Taking over the world, one continent at a time

BtS colonies and blockades Pros: Navies are made more relevant. Civs appearing in the middle of the game. Work very well with the new map scripts.

BtS colonies and blockades Cons: On some maps, it may be too expensive to hold on to a large conquered continent.

BtS colonies and blockades Tips: If you get Privateers early, they can be really powerful. Gift your Colonies some Workers when you spin them off, and do use them as good trading partners.

Beyond the Sword provides considerable changes to how things play out on maps with multiple landmasses – the main changes being naval blockades and overseas colonies. I should begin by saying that there are also good new map scripts in the game. The “Big and Small” script by Sirian (designer of most Civ4 map scripts) provides an interesting mixture of large continents and small islands, with an option to have the islands mixed in or being in a separate map region. There is a “Medium and Small” map script, which is quite similar, just producing smaller continents on average, and there is also the “Hemispheres” script by Ben Sarsgard, which is similar to Big and Small, but divides the world into hemispheres (or quadrants), separated by a large ocean, whereas Big and Small will often produce maps where you can navigate between most landmasses by coast.

These new map scripts are likely to give you maps where civilizations will be colonizing islands of varying size and generally waging some overseas warfare. So first, there are changes to colonies. Cities not founded on your home continent will now incur additional “colony maintenance” (if you put more than one city on a new landmass). That, obviously, makes colonizing other landmasses more expensive. If you are colonizing a small island and put only 2 cities there, you won’t even notice the colony maintenance, it will be tiny. If you are colonizing a continent, however, your colony maintenance costs will ramp up significantly.

The increased maintenance exists to encourage you to split off colonies. This is a new feature in BtS, where you can grant independence to your cities on another landmass. That will create a new civilization, which will be your vassal and will start with a very positive attitude towards you. The civilization inherits all your technology and receives two free defenders per city – that is to allow your colony to start building infrastructure at once, instead of spending the next 30 turns getting basic defenses up.

On maps like Big and Small, you will probably have situations where it’s advantageous to split off a colony, and the AI will surely not hesitate to do so – I have seen as many as five new civs appear during the game as colonies on a Large map.

The most obvious benefit of splitting off a colony is saving a good amount of gold in maintenance. Having a vassal is probably not as good as controlling those cities yourself, but then again, having a vassal is cheap. And colonies tend to be more useful than standard vassals. Provided you split off a big enough colony (not a 2-city island but, say, a continent that you had conquered), your colony should have a strong enough economy to actually get some technologies before you do – and then they will probably be willing to trade, thanks to starting out as Friendly.

Split-off colonies have an interesting way of working together with corporations. If you split off a colony in the Industrial Age, you’ll probably need a lot of GP points to get a GP by that time – let’s say 1000 at Normal speed. The colony, though, will only need 100 points. As such, they are likely to pop a Great Person soon (particularly if one of their cities has Wonders), which might just let them found a corporation while you’re unable to get a GP for it. On the upside, the vassal AI will spread its corporation to one of your cities, allowing you to further spread it yourself later if you want it.

Here’s a hint: be sure to gift your colonies some Workers. If the colony is a continent that you conquered, you probably have a bunch of captured Workers there anyway. Gifting them Workers will give your colonies a good jump-start because they don’t start with any. In my experience, colonies are not much help in war, however, they can make for good trading partners. Depending on geography though, they may serve as a useful “buffer zone” in a future war.

Only 50% of the land and population of colonies only counts towards your Domination threshold, as with regular vassals. Therefore, you could say that colonies make it a bit harder to achieve Domination. Really, it’s something that balances itself out. On the one hand, yes, you’ll need to conquer more land than you otherwise would for Domination if you’re using colonies. On the other hand, you are saving yourself some good money by splitting colonies off, and that makes conquest easier.

In the meanwhile, how you fight on water has also changed. Warships now have a powerful Blockade ability, which blocks all trade routes within a 3-tile radius, and also makes enemy cities unable to work any of those tiles. You can blockade while at peace, however, if you just blockade with one ship in the middle of the ocean, trade routes will go around the blockade zone, and you’ll get no result. So you need a lot of ships in that situation, enough to create a wall of blockaded tiles that can’t be gone around. Thus, completely blockading anything except islands or small continents at peacetime is not practically feasible.

At wartime, you of course have the benefit of being able to enter enemy land. Just put a warship right outside an enemy city and blockade the area – trade routes may still reroute themselves over land connections, but the city will now be unable to work any of its water tiles. This is very powerful against coastal cities that mostly work water tiles. Chances are, you’ll be able to send that city into starvation. And unless you move your ship away, the blockade will persist until the enemy is able to dispose of the ship.

Blockades do not play any significant role in the early game – while ships can blockade, you just won’t have enough ships in the early game. With post-Astronomy ships and in particular with post-Combustion ships, blockades become a very good complement to offensive operations. You are going to need a good amount of ships anyway, because the AI will have a strong navy – you just can’t build an invasion fleet of 5 Transports and hope to protect them with only one Destroyer. Some of the new units also play an interesting role in naval combat, but I will speak about it later.

Colonies provide a means for civilizations to spawn during the game – something that is new in Civ games, unless you count civil wars. Blockades add a level of importance to maintaining a strong navy, which has been one of the most common fan requests. In BtS, warships are more than escorts for transports and sea resource pillagers.