5-tile-distance city build restriction moddable?

It's not possible to change that value. If you increase the cost of pioneers, players will have less incentive to build every 5 tiles.

Thanks for the reply.

Actually, my problem is not that I want to build cities every 5 tiles, but that I want to be able to expand my cities in any direction and layout that strikes my fancy in a given game, without being restricted by having to have enclosed improvements no closer than 5 tiles away from each other.  I run into this limitation a lot in my games, given the usual layout of resources.  If I build cities further away to allow more room to build around each city, then my economy suffers during the all-important early game as I have to settle for building cities further away from resources and consequently have to wait longer or the ZOC to reach them.  

I'm bummed to read you can't mod this at this point.  The great thing about modding is that everyone can season their gameplay to their taste uniquely for their game, without other gamers having to worry about wether they like the change or not, since they never have to see it if they don't want it.  I sincerely hope they allow this stat to be modded at some point in the near future; this is really messing with my ability to enjoy the game, at the moment.

Yeah, in some ways, the limitations of modding have taken a back seat to vanilla game fixes to this point, but I think we can all agree that there are good reasons to prioritize game updates to mod fixes. That said, I am certain that the dev team will work on reducing the limitations currently on mod makers once they have set the game down a more stable track. Honestly, this is one of many hard coded values that should probably be moved to an easily modifiable xml.

Way back in the day, I proposed that any 2 cities that reached each others borders, as they can and often do now, have the ability to be Merged into one larger city base.

It would be cool to take 2 cities, that when the touch, would offer you the chance to take, for example, a L2 and a L3 and Merge them into a Single L5, which then gets encased within whatever the lowest current wall tech was researched while reaping the combined resources that had been accumulated by both.

Of course there would be some Building based Logistical issues, but given the news of the upcoming 1.1 multi-building allowed rule, this would only be an issue for those 1 off's left over under the current prevailing L5 city rules. That could easily be resolved by allowing the player to choose which city structures would be retained/razed that are duplicates, if any even exist.

Anyways, something to contemplate going forward I guess.

The big problem with this is the fact that the system does not allow you to do this and the devs have not ever expressed a desire to add some kind of auto raze functionality.

Found in ElementalDefs.xml

or here's a complete mod file to save as something.xml of course change the 5.0 to whatever.

The game really doesnt like an incomplete ElementalDefs file. If you are going to overwrite anything in ElementalDefs, you're best to copy the whole file, then change what you want. Everytime I've done it in the past, it creates a lot of weird issues if you don't completely overwrite all the tags.