City Sprawl

[ragapa]

I understand it's purely asthetic, but it would be nice if there were an option to tame the city graphic sprawl a bit. I tend to have big cities, and towards the end it sometimes gets hard to see where one city ends and another picks up. Does any one else feel this way? You game tweakers out there have any ideas?

[GeoModder]

Mmm, you could try to reduce the scale of the city buildings in the Civ4LSystem file... or else use the linear mapping approach for depicting colonies if that works in C4C.

[armyjournalist]

Directly changing from exponential to linear doesn't seem to help, if anything it makes it worse. Here's what I found out you can do (be sure to backup the XML, it looks like it works fine but I'm not a pro:

Go to GlobalArtDefines.xml (Sid Meier's Civilization IV Colonization\Assets\XML\Art) and open it in Notepad. There are instructions for switching between exponential and linear.

Leave alone:
"DefineTextVal>METHOD_EXPONENTIAL
Beneath that, there's a note that says:

"this is the way to tweak city size when METHOD_EXPONENTIAL is chosen in the above define"

Beneath that, find:
Define>
DefineName>GAME_CITY_SIZE_EXP_MODIFIER
fDefineFloatVal>1.05
Change fDefineFloatVal to a smaller number. O.5 will give you this result:

[armyjournalist]

Here's the B4 (different turn though)

[GeoModder]

With the linmap method, you can define the initial amount of city buildings you'll see and the number you'll see at a certain citysize. Minus the facilities you put in the city of course.

[armyjournalist]

Yeah, it looks like you could do that from the same file -- I just didn't know what to redefine the numbers as. Like I said, I'm by no means a pro-grammer.

[ragapa]

Thanks you two for the comments/suggestions. Knocking down that GAME_CITY_SIZE_EXP_MODIFIER value helped a lot.

[Supr49er]

Welcome to Apolyton armyjournalist.

[armyjournalist]

Thanks, it's great to be here.