have a population variable

How to Build:
- Still requires a worker to build them, since they are improvements, but now they can only be built on unclaimed territory or your own territory
- Must be built to have connection to a city in your civ (trade route possible; e.g. river connection, coastal, connection via road or railroad)

Positioning for Military/Economic Strategy:
- If on coast, ships can dock in it and heal
- Air units can be based there
- If your civic is Mercantilism, and if there is a resource on the fort's tile, the tile will not be worked like in a city but you will have access to that resource (simulates European imperialism in small regions of Africa, South America, Caribbean, etc. to just get strategic resources)
- Depending on technology, founding a city on top of a fort will result in pre-built buildings:
- If before Rifling, and with the correct techs, a new city on that fort will come with Walls and/or Castle already built
- If after Rifling, and with the correct techs, a new city on that fort will come with Bomb Shelters and/or the other modern defensive buildings

Future Ideas (Semi-City Elements)
- If you have a Great Artist join the fort, the culture effect of the fort will be expand to that of a new city (square, not fat cross), but that additional cultural area can be affected by other civ cities' cultural boundaries (i.e. Colonial Territory)
- If you have a Great Merchant join the fort, the fort can have trade routes (base 1 + civic/tech modifiers) (i.e. Trading Outpost)
- If you have a Great Prophet join the fort, the fort will convert to state religion and will spread that religion to nearby areas (no effect if running Secularism) (i.e. Missionary Outpost, Crusades Fort)
- If you have a Great Scientist join the fort, one ICBM will be able to be relocated to the fort from a connected city (i.e. Missile Silo)
- If you have a Great Spy join the fort, the culture and units of the fort will appear as Independent or Barbarian to other civs (i.e. Insurgency Base, Puppet Independent "Citystate")
- If you have a Great General join the fort, you get an additional +25% defense bonus and units heal 50% faster
- You can trade fort control to another civ as a condition of peace, or with a normal diplomatic trade (simulates countries having military bases in other countries by contract)

If no one is up to making it, I have been meaning to get into the nitty gritty of learning Python and XML for a while now so I might be willing to take a crack at it. I would only continue once the idea is perfected or considered feasible, though.

Any thoughts on this very rough sketch of an idea?

 

[srpt]

there is a very many-featured forts mod already:
here

 

[Big Heb]

there is a very many-featured forts mod already:
here

That mod does look exactly like what I was considering. Do the RFC cultural boundary stability mechanics look at the stability bitmap to determine how to impact stability from culture in foreign areas? If so, this just might be complete enough to add in. It does mention some AI changes, though, so maybe it's not that easy to just drop it in.

Either way, I think this kind of mechanic is very useful for something like RFC when, as I said, you want to minimize the number of "useless" cities as much as possible due to stability and research impacts, but still want to play historically and fill up the historical cultural areas.

I just wish there was a way to name forts and have them tied to the RFC civ-based city naming process (whatever that is formally called). Any idea how that could be theoretically implemented?

 

[BenZL43]

I just wish there was a way to name forts and have them tied to the RFC civ-based city naming process (whatever that is formally called). Any idea how that could be theoretically implemented?

It is called City Name Manager and regulated in citynamemanager.py
Since in Civ 4 Fort = Improvement, I'm afraid there is no way to name each fort; there's no space given to write a name anyway. The best you can do is the label tool usually used in WB.

I am guessing that theoretically it can be possible by writing let's say improvementnamemanager.py or more specific improvement such as fortnamemanager.py, minenamemanager.py, etc and name each tile so that name will came up whenever a fort/mine/etc is built on that tile.. just how would the name be shown on the game while there's no mechanism that allow so?
As far as I'm aware, City naming is possible because there's space given to name and rename a city from the original CIV4, but there's no such things for a mere improvement.

 

[mrrandomplayer]

I really like this idea. Maybe the GP settlement seems excessive, but the general idea is very good.

 

[SheaferDaDawg]

Sounds good generally, but can I propose that a fort also produces +3 commerce, with a maximum of 10 forts?

 

[giant49er]

I think this is a great idea.

 

[The Southerner]

Very exciting idea.

 

[iOnlySignIn]

This idea is very necessary given the scale of the map. A city's BFC is large enough to cover all of Texas, so smaller settlements has to be represented differently in some way.

Not sure about GPs in Forts though. I can't think of any historical analogues of Great People dedicating their life and work to forts. They seem to prefer cities.

The maintenance of Forts should be the same as cities with population 1. And it should provide access to resources regardless of Civic - Mercantilism is very good already after the redesign.

 

[Oregon Lee]

And a bonus for making Panama or Suez Canal

 

[Askiya]

I like the Great Merchants joining forts and Great Prophets joining forts to represent trading posts and missionary outposts, respectively. As well as the Great Generals joining forts. It would be historical and add a new dimension to fort building. The other GPs joining forts don't make as much sense to me, though. I'd be cool with just the Fort mod that srpt linked to.