Make barbarians (More) playable (RTW original)

[Pisces]

I have one of the mods to make barbarians playable and I love playing Scythia (sp?) but one huge problem I have is because Scythia is so spread out I get a huge distance from captial modifer on all my established settlements and a large culture penalty on my new settlements because a lot of things I can't upgrade/destroy, combined with the fact many settlements reach 26'000 people with a city only designed for 6-12 thousand, so I have to maintain huge garrisons and expand painfully slow which hardly feels like a barbarian culture. Now I know a lot of people will be thinking "but barbarians didn't make empires", but of course they did, infact there was several empires larger than the Roman empire and the Greek/Alexander empire but they are ignored basically because they didn't contribute to history, they didn't build libraries, muesems, monuments, schools, they didn't develop scholars and they usually didn't write their history so the only evidence for their existance is the history written from before and after the empire and from the outside. Like Alexander's empire the empires usually spreads through many conquering generals (or the R:TW verison: family members) rather than centralised organisation, the roman empire being a 50/50 mix of each as you should know, but barbarian empires tend to lack any sort of capital to tax/exploit the conquered regions once they move on so the empires are maintained by the introduction of the self sustaining barbarian culture which will usually remain untill conquered or by gradual evolution of culture.

My proposition which I have to admit I am looking for someone else to make is a quick mod to remove distance from capital modifers for barbarian cultures, or if its not possible to do it for just barbarians make it able to toggle on and off, perhaps I already can in the preferances but I can't find it; this makes sense because it is assumed that the barbarians don't develop a centralised management system otherwise they could steal technology off other races and fully upgrade the settlements which I don't think they should be able to do, so a distance from capital modifer doesn't make sense. Second thing is that a barbarian city would never grow to similiar sizes a developed city would because the death rate is never reduced by such things as education, health and cheap food/housing/water, logically the growth rate for R:TW should be much less but increased more substantically with public health bonus and and increase with the academy but an alternative way is to decrease barbarian's growth rate by removing the growth bonus on barbarian's markets, although a trader really would increase growth rate but growth rate has got to be decreased somehow, the other way would to be to introduce a new building (which I understand is harder): the fighting pit which for each level (probably only 2) it has 5% to happiness and -0.5% to pop growth (or +0.5% to squaler for growth only) or 10% to happiness and 5% to squaler for both if you can't seperate growth from public order with the explaination that it is a dueling pit (using the arena mesh as a proxy if no one can be bothered making a fence circle (which does exist already except it has a tree in it)) which competitions to the death occur between people of all class, balancewise this is basically just a execution square for barbarians except with less population you get less tax. Or alternatively it may be possible just to increase the squaler for growth when a warlord's hold is in place.

Obviously this is for R:TW original, if there is already a mod like this then could you point me to it, I had a look but couldn't find anything, saying that the mod list isn't very user friendly. I am looking for someone else to make this because I am a complete newbie to R:TW modding and I'm not very interested in learning. (sorry if this is the wrong forum and sorry for using parenthesis).

[Turbo]

The distance from capital penalty is hardcoded. Just increase the hapiness and law bonuses in the export_desc_building.txt file and that problem will be solved.