City Rush Mod

I don't know if this is possible, considering everything else you guys have done I'm presuming it is...but is there any way to mod in something to counteract the 'city rush' benefit? It seems like the best/most reliable way to win is to city rush as many cities as possible, in as tight a space as possible, and I've noticed that the AI players that do this tend to always win. I tend to prefer to stick to a fewer number of cities, simply because I can't imagine playing the game as anything other then the wonderful elves from the expanded faction mod, and it seems really out of character for elves to be zergrushing early game cities.

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Well, depending on how you want to do it, there might be a way. I noticed that there are a couple of lines in the ElementalDefs.xml that look like this:

<CityAdminCostExponent>0.0</CityAdminCostExponent>
  <CityAdminBaseCost>1.0</CityAdminBaseCost>

You could mess with these values after copying and pasting the file to the mod directory. I assume that the cost would be in gold, but I can't confirm that the values do anything, atm.

Anyway, if you go this route, and the tags are, in fact, hooked up, let us know what values seem to work well for you. Happy modding!

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Another option I use to stop this is to crank up the difficulty for "World" to increase the monsters. They eat pioneers much better now, helps stop this annoyance in 1.11.

Other mod based tricks I use to stop pioneer zergrush, at the low low price of a ton of content:

> Add ACP to get some high level wandering ones. I have seen club armies do horrible things to AI zergs.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/399062

> Use Murteas Grimoire; the Cantrips are all designed to deepen the early game and the Guardian / Destroyer keeps your own cities from drowning in the tide of monsters stopping others pioneers. Plus the AI will use the spells to protect their own cities so they don't get wiped out.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/402601

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

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Be careful trying to mod elementaldefs.xml and in general, this is probably not the best route to start with. Honestly, there is really no good way to stop the city spam. It is such a good strategy at current that the AI will simply spam out as many pioneers at it can. Now, you have a couple of opinions, but most of them are not great. The first is to increase the overall cost of a pioneer kit. The pioneer kit generally costs 10 mats and 5 gold, if you change this to 100 mats and 100 gold, then it will be much harder for the AI to spam cities ( though not impossible ). You won't see the kind of zerg rush immediately. Secondly, you could modify the city hubs so that low level city hubs have a fair maintenance value, which would then hurt any city spamming players. Maybe, make them cost like 10 mats per turn, so that you need like 10 workshops to support them. Thirdly, you could increase the maintenance costs for buildings, thus making it hard for them to upkeep multiple sizable cities. This said, I want to point out that this kind of mod would only be a temporary barrier and would probably not stop the hard AI's. In general, city spam will not go away as a significant strategy until the overall advantage of multiple cities to a single city is neutralized.

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