Tested and working as of march 2025. I have around 80 mods active and its working fine. The only thing is when using with the Historical Spawn Dates mod the barbarians have their unique names removed, not sure what the conflict there is.

I have created an extension mod: Starting Free Cities - Cooks
* Correct count of Free Cities (off by one)
* Support for the mod Free City States

@HandyVac feel free to include this in your mod if its to your liking.

Mod will work in GS if you enable it. i do not have many DLC's installed.

The mod works for me most of the time

Bro, this mod hasn't been updated in years. I doubt it will be any time soon. The dev hasnt even been seen in a while. Great concept, but may be incompat with the new Barbarians mode anyway

please update

Sadge this used to be a great fundamental mod now it doesnt even spawn free cities at all anymore

Bro, this mod hasn't been updated in years. It's not compatible with the game as it is.

Im experiencing a interesting thing in my guy.

The free cities are gaining more defence strength every so often, no in correlation with population.

For example, im near the start and all there cities have 26 strength in 2465BC, they started with -10, then it went -5, then 10, then 26......any idea why this is happening.....if its part of the mod its ridiculous, as now the free cities are stronger then any civ in the game....

All sounds good but flipping them through loyalty would be too easy (unless they have loyalty system in place too)
And by military too easy as well - unless they build walls and units in a good timely manner

But because it hasn't been updated for so long we will never know ;)

I tried taking a look at the code of this mod but it is far too confusing for me. I don't know how to change the era of the free cities, but these motherfuckers have muskets and shit in the ancient era, really breaks the game sadly

Maybe someone could make another mod ?

@Grathocke That's very sad, just found it, got hyped, and now nothing but despair

Considering that @HandyVac hasn't been online for 10 months at this point, I seriously doubt this excellent mod will ever be updated.

please update this mod for GS :)

@HandyVac- will we be receiving a GS update in the future? No rush, of course

Hey so, this mod does not work for me at all. I have the mod in my subscription list and the option to add free cities is not present, and I don't know how to fix that or if it is fixable at all.

What if you made these cities strong enough in their self defense, that the only way to get them ws by loyalty?

The free cities are way over powered of you play anything slower then standard, I am playing on Epic game speed and attack a free city with swordsmans and cataputs, AI turn it attacks back from the city with a machine gun.

does this mod work with non-vanilla/modded maps? because i used both the fantastical modded map,and the transpolasia map,and neither of them had any starting free cities,despite me putting them on 100...

I took a city via loyalty, and the units did not disband. As a warrior is in the city tile itself, I cant build anything in it, and it is now useless.

Why did the units in the free city not disband?

I love this mod but is there any way to make it so that the cities can't be taken via loyalty? i.e. is it possible to give them an extra high initial starting loyalty? Not sure if this is possible.

@HandyVac: I have found a bug in StartingFreeCities_Main.lua occuring when someone combines your mod with my Free City States mod.
The reason is that pPlot:GetX() or pPlot:GetY() will crash the game when pPlot is nil.
So e.g. I suggest that you change line 300 as follows:

if pPlot then print(sPlayerType .. " has a settler on plot " .. pPlot:GetX() .. "," .. pPlot:GetY() ); end
(or simply delete that line).

A small request if possible..
If we capture any such Free-Cities, the usual Notification always declares;
The Capital of Free Cities has been captured by ---!

Maybe if we could get the actual City Names instead of the term "Free Cities" for everything, please?

The option for the Free Cities doesn't even show up on mine... I do have Rise and Fall, and I also have a bunch of other things from the Workshop. Is it possible that one of them is interfering with this?

@HandyVac

Ah, then it makes sense!

Would it be possible to get a version of this mod, or better yet a toggle in the setup, for the army generation of Free Cities? Having each city be as strong as a City State seems pretty broken to me. It usually ends up with dozens of Free City units roaming around like persistent barbarians at all times in my games. Not had the aforementioned issues with them being ahead in tech, but even when they're equivalent it can make the game much more difficult. I understand the reasoning though, so maybe just an option?

Never had this happen before......took over a free city and my glasses slipped down my nose and landed in my bowl of cherry pie and custard. Please fix, as this is obviously down to your mod.

@Vixxyn
Technically all the free cities are one civilization, the "Free Cities" civ, and the game handles them in the same way as any other civ. e.g. earning tech with science. I haven't done anything to change that in this mod.

So if you set up a game where Free Cities has 100 cities then they're going to be getting a lot of science per turn and will tech up quickly.

Uhm.. is the free cities supposed to be ridiculously OP? They are always one or two eras ahead of everyone else. There is basically no chance to conquer them with sworsdmen when they have timetravalled to get som semiautomatic rifles to defend their city.

When I get a popup telling me a citizen has migraited to a new city, I get a CTD. No one else here seems to have that issue so I'm guessing I have a mod conflict. That suks. I have a lot of mods installed

Doing fine here thanks. Just finished a game and looking forward to the new version, cheers.

"We just met Free-City 'X' and they mean business!"
It feels somewhat appropriate that we should also get a "PopUp" similar to what we have for CityStates. Even if they tend to succomb to our Loyalty pressure eventually.. such nearby wrenches into our usually smooth growth trajectory, they deserve a special treatment IMO.

New version up.
Free cities now get the same starting units as citystates, so they shouldn't be quite so vunlerable on turn zero.

Also added an option to name free cities depending their proximity to a major civ. So. e.g. if it's near Greece's start position it'll pick a name from Greece's city list.
This can be turned off in the Advandced Setup menu if you want to use Leugi's mod.

Same old controversial situation as with the Barbarians ruleset, AFAIC. Players either like the system(s) in place or they don't. Luckily we **do** have alternatives like this mod! :)
Can't please everyone.

too tough v too easy....if only there was an obvious solution to this.

cities need to start with more defense you can practically take over them with a single caveman unit :P

Hey there. I've made this mod inspired on yours:

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1352912857

This way the spawned free cities will have city names, and not all will look so generic starting from the classical era as they'll get a mix of different city styles.

OK, loaded up and went for it. First save crashed to black screen after saving (which was ok), and since then evrything has been fine. Now my dinner is past cold. Cheers.

I subscribed this mod, but I can't see this mod on subscription list.. :(

A feature I'm eager to try! Nice idea HandyVac

Ah, just tried this out. I think you need to do something to tone them down a bit.
They spawn with Archers, which makes them lethal to passing units such as scouts and warriors.
Additionally, I saw several getting Crossbows in 1000 BC. Which was just absurd.

nice idea, just finished old game, will give this a damn good thrashing tomorrow.

this is a great idea, shame free cities are usually very weak and unprotected.

A very interesting and not to mention cool idea. Kudos!

A smart alternative to the "annoying" (IMHO) Barbarian/GoodyHut dynamics.. this really is *THE* solution for jump starting a swift territory without having to support too many assets which we would otherwise scramble for anyway at relatively high cost & time!
Thanks.

This Mod is awesome, adds a fun bit of early military action

Cool idea. Do the Free Cities city names always start with America and go down the list?

I really wish the way to get it is just go inside their borders. :(

the free city is not strong enough，plz make them more powerful