Border treaties in Civ5?

[axisworks]

I wish there was a way to draw permanent borders through a mutual agreement between two nations like a border treaty. It would add quite an element to the game if one could re-create a Treaty of Versailles or Congress of Vienna-like situation. I think it'd be interesting, particularly if there was a resource such as oil or aluminum right on someone's border.

The only way I could think of doing this would be to actually click some sort of red line between the tiles separating two nations. Obviously, this would be rather idiotic for people going for culture victories or people planning cultural takeovers of cities. It just seems, to me that cultural influence and takeovers of regions through culture is more of an round-about way of showing what happened often between nations prior to the 19th century. It's still interesting and applicable, but constantly shifting borders has all-too-often created more problems for me regarding allies that are close-by, stealing resources from them that I didn't need and such.

[Blake]

I've thought about this a fair bit, and I see two main ways of implementing it.

The easiest way is to have a "Fair borders treaty", this would automatically reallocate tiles with shared culture as fairly as possible, using the following algorithm:

The cultural owner of the tile can either keep, or give up, a tile at their discretion (bear in mind this is an automated process).
If another civ with culture on the tile & fair borders with the owner, has a city closest to that tile, then the tile is loaned to that civ. Ties are broken by culture. Only tiles actually within a city radius are subject to being loaned.
To keep things simple, the rights to resources remains with the cultural owner (the resources can be gifted seperately, of course). The loan only extends to the food, hammers and commerce. Access rights (open borders) are also determined by the cultural owner. The ONLY thing fair borders allows is for non-cultural owners to WORK the tiles. (they can't even improve them)
With a fair borders treaty signed, cities cannot flip.

This algorithm will gracefully handle any combination of civs contesting a tile.

AI Evaluation:
When considering a fair-borders agreement, the AI counts the number of tiles it will gain/lose and will require compensation per tile:
Losing a workable tile that goes to the other party: 8 gold/turn.
Losing a fallow tile that goes to the other party: 3 gold/turn.

Fair borders would be cheapest when approximately equal numbers of tiles change hands in both directions, or when mostly fallow tiles change hands.

When a civ is being culturally crushed, they probably wouldn't be able to afford the fair borders, and it would only be done charitably.


The second way, would be to have a system where you can click on a tile and choose "Demand/Loan this tile", but it seems a bit unwieldly.

[axisworks]

The second way, would be to have a system where you can click on a tile and choose "Demand/Loan this tile", but it seems a bit unwieldly.

See, I think something similar to that would actually be the most fun, but more in regards to physically drawing a border line, and claiming an area of tiles, or, if it's only one strategic resource on your border you want, just demand that tile alone. Culture is basically ignored that way, which would present interesting results in regards to revolts in cities inside your own sphere of influence, and that might even lead to how productive a city could be and how happy. Mind you, this is all excessively complicating the entire matter, but I thought it was worth some discussion

[Yehbo]

The simplest way might simply be "fixed borders" which keeps the borders (and cities) as they are when the agreement is made. Even this would be handy sometimes, to avoid (or delay) a culture war.

Again there is the problem of the AI valuing this - a prediction of whether cities / tiles would swap if the AI chose to be aggressive on culture instead.

And the problem of the AI taking advantage of the fixed borders properly.

[axisworks]

I think it would be equally as interesting to have fixed borders but to have an option to still allow culture to spread. Then you could have legitimate border disputes and such, and theoretically you could form consolidations like the USSR.