Starved-out cities

[Michael Daumen]

OK, so when a size one city loses its food, it is converted into a lone settler. Does anyone know how close it needs to be to get picked up by another city's support?

Is it possible to make a map where any new city built will result in starvation automatically? I am thinking of combat engineer or legion units that could make fortifications (the starvation is to prevent cheating by players - I have no idea what the AI would do with a settler on such a map).

I suppose I could live with small camp-like cities but I dont want to

[Boco]

If I understand you, closer to your city than to another civ's city. I don't know if there's a max or whether land mass number fits into the algorithm. I suspect not.

Can you afford to have only one or two terrains that produce food and place them only at city sites that you want? Their exact settings + irrigation would dictate max city size.

Terrains with 0 food and no irrigation bonus won't support a viable city. It starts as size 1, with a -1 food rating and no reserves.

If this is a viable suggestion, do I get to learn the topic?

[:) Smiley]

Just make all terrain give no resources, then there'll be no incentive to make cities except for the stacking benefits, and even that's questionable as the city would be destroyed when the first unit loses.

[yaroslav]

Give a setler to the AI and it will build cities There are some things you can do:

A) Modify the terrain (time-costly)

B) Include up to 255 cities. If you don't want 255 cities, just add some barbarian cities non visible (you can create cities in weird places, like non-displayed coordinates that will be no visible, ask Henrik ). Problem: if a city is destroyed, an AI could build a new city.

C) Hex-edit the map and put a value of 0 in the field of 'fertility' in all the squares of the map. This is very time-costing and it has been not checked (IIRC) but it should work for you

[Mercator]

Re: Starved-out cities

I take it you want to prevent new cities being built?

I don't know about human players (I guess a "house rule" should be effective enough), but the AI can be manipulated easily enough.

Use MapCopy to change the fertility value of all squares on the map to zero.

The AI will only build cities on tiles with a fertility value of 8 or higher.

And, interestingly enough, the AI will always build a city if a tile has a fertility value of 15 (the maximum). This can be used to create AI cities by events. Edit a particular square to fertility value 15 first, create a settler on that square with an event and it will build a city there right away.

Manipulating the fertility values is perhaps the most sensible way to prevent the AI from building cities. On a standard map (i.e. without any fertility changes), the AI will build its cities only on the terrains in the Grassland and Plains slots, and regardless of what the rules.txt says.

[Mercator]

cross-posted... But it has been checked, and isn't so time costly if you use MapCopy.

[yaroslav]

Sorry Mercartor, I'm ashamed, I didn't know that it has been checked and I didn't know that MacCopy has these function :shamed:

[Mercator]

It can only set everything to zero though, not do any of the more fancy fertility things I was talking about.

Oh, and just in case anyone here wants to use mapcopy but is intimidated by its readme. Here's how you turn an entire map in a savegame infertile... type in the command (DOS) prompt:

mapcopy your_savegame.sav -f:ZERO

[Boco]

Did I see a post about an updated tip article on hex-editing? "Hex-editing" for Idiots?

[:) Smiley]

Can someone prime me on the details of how fertility works? What else goes into determining fertility values for a terrain square?

[Mercator]

@Boco: Where?

@: I'm not sure about the details myself. Fertility is stored as part of the map data in half a byte (4 bits).

Values range from 0 to 15, and the AI will only build cities on squares with fertility above 7 (8-15). Only grassland and plains will ever have values above 7.
Fertility is reduced to below 8 on city squares and squares adjacent to cities.

Other that that, I'm not sure. I think the values kind of depend on the size of the map, the total amount of land and the total amount of fertile land. So while a map may start with fairly high values, they will likely drop as more cities are built and the amount of available fertile land drops.
Apart from this, I think only rivers, resources, and possibly roads, irrigation and mining have some influence on fertility. But I'm pretty sure none of it has to do with the terrain values as in the rules.txt.

Gradually dropping fertility over time would also mean the map becomes less desirable for the AI. This might even be a fundamental part of curbing AI expansion, seeing as the AI immediately builds a city on fertility 15, but not on fertility 8. So presumably it prefers a higher value and isn't just content with anything over 7. Maybe it's even a simple probability function...
But this is all pure conjecture.

I'm not sure what happens when a city is destroyed (whether fertility bounds back up or not) or what happens when infertile terrain is transformed to fertile terrain. I have the feeling it stays at zero... But that would mean the AI won't build cities on terrain transformed to grassland. That can be tested.

[:) Smiley]

This could explain why the AI doesn't do Infinite City Syndrome.

So hypothetically speaking, even if grassland produced nothing, the AI would build cities on that would promptly starve?

[Mercator]

Yep.

[Elok]

On a related note, if the AI had a city surrounded by horrible grasslands and super-upgraded glaciers, would it decide what squares to have its people work based on stats, or stick to its prejudices and get like 1 food from the grassland?

[N35t0r]

it will probably choose the 'best' arrangement that it offers you when you click for deafult arrangement on your city screen.... it will probably go for the uber glacier (they _do_ exploit oilfield-deserts on scenarios, at the expense of farmlanded grass...)