Two ideas

[ggalindo001]

I have two ideas for possible mods -- I'll dig into files as well, but wanted to also query the community.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Scale the number of alliances to map size (or # of civilizations). When playing on a small or even normal map with 7 other civs, being able to ally with 5 of them really makes the game less strategic and more formulaic.

My thought is to rationalize how many active alliances you can have at one time -- so if 8 total civs in the game, maybe limit to 2 vs. the 5 currently out there, and scale up (so maybe 10 civs --> 3 alliances, 14 civs --> 4 alliances, etc.). I also think this would open up the game with the AI as well as they won't be locked into so many other alliances which makes AI to AI conflict impossible in the mid game and on.

I would still want to allow for any of the alliance types (so you could have one military, one research, then later could be one cultural and one religious, etc.) -- which also adds a strategic layer to things.

I really don't see downside in this from both a player and AI perspective, other than the AI likely not being able to strategically maximize alliances (which they cannot do really anyway).

2. In my experience, pre walls, the AI is very aggressive and can effectively fight wars. So, was first thinking instead of a separate set of walls with the ability to do ranged fire, just making walls increase the city defense value. I think this would keep the aggressiveness of the AI up and make it easier for them to conduct wars.

This would likely be fraught with a number of issues, including:

a. It would also make it way easier for human players to run over AI players.
b. City states would disappear by mid game
c. It would absolutely prioritize melee units over most other units (which isn't a bad thing from an AI perspective).

So I thought another possible solution would be to tie building of walls with having an encampment district. The AI tend to build encampments a lot anyway, so that may not be a huge handicap for the AI. This would force the human player to burn a district for an encampment. To make this even more interesting -- make an encampment building (and city center building) that is required to be able to do ranged fire for the encampment and city respectively.

Would be interested in thoughts on this one.

And if anyone has looked into either of these or similar, would love to learn from you. I haven't seen either of these addressed in a mod, and frankly, not sure if either idea could be modded in current state.

Happy to discuss.