Too easy to discover the whole world; and urban sprawl

[Plopp]

Ive got an idea!

How about making settlers only able to move whithin cultural borders in order to limit urban sprawl (or make them able to move one tile outside your borders aswell (or heh, make them "get lost and disappear" if they end or begin their turn outside your borders)) This would be a extremely easy way to limit empires and urban sprawl. It would be a war in itself to just get to other nations to conquer them with an army.

You might want to alter culture for this in some way though, so you dont just settle on every possible tile around you capital just to push your borders out. Maybe make the 2nd ring of culture very cheap and then make the 3rd cost as much culture as the 2nd one originally did and the 4th ring cost as much as the 3rd and so on. Would make cities that dont produce culture stick with 1 ring and ones that do improve your borders rapidly.

However the more narrow you limit your settlers movement the more help the AI would need with this so Id think the most culture and making settlers able to atleast move one tile outside your borders would be best (if this is possible). Making settlers disappear could be hard for the AI where a human player could use this to his advantage and build roads in advance to settle better spots farther away and so on...


Anyway Id love to play with somthing like this, so if anyone could tell me how to do this or make their own mod or somthing, just gimme

:EDIT: Instead of letting settler only move within borders maybe the ability "settle" should only be available when youre within borders to allow settlers to travel to cities conquered far away. Also I dont usually play maps that have several continents or islands and this would pretty much kill those maps, no idea right now how to fix that.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

If you want to limit settling to within borders you might want to have it work through a spell instead of editing the dll to change the ability. It would be a very easy spell, only needing about 1 line of python if you want to use xml for the prereqs. You might need more complex python prereqs though if you want the AI to have any clue how to use it, or if you want to allow island settling out of borders.

Another benefit from making settling work though a spell is that you could make settlers from Tolerant/Conqueror trait civs build cities of the unit's culture instead of the owner's.

 

[Pazyryk]

I long long time ago I modded settlers as a kind of great person -- I called them city founders. My idea was to have city crowding (measured by unhealth and unhappiness) add to city founder points, along with other adjustments for traits and such. It has a sort of real world logic to it, although it really turns the normal civ strategy on its head (rewards player for what would now be considered bad city management).

 

[Opera]

Could be done by populations point rather than 'crowding'. Take the city's pop (#1); take the total pop of the civ (#2); run a random number using #2 (#3); if #3 if equal or inferior to #1, then increases the City Founders pool by 1.

With this, you would pretty much increase your pool by 1 every turn as long as you don't have another city but your capital. Then, the more cities you have, the slower your expansion would be.

But that's just a wild idea

 

[blade117]

Interesting idea, Opera