RagnorIronpants
Chieftain
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2010
- Messages
- 49
Totally agree with the OP and I understand what you mean - it drives me crazy and was one of the things I still hated about V even when it was redeemed by the DLC. If the way borders expanded in SMAC to IV were a bit crude they were at least a lot more logical and predictable than this - and by the in-game early modern period they actually became fixed and solid in a way that was historically accurate. However it does appear that VI was designed with more tile purchasing in mind - I get the impression the AI purchases to fill in its borders, and the reason I had so many holes in my borders in the first few games was because I wasn't. But I think it's still a problem even if you do buy tiles.
I think city radius and national borders should be totally uncoupled from now on - the suggestion above about claimed land is a good one. Perhaps a city could produce cultural borders as it does now, a tile at a time, and it can only work those borders. But a founded city claims land in a fixed radius around it (as it did with Alpha Centauri, when it was I think 7 squares in all directions). However if two foreign cities are close to each other their borders could overlap giving competing claims, and these have to be solved in either diplomacy or war, as with real life. If two civs claimed the same tiles, you could have a CB to forcibly take that land - but it could also be offered in deals, with civs willing to renounce certain bits of land in order to gain other ones (think Britain and the US over Oregon). And then, perhaps, if a city's cultural borders expanded massively then this would not claim land, since the systems would be totally separate, but it could flip cities, as with III and IV.
That ^ is probably totally unworkable given the problems with the AI...but I think something along those lines is just fundamentally better than V and VI's systems.
I think city radius and national borders should be totally uncoupled from now on - the suggestion above about claimed land is a good one. Perhaps a city could produce cultural borders as it does now, a tile at a time, and it can only work those borders. But a founded city claims land in a fixed radius around it (as it did with Alpha Centauri, when it was I think 7 squares in all directions). However if two foreign cities are close to each other their borders could overlap giving competing claims, and these have to be solved in either diplomacy or war, as with real life. If two civs claimed the same tiles, you could have a CB to forcibly take that land - but it could also be offered in deals, with civs willing to renounce certain bits of land in order to gain other ones (think Britain and the US over Oregon). And then, perhaps, if a city's cultural borders expanded massively then this would not claim land, since the systems would be totally separate, but it could flip cities, as with III and IV.
That ^ is probably totally unworkable given the problems with the AI...but I think something along those lines is just fundamentally better than V and VI's systems.
