Drawing of national borders

[petermarkab]

Are national borders drawn in the same way as in civ 3 or are there other factors? Namely: geographical features (rivers, mountains), position of troops on the ground, and even through negotiation (I'll give you [the tiles with] two cows and some wheat if you give me [the tile with] those elephants).

Something to mod if not...

regards,
Peter

[Solver]

If you take a look at the different screens, you'll see that borders sometimes adjust to rivers.

Land trading isn't in, and it would be an extremely hard thing to implement!

[petermarkab]

yeah i've seen some borders running alongside rivers - nice feature. for land trading it would be possible to assign a value to each square based on resources harvested from it, but i suppose the difficulty would be in assessing its strategic value particularly for the AI. maybe something for human multiplayer only?

[snoopy369]

You can always trade land the same way you did in civ3 ... agree to build/not build cities in a particular way ... and can you still trade cities?

[petermarkab]

yeah but positioning cities in a particular way is still dependent on their culture value. you can't turn off the culture tap. Suppose your military unit positioned itself on a tile for X number of years after which that land became your territory (ie officially recognised by the other nations and the UN). That tile could be given immunity to culture gradients so it would only change hands through conquest or the trading of cities.

[conmcb25]

Originally posted by petermarkab
yeah but positioning cities in a particular way is still dependent on their culture value. you can't turn off the culture tap. Suppose your military unit positioned itself on a tile for X number of years after which that land became your territory (ie officially recognised by the other nations and the UN). That tile could be given immunity to culture gradients so it would only change hands through conquest or the trading of cities.

Huh? Is this possible or are you suggesting this?

[petermarkab]

i'm sure its possible. i'd assign an extra variable to each tile so the game engine would either ignore culture values when calculating who owns that tile or it wouldn't ignore the culture values. Having a military unit stationed on the tile for 10 years or ten turns (whichever is longer) would toggle that extra variable.

haha. or something like that. I'm only a very casual programmer - feel free to criticise.

cheers,
Peter

[conmcb25]

No No I dont mean criticism, I was wondering if you saw somewhere were it is implemented in the game already, but it looks like you are talking a mod, so I got it thanks

[petermarkab]

yeah Solver said land trading isn't in so this would be a mod. right now where's that python book i bought in july...

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Solver
Land trading isn't in, and it would be an extremely hard thing to implement!

Really? I assume Civ4 uses tiles for the map and each tile has an owner and that could be easily changed, or how else should this work? Of course if you use the border calculation algorithms each time when the stuff should be drawn, but then you probably get a performance problem. So shouldn't be such a big problem at least not in CTP2. Other problem would be to make the diplo code.

And finnally the most important thing to consider is why implementing this, as I don't see a major gain, of course it creates some atmosphere.

-Martin

[Solver]

No Martin, I didn't mean hard to implement the trading of plots themselves. The hard thing would lie in making the AI understand these situations and preventing the player from exploiting tha.

[Martin Gühmann]

Originally posted by Solver
No Martin, I didn't mean hard to implement the trading of plots themselves. The hard thing would lie in making the AI understand these situations and preventing the player from exploiting tha.

Yes, this is the difficuilt thing, so you need some functionality to valuate the tiles. Border tiles should have less value than inner tiles. Of course the productivity of the tiles should be considered. If they would allow a connection to exclaves, etc..

Based on the value of the outcome the AI would accept/reject. Of course an land exchange is easier to balance than land against something else.

-Martin

[sophist]

What's hard isn't the implementation, but rather the concepts around selecting and valuing a particular piece of land, and how to reconcile that with a cultural border system. Maybe you agree that the tile 2 squares from your capital goes to the French, but what happens your capital's cultural borders spill out to 5 tiles in every other direction? There are just too many thorny issues like that with unsatisfying solutions to justify implementing it.

[wgabrie]

Solver, If my unit occupies territory and that flips to me what keeps me from starting a war and then bunkering down in half my enemies' territory until it flips to me?

Sounds like an exploit.

[petermarkab]

wgabrie: its a hypothetical situation - one of my ideas is to allow military units to "naturalise" territory. This would need to be implemented in a mod. Of course it could be exploited as you say but i haven't thought it through!

regards,
Peter