City building, or lack thereof

[Goingonit]

The Red Storm Rising scenario I am working on encompasses a very short time frame - 60 days - and thus building cities would be inappropriate. However, engineers would still be needed, for rebuilding roads, et cetera. So: is there any way to disable settler/engineer options, or to prevent settlers/engineers from building cities? (other than already having 256 cities in the game).

Thanks

[techumseh]

I just spent some time re-exploring this in some detail. And I regret to report that I couldn't find any way to do it by manipulating any of the text files. Perhaps it might be possible to somehow hex edit the game so the computer thinks there are 255 cities?

[Marko]

You can also reach to the cities limit without overcrowding the map if you create many barbarian cities to the "twilight zone" (squares with odd-even coordinates). These cities should be nameless (unless you want to see the city name on the map) and empty.

It is also possible to create cities atop of each other.

[St Leo]

Don't use Grassland, Plains, Desert (?), and Forest (?) terrain slots. The AI won't build on the other ones and humans can be taken of with a house rule.

[Goingonit]

Marko, that worked! Thanks a lot!

[Boco]

If a player disbands the 255th city, will he be allowed to build another one? If that's the case, you'll still need a 'house rule'.

I can just see something like this in a Xin Yu strategy guide: "starve Keflavik to foil invasion of Iceland, then build 'Jan Mayan' to guard the Greenland-Iceland gap."

[Goingonit]

That would be hard, since each citizen eats 0 food, and each terrain also produces 0 food.

[ravagon]

Cities wouldn't ever grow that way would they?
(Or would a pop boom do it?)

Hence if a follower of the Xin path decided to disband a certain city's walls ...

[Goingonit]

Damn - I didn't think of that.

Looks like house rules are necessary then.

[Goingonit]

It is definitely necessary to have static city sizes - no city would significantly grow or shrink in 2 months, even if besieged. And building new cities in the middle of Europe during wartime is absurd. So, there's no way to get around either problem.

[techumseh]

I suggest something like this: put the cities fairly close together, so their city radius overlaps somewhat, leaving little room for new cities. Set the @LEADERS text for all civs to 'perfectionist'. If you don't need all the terrain types, use tundra and glacier in place of grassland and plains. (If you do this, don't use grassland or plains for something else, or cities will start popping up there.)

Adjust the @COSMIC text to increase the number of rows in the food box. Adjust the "Aqueduct needed to exceed this size" and the "Sewer System needed to exceed this size" numbers to the maximum city sizes you want. Don't allow either to be built. Don't allow granaries to be built, either. Then it's just a matter of fine-tuning the food available on each terrain type for the right balance between production and consumption.

None of these techniques is foolproof by themselves. In combination they will probably get you the results you want. Good luck.

[ravagon]

Actually ... expanding on something Leo mentioned earlier - if you remove all plain/grassland terrain (I've never seen AI's found cities on anything else )from the scenario, (and prevent settlers/engineers from irrigating/mining/transforming anything else into those terrain types) - other than at those points where you have cities sited, and drastically increase the food production on those terrains only ( = zero on all others) the AI should never be able to found new cities (or maybe they would - only to have them die off immediately?) - at least on any new sites.

Human players could likewise be prevented from founding new cities as long as caravans (food) were likewise disabled.

You would still basically "lose" two terrain slots of course but its probably better than many alternatives.

I've found that you can get an enormous number of the "New city cannot be created as this would exceed the max number allowed in the game" type messages as AI's repeatedly seem to try to build more.

(Or can this popup be "removed" from game.txt or labels.txt? Or wherever it's stored)

[Goingonit]

Unfortunately, my map is almost done (including cities and improvements. This means that changing it is very impractical (especially with all the plains and grassland there is in Europe).

[St Leo]

MapEdit 2.0

[Mercator]

What St Leo said.

No matter what, you'll always need to have the house rule for the human players.
For the AI, either use MapEdit to swap terrains (if you have two unused terrains you can swap for grassland/plains).

If you don't have any spare terrains:
Use MapCopy to set the fertility value of all terrain to zero. Call MapCopy from the DOS command-line like this:

mapcopy THE_SAVEGAME -f:ZERO

THE_SAVEGAME should obviously be replaced by the name of your scenario's savegame. A backup by the name of THE_SAVEGAME.bak is automatically created by MapCopy.