A world with no unclaimed land.

[dedboy]

Does anybody else out there hate games where you even reach the modern era and there are still huge chunks of land completely unclaimed by any civ? Sometimes half a continent is left uninhabited for the whole game! Imagine the impossibility of that in the real world.

What is your solution? I tend to prefer slower games on larger maps with lots of civs so playing on a small map to solve this is not really my thing. Is there some balance of civs and city states that I should try? Is there a mod out there that makes civs more land-hungry?

[McBain]

What difficulty are you playing at? I would think at the Prince and lower difficulty there might be less land hunger from the AI because they have to deal with the same happiness penalties you do. On higher than Prince, however, with the happiness bonuses they get the AI tends to try to fill alot of the inhabited land pretty quickly.

I play on King and Emporer on large maps and pretty much every nook and cranny gets filled in... except areas around me (I tend to frown on encroachment) :)

[RedRaccoonDog]

Nothing i hate more than a runaway civ with 20 cities and somehow he is still out teching you can out culturing you. Pretty annoying.

[denton91]

I never had this problem. Quite the opposite, I have to rush settlers to good spots or else ai suffocates me (even on prince, though I usually play on king, where it is more prominent). Around renneisance there are hardly any spots without some civ's influence.

[Darkrage_nl]

Are you playing with sparce resources? A lack of happiness (but large developed cities) might prevent them from expanding.

[CidDaBird]

Originally posted by dedboy:

Does anybody else out there hate games where you even reach the modern era and there are still huge chunks of land completely unclaimed by any civ? Sometimes half a continent is left uninhabited for the whole game! Imagine the impossibility of that in the real world.

What is your solution? I tend to prefer slower games on larger maps with lots of civs so playing on a small map to solve this is not really my thing. Is there some balance of civs and city states that I should try? Is there a mod out there that makes civs more land-hungry?

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but what kind of crack are you smoking?

In my games theres not enough land to go around, let alone "unclaimed" land. I mean yeah, I put a city on a piece of land where no one "claims" then branch out. Still if you are having this problem go to the higher difficulties lol

[daniel]

Make it a duel map (Sized for 2 players) and put 6 civs in, lol.

[dedboy]

"I mean this in the nicest way possible, but what kind of crack are you smoking?"

I did not realise the type of crack I smoke affected Civ V's AI behaviour. Thanks for the help! I'll try some different types.

[dedboy]

Just to clarify, I mostly play on Prince because I hate competing with an AI that is only beating me because of bonuses rather than actually playing smarter. I guess I'll suck it up and try the harder levels anyway.

[Damsteri]

I think this is more common in the BNW. In the G&K AIs always spammed cities to all useless land too, but they are more concervative to expand in the BNW. I had one archipelahgo game where all of the AI civilizations had maximum of 4 cities in the start of the Modern era, then cuople of the civs started spamming cities.

I think that the BNW is more accurate when compared to a real life. Cities in the Civ V are large and there is lots of land in the real world where there is only a small towns, nothing compared to Civ V cities. If there are no resources then it's not wise to settle a city there. For example norrthern part of my native country Finland is very sparsely populated, and actually Finland is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. There is just forest and lakes in the north, nothing important enought to found big cities, so there is mostly just small towns, which could be barely compared even to pop 1 cities in the Civ V.

[bronze_aged]

Yeah it's definitely an expansion issue...in vanilla Civ V, they AI will settle on every single patch, even if it's in the middle of the ice caps with no strategc value at all. In BNW, they're a lot more conservative about settling. I kind of think they went a little too far with the BNW AI, adjusting for things that people complained about. Now they are way too passive and conservative with expansion.

[Darkrage_nl]

I agree on the fact that the AI is less likely to expand rapidly far from its capital) but in my experience that only last untill they hit the renaissance (what is in a way a lot more historically correct).

Sidenote to OP: even in the modern world are large chunks of lands mostly underpopulated. Take Mongolia as a example what is almost 3x the size of France but only got a population of 3 mil of which roughly half lives in the capital.

[dedboy]

Thanks for all your answers.
I agree that there's plenty of underpopulated land in the real world, but I'm talking about totally *unclaimed land*. There's no way land would stay unclaimed IRL. Countries will go to war over unpopulated islands just to maintain their claim.
No matter how underpopulated a country is, it still has sovereignty over its land and borders. You couldn't just wander in and found a new nation there without them having something to say about it!

[RedRaccoonDog]

Im playing a game right now on a Additional Maps - Frontier. There are so little resources and vast swaths of land between me and my enemies there are hardly any new cities. Its actually going to be quite interesting to see how it develops. Also i have a question. On that same game i got random choosen as Germany. I took the Honor tree since i figured i would be killing people. I noticed im getting Culture form killing barbarians. I remember the Aztecs had this as a Unique Ability but I saw it mentioned nowhere in the Germany civpedia. Just that i have a chance of converting camps to my side. Whats up with that? im not complaining but didnt expect it.

[Damsteri]

Originally posted by RedRaccoonDog:

Im playing a game right now on a Additional Maps - Frontier. There are so little resources and vast swaths of land between me and my enemies there are hardly any new cities. Its actually going to be quite interesting to see how it develops. Also i have a question. On that same game i got random choosen as Germany. I took the Honor tree since i figured i would be killing people. I noticed im getting Culture form killing barbarians. I remember the Aztecs had this as a Unique Ability but I saw it mentioned nowhere in the Germany civpedia. Just that i have a chance of converting camps to my side. Whats up with that? im not complaining but didnt expect it.

Honor policy tree opener will give that ability to gain culture from killing barbarians to all civilizations. But it's just barbarians, Aztec will get culture from all kills.

From example you get 8 culture for killing a Brute (strenght 8) if you have opened the Honor policy tree. Aztecs get 8 culture from their UA and if they have also adopted the Honor they get another 8 culture from the same Brute, a total of 16 culture.

[daniel]

Originally posted by dedboy:

Thanks for all your answers.
I agree that there's plenty of underpopulated land in the real world, but I'm talking about totally *unclaimed land*. There's no way land would stay unclaimed IRL. Countries will go to war over unpopulated islands just to maintain their claim.
No matter how underpopulated a country is, it still has sovereignty over its land and borders. You couldn't just wander in and found a new nation there without them having something to say about it!

No, the North Pole is unclaimed. A lot of countries are making claims to it today, including the U.S, Canada, Russia, China, etc., because of its amount of fresh water.