Initiating revolution...

[Jeje2]

Originally posted by snoopy369
I do think, though, that you're objecting to the game because it does not fit with your strategy, rather than adjusting your strategy to fit the game, as is what I would generally expect of a strategy game ...

Have to jump in on this?
Why should it be required? Why should it be required that player change?

(I had a strategy after civII that used & wanted to use. In CivIII it didn't work well so had to adjust it a little - result: played CivIII quite many games, but never liked it like CivII. Civ4 I threw it in the darkest corner of my apartment after realized that my old strategy couldn't even be adjusted into it. Only a couple of games ever played it)

So why should it be required? (Sofar it has just killed the fun of playing for me)

[Dale]

So you're playing the same strategy since 1994?

The French tried using the same strategy from 25 years earlier too in 1939, and look where it got them.

[Jeje2]

Originally posted by Dale
So you're playing the same strategy since 1994?

On the basic concept - yes. (I'm a builder)
I had a system that I liked and preferred.
(And no - I've never played MP as I've all the time known that it isn't a good way. It's just my way. - and what's wrong with that?)

The French tried using the same strategy from 25 years earlier too in 1939, and look where it got them.

In the end pretty well...

Back on topic - after reading sofar I've made a few observations
* SoL production MUST be kept at minimum until time...
* Don't even think about defending in your cities - best would be to abandon them
* all soldiers must be working in city until revolution or the % is penalized

Hmmm... Were are my options?
But more important: where is the fun? (- for me?)
(And I don't have the game yet - gonna get it soon)

[Dale]

One VERY important thing you need to remember: C4C is NOT Civ. It does not resemble Civ. It does not play like Civ. It has a couple of similar concepts, but so much is different to Civ.

Don't think a Civ strategy will win well in C4C.

[Impaler[WrG]]

If the game didn't count 'map units' such as soldiers, missionaries, pioneers and Free colonists against global rebel sentiment then it would be trivially easy to reach the required percentage, just eject all but one person from every city and BAM easy revolution. We didn't want that to be a cheesy exploit for multi player or single player.

If your having trouble getting to the threshold you need to use more ES (Elder Statesmen) and stock up on the LB (Liberty Bell) boosting Political branch FFs (Founding Fathers). You may have to drive your cities near 100% in order to get a 50% global if your using a lot of map units.

[Aerion]

Originally posted by snoopy369

...
If you're keeping a large standing army around, you can't DoI, because ... the standing army won't let you. Which is just about right.
...

Actually there is no reason why a standing army should prevent you from declaring independence. A standing army is an arm of the body politic and would follow the will of the body. Armies should be neutral and not count either way - for or against.

As an aside, people who have spent years training to fight a war usually want the opportunity to test that training. But then those who have actually fought in a war usually don't want to do it again.

[tommo1975]

As I understand this then - and this comes from a long drawn out game I've just had - the King has a huge army.

You can't really have an army at all, because if you do you cannot declare independance because you end up stuck on 43% sentiment even if all your cities have 100% rebel sentiment (as I just found out in my game)

The game doesn't really encourage you to have lots of settlements, unlike Civ 4. So unless you have huge 20+ sized cities you'll never be able to match the kings army in size come the revolution. If you do have sized 20+ cities - not only will people tend to starve in them but even with 3 elder statesmen and the printing press and newspaper it takes an age to get anywhere near 100% rebel sentiment.

Therefore you tend to have small sized settlements and few of them so come declaration of independence you'll only be able to cobble together an army <50% the size of the Kings if you take every single person you have and turn them into an soilder.

Oh and in order to be able to build an army come independance you will have had to go about messing around with Wagons and filling them up with horses and guns just to add the to the fun 'cos warehouses only hold 900 max of anything.

Nice.

Not.

There should have been an option in the game to allow you to amend the impact of army size on independance sentiment.

Oh, and do ships - Frigates and Ships of the Line - count against your indepenance sentiment?

Someone please mod this aspect of the game so people can play it the way that they find fun.

[Krill]

Originally posted by snoopy369
While I consider Civ4 to be more shallow than Col... different strokes for different folks I suppose

In COL you have to declare independance to win. Not nessecarily a bad thing, if you can declare independance in a number of different ways. But as it is you have to get statesmen, and use them to get rebel sentiment. It's best (not only, but best) to only run the statesmen in the last third of the game as others have said to keep the REF down in size. Some people on CFC have even commented that you should just disband population that can't become military units so that you require fewer LBs to get the revolution and hence face a smaller REF, but still have the same size army.

I'll agree with you that CIV is becoming shallow; 3 years after release, I'd expect it to be shallow, but COL has been released with very few unbroken or balanced mechanics, and limited replayability (8 leaders, two map scripts! A modders dream, they can effectively design the core game because Firaxis sure as hell haven't). CIV on one hand allows different economies, different starting strategies, has a multitude of leaders, maps, eras, game options, game victories, then compared to what COL has? CIV is a game that can take a lot of thought, because of the sheer breadth and depth of the options. COL...still needs a lot of work to match it.

Either Firaxis/2K wanted to release a game which is true to the original (in which case, it failed, because it isn;t the original according to all of the people posting about it being different) or Firaxis/2K wanted to create an updated game along the same lines of COL, and they screwed up because they didn't balance it that well (that's not to say it won't be rebalanced well in the first patch). I'm sorry to say that I'm still dumbfounded about this game now, and that I'm unhappy with how it has been released and the state of it. I hope it does get fixed, because COL could have been, and still can be, a great game.

[Guynemer]

Snoopy, the problem is that, at the moment, the way the game forces you to play is a pain in the ass. I won a game last night doing what has been advocated--no standing soldiers, stockpile guns and horses in wagon trains and ships, and arm everyone after revolution--and it's just not fun. This is supposed to be a game, after all. That level of micromanagement when it comes to the revolutionary army, something that must be done to win, is just painful.

Creating new soldiers and dragoons from colonists as they are born in your cities just feels far more organic, and doing it once in a while instead of everyone at once is far more enjoyable.

The simple solution is to have LBs affect garrisoned units, but not units in the field. Honestly, I can not believe it doesn't work like this already.

[DarthVeda]

It's not fun. It's not the way we've been trained to play civ for years. It's counter-intuitive. It's not spelled out or suggested in any way. It's bad. Terrible. Awful.

For everything that's been abstracted, or made easier for new players to understand, this is one thing that's been "hidden"--not abstracted. And so hidden that... I mean hell I've been playing this genre for almost 15 years and I can't figure out what the heck was going on.

Doesn't it seem kind of odd that in a strategy game there is only one strategy that works?

No amount of justification covers this glaring hole. It'd be like in Civ4 having second hand knowledge that if you did research early, the late-game ramp for research would be so bad that you couldn't win. Or if you built nuclear weapons, your opponents would hasten their space race to the point you couldn't win. Justified by the fact that the nuclear race and space race went hand in hand.

It's Just Plain Broken!

[probablymike]

Originally posted by Aerion

woah, i think that's totally right! remember that 'garrisoning troups in the home', meaning that you had to feed and shelter one of the king's troups, was a big complaint of the colonists... the soldiers don't belong to the colony, and, really, the colony is just that, a colony and not a sovereign nation.

but, how, then can we use these troops to fight the homeland? that doesn't make sense, does it? especially when we've bought them. but, the homies, the locals... providing them with guns, and not having store-bought troops in the town, that might work as a reflection of actual events. it's a question then of having enough of them and being intrepid fighting the king's troops.

That's just wrong. I'm really starting to get soured on this game.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Aerion


Actually there is no reason why a standing army should prevent you from declaring independence. A standing army is an arm of the body politic and would follow the will of the body. Armies should be neutral and not count either way - for or against.

As an aside, people who have spent years training to fight a war usually want the opportunity to test that training. But then those who have actually fought in a war usually don't want to do it again.

Should, yes. Do, no. Absolutely no. Standing armies generally discourage independence/revolution, except when the revolution puts the leader of the army in power. That's in fact the way it works - some leader of the army decides to have a coup/revolt/etc. and takes his branch of the army with him. Think Napoleon, or Chavez, or Musharraf. Soldiers generally stay out of politics - but generals don't, and it usually comes down to whether the revolution will give the general significantly more power or not. Loyalty is drilled into a soldier every day, to the point that it is fundamental to their identity.

[Krill]

Arguing from Realism Snoopy? Wouldn't have though you'd stoop to that level

On Topic: I understand you're point about not making trrops, but instead stockpiling everything that is required to make a soldier (population, horses and guns), but that doesn't rebut the LB/ES argument, or the fact that the game is balanced so that the smaller an economy the easier the WoI is.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Guynemer
Snoopy, the problem is that, at the moment, the way the game forces you to play is a pain in the ass. I won a game last night doing what has been advocated--no standing soldiers, stockpile guns and horses in wagon trains and ships, and arm everyone after revolution--and it's just not fun. This is supposed to be a game, after all. That level of micromanagement when it comes to the revolutionary army, something that must be done to win, is just painful.

Creating new soldiers and dragoons from colonists as they are born in your cities just feels far more organic, and doing it once in a while instead of everyone at once is far more enjoyable.

The simple solution is to have LBs affect garrisoned units, but not units in the field. Honestly, I can not believe it doesn't work like this already.

All I can say to that is I'm sorry it's not fun to you. To me - as a long time Col fan - this game is just about right in that sense. Yeah, it's a lot of micro in certain areas, but that's pretty much what Col is. Having a small standing army feels right to me, because that's how it was in Real Life - very few colonists were part of a standing army - and it reinforces that this is not a military game. Heck, the thing that annoys me most about C4Col is how military it IS...
You control colonists, not military units, and this element is just one part of that gameplay mechanic. Your soldiers won't be easily converted into rebels while they're drilling ... they will be converted into rebels by working in a rum factory and seeing the circumstances other colonists are forced into by the evil King. Eminently realistic, and perfectly fun gameplay.

And I'm not sure exactly how this adds significantly to the micro, anyhow. All this means is you wait to make military units until you need them, which is a couple of additional clicks. You'll find what's mostly annoying is figuring out which colonist to pull from his important job to become a soldier... which is a very reasonable game decision. You'll also find that, until the very end (until you DoI basically) you're way better off this way - if the army is working the whole time, you get more stuff, and thus you win more easily. It's hamstringing yourself to not work the soldiers.

Finally, and Ken or Dale correct me if I'm wrong, but the same number of bells are still needed one way or the other. For the global condition, if you have 100 citizens, you need 50 citizens' worth of bells to be able to revolt. This shouldn't matter if you have 50 citizens working, or 100. Same bells... The only problem is if you have less than half your population in your colonies, of course, but that's just absurd, and again a very bad game decision regardless of this rule; and if you have too many small colonies that take too long to become 100% rebel, but that's an effective control on ICS (a penalty to having more cities, which is reasonable). Having 5 or 6 colonies with 80% of your population in them, and the other 20% in army units, you still DoI easily...

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Krill
Arguing from Realism Snoopy? Wouldn't have though you'd stoop to that level

On Topic: I understand you're point about not making trrops, but instead stockpiling everything that is required to make a soldier (population, horses and guns), but that doesn't rebut the LB/ES argument, or the fact that the game is balanced so that the smaller an economy the easier the WoI is.

The gameplay reason makes perfect sense - as Ken explains above. That shouldn't be necessary to be argued.

It's only easier because the REF increases a bit too much right now. However, I think you're wrong, anyway; a large economy should be just as good or better, because you are building a lot of STUFF to fight that war with, the more people you have. I suspect one of the problems is that people just haven't played long enough to figure out how to do that efficiently. If I have five or six cities, my REF on conquistador will be like 100 units or so. Easily fought off by 30 units on my side, since they come in waves; and with 6 cities, at size 15 each, that's just 1/3 of my total population, perfectly reasonable, especially when you throw in a few SoL's to sink a few MoWs, and throw in some cannons as well. If you have 20 cities, shouldn't you have 3x the army as well? Of course if you have 5 pop per city, that won't work very well, but that is because you aren't doing a good job of playing the game... you shouldn't be able to win in Civ with 20 cities at size 5 either, for heaven's sake, and people don't whine about that.

And, finally, think about the ICS. It's not a bad thing to have a reason to discourage ICS, is it?