Cool, thanks.
Using this next time.

@shaypewe90 This mod is based directly on Trading Posts Grow Into Towns, and adds additional features such as flavorful messages describing the growth needs of your towns. It also adds a more dynamic system for checking whether your towns are in good locations, including checking if they are on rivers or connected roadways, or if they are near important improvements or natural wonders.

Dynamic Towns was developed and released after receiving permission from TofuSojo, the author of Trading Posts Grow Into Towns. So it is not compatible because it is a replacement.

So I guess this would not work with Trading posts grow into towns mod?

@[PIGZ]MrTango Yes, the AI has to follow the same rules for town growth, particularly regarding adjacency and good locations.

To keep the AI competitive, there's a scripted mechanism to help the AI place villages in optimal locations if they're falling behind the expected number of towns per city over the course of the game. (This is important because I don't have direct access to the AI worker placement logic in Civ V... only a DLL mod can directly edit the AI's logic.)

And thank you!

Is the AI subjected to the same growth rules?

*Gratz on the newborn.

@[PIGZ]MrTango Yes exactly, 3 tiles away is the outermost ring that a city can work.

I actually recommend leaving adjacency enabled for villages. You may find scenarios as a city planner where you want to build several villages next to each other, with the foresight that one will grow into a town and the other into a large town later on.

It isn't really optimal to build villages where they won't grow into towns eventually, and since towns can't be adjacent to each other, this is the main mechanism that discourages building villages next to towns unless you have a good reason.

If you do build a village next to a town, you'll get a thematic message telling you the village's growth has stagnated. (This won't happen if the village can grow into a large town because it's in a great location!)

@ericwidlund I believe this is an issue with the game client that occurs when a large number of mods are installed/subscribed at once. You might try unsubscribing from any mods you aren't using or doing a pass to streamline your modlist. You can always favorite mods before you unsubcribe so you can find them later. Unfortunately the Civ V modding infrastructure can be fragile in unexpected ways sometimes, there's not really much I can do about it as an individual modder.

Thank you for your patience everyone! I have a newborn and so my spare dev time is pretty limited right now. I haven't forgotten about you all!

And, is there a way of restricting village placement to disallow adjacency to towns and large towns? *i've done so for villages to each other.

What does 3 tiles away from city mean? outermost ring that a city can work?

It wont upload to my mods in the game app? I would appreciate any help.

@Dino153, Good question! If a village is next to any number of improved luxuries it counts as a desirable location. So if you had 2 adjacent luxuries, you would still need another distinct quality to upgrade your village into a large town.

Love the mod! Quick question though, if I build a village next to 2 improved luxuries does that count as +2 for the purposes of creating a large town or does it have to be two *distinct* qualities

@Beffi Civ V uses a database layer that you can mod through XML text files, or go deeper into using SQL directly. So most of the game's objects are actually backed by a relational database that has strictly defined types and fields. This is normally done in 4x games because making everything a dynamic object (think Python style) is going to be really really slow when you have giant maps and tons of AI logic to run every turn.

If you want to change the fields in the database you're looking at a DLL mod, usually, unless the devs planned ahead for that specific type of object to be more moddable by giving it special fields for modders to use.

On the other hand, there's a ton of things that you can do directly in Lua (the scripting layer), and you can also make your own UI that basically just sits on top of the core game without really touching the database. I could see something like that working...

@Pigeonović That sounds really cool, I'd be super curious how they managed that!

@Beffi iirc there used to be a Civ V mod that did exactly this for landmarks and terrain features called Map Labels mod, maybe it could be used as inspiration

I haven't done any modding of Civ V so I don't know the ins and outs, but on a generic programming level I can think of a simple way of implementing names. Villages/towns/large towns are objects, I imagine, so couldn't you just add a 'name' field to them which can be referenced when creating the notifications of growth and such?

@Beffi, This is an absolutely awesome idea! Unfortunately I'm fairly sure it would require someone to go diving deep into the C++ code of the core game engine just to see how bad it would be to implement (my guess is: really bad or infeasible). The devs only planned for each improvement to have one name (and one set of stats).

I really love name generators though, which is why in my unannounced game there are lots of procedurally generated names (shhh... it's a secret... :3)

How doable would it be to make towns nameable? Or even generate their own names based on the civ being played.

@greg Good point about sprawls, though most of the game takes place way before metro sprawls were possible. Even in a giant metro like Tokyo or New York, there are more and less affluent neighborhoods or districts, parks, suburbs, manufacturing sectors, and more. It makes sense to represent these all symbolically as different improvements.

Anyway, the proximity rules are really there because I find endless city/town spam to be a very unsatisfying endgame. If you ever played the first few Civs with very small min distance between cities, the only viable engame strategy is to spam as many cities as possible. (Or look at Loop Hero's endgame.)

I do appreciate the discussion, and ideas are always welcome! Just be aware that the basic strategic design of this mod is set in stone at this point, for better or worse... the lua script for this mod is about 4500 lines and a redesign would take months of work. Small tweaks and balance changes are always possible though.

thank you for the response. i don't mean to be an annoying internet person (of which there are innumerable), but im not sure i agree with your immersion point; this mod precludes wide metropolitan sprawls (the tokyo metropolitan area is 12,000 square km) when it doesn't really have to. if we look at it from a bigger scale (more appropriate for civ), massive cities being right next to eachother isn't ahistorical/unrealistc; osaka and kyoto are right next to each other, los angeles and san diego are quite close, etc.

a simple change is to have your towns/large towns progressively subtract from the tile's base yield, thereby requiring an even bigger food surplus to work. this also reflects the density of development on the tile.

More to your point, a village that's right next to another town essentially becomes a backwater village, or you could think of it as a poorer district of a larger town if you want. The smartest people from each generation move to the wealthier nearby town where the better opportunities are, the best merchants set up shop in the richer town, and so on.

@greg, Dynamic Towns is all about immersion and strategy. For immersion, a village or town growing to the next size means a thriving local economy. You can put villages wherever you want, but they'll stay fairly small and poor unless there are good reasons why that location draws in more wealth over the generations.

For strategic gameplay, spamming towns everywhere would be boring and overpowered.

villages/towns don't grow if they're too close to another town/large town? that's... a little strange

Hi Lucius, sorry for the delay! I can look into what it would take to get compatibility with Il Principe. Let me investigate and get back to you!

Hello there Azaquor, I was wondering that if you were still willing to create compatibility patches for this mod, if it would be possible to make one for Iska and Ismet's II Principe? If not, then it's totally understandable, but it would be wonderful to have both active at the sametime!

good

@Jarl Ballin' Sorry I missed your question! Whichever tree you finish first will unlock its Dynamic Towns special ability. If you finish the other tree after, you still benefit from its normal finisher but the Dynamic Towns special ability will stay locked.

Quick question: what would happen if I completed both Tradition AND Liberty? How would villages grow then?

@Invictus123, No, Dynamic Towns is not compatible with any other mods that change Trading Posts. In Dynamic Towns, Trading Posts are renamed to Villages.

Does this work with the other mod that changes trading posts and lets them evolve? In this mod, can you still build trading posts?

@bobbyandassociate, An option to disable bountiful locations sounds like a good idea! Would make it a bit harder as a fun challenge. It's probably a fair amount of work to implement, but I'll put it on the feature wishlist.

is it possible you can make a version that removes the requirement? i play multiplayer with no ai

if its for ai, it makes sense - I might impose on myself the rule that I must have a benefit other than bountiful to build them

@bobbyandassociate, It's supposed to be easy to find a good location. This also helps the AI! Great locations are harder to find though. Remember that bountiful locations are only good for Towns, not for Large Towns. So that means a grassland will need 2 other location factors before it can grow into a Large Town.

one question I have - is it too easy to have good location? All grassland are good location?

Dev note: if you add a reference to another mod in your modinfo, this will absolutely break any existing saves. I did this in version 12 so I could support More Luxuries & Resource Compendium, and I learned it the hard way.

@bigoakley02 Does it work if you start a new game? If your save is broken, unfortunately there's no way to fix it... this is a problem with the game engine that I can't do anything about :( So sorry about that!

is there a way to redownload version 11? my game no longer works

Vox Populi compatibility beta is live! You can find it under the Dynamic Towns Compatibility collection. This is an open beta, so please excuse any bugs in this version :)

Everyone, version 14 is out with a fix for the 10% Village defensive bonus, as well as script changes in preparation to support Vox Populi. Please wait to start a new game before updating!

@Tonas Good question! I would strongly recommend waiting until you're ready to start a new game, ideally with Dynamic Towns - Vox Populi, which is due to release tonight or tomorrow. If you want to test it out anyway, please make a backup of your save in case it gets corrupted!

Would it be safe to install this mod into my current save? I'm playing with VP and was wondering whether it'd be possible to install it now before the compatible version is released

Just so everyone knows, there's a pinned discussion where I keep an updated mod compatibility list.

Unfortunately Gaia's Core Mod is not compatible for now, since it has its own mechanism for making Trading Posts grow into Towns. Support might be added, depending on demand and also whether Gaia is interested in helping.

It's not really just the social policies, it's a number of UI icons in general. The grid lines on the map are glitched and look like wide mirrors of the sky or something. It's hard to explain.

@Dr. Oz The Great And Powerful, Social policy icon glitches? That's weird. I didn't touch icons at all. I guess Sapiens needs compatibility work. Thanks for letting me know!

When used with Gaia and Sapien's mods, it causes graphical glitches with tile hex borders and social policy icons.

I'll also throw Village --> Burg --> Town into the mix

Hamlet -> Village -> Town!

Also I'd like to hear if you prefer:
Hamlet --> Village --> Town
Village --> Town --> Burg
Village --> Town --> Large Town