Initiating revolution...

[DarthVeda]

I am declaring independence from your line of thinking, and looking around I'm pretty sure rebel sentiment is greater than 50% :P

[Guynemer]

Snoop, if I've got a size 15 city that is pumping out free colonists every few turns, but no meaningful jobs to work, with abundant guns and horses to be had, and the city is cruising along at ~95% rebel sentiment... why on earth should those colonists not be made dragoons in preparation of revolution, and why on earth shouldn't they have a rebellious outlook, given their American birth?


Look, ultimately the problem is simple. In the original game, bells affected garrisoned units. In this one, they don't, for no discernable gameplay reason whatsoever.

[Ijuin]

How about a compromise whereby soldiers count as having one-fourth of the average rebel sentiment of your settlements? For example, if your settlements have an average rebel sentiment of 60% (as calculated by aggregate liberty bells divided by aggregate settlement population), then soldiers would be counted as having a rebel sentiment of 15%. This would still leave a cap in place--e.g. if 50% of your population is soldiers then the maximum rebel sentiment possible is 62.5%, and having more than 66.7% (as opposed to the present 50%) of your population as soldiers would make getting 50% rebel sentiment impossible (if I calculated correctly).

[probablymike]

i think what's being overlooked in the standing army problem is that the settlers depend on the standing army for protection -- feeling protected diminishes their need to rebel. however, feeling 'put upon' ups the rebellious mood, yes, but there were more factors in their lives than just 'taxes' and 'authority' -- back home they were virtually slaves to some manor lord... it may be that their taxes were not an issue there, say, but that's in the case that almost all their farm product went to pay rent to the manor lord. nominally, in the colony, they may be free or not... not all colonies allowed outright ownership of land. as in the old country, the land was owned by the king, in a 'crown colony' or the lord who set the colony up in the first place. the rule was that the king had to keep his hands pretty much out of the business affairs of the aristocracy. and, anyway, a peasant is only a peasant in a monarchy -- with independence and republic, there are no more peasants.

point being that the kings troops are in the english colonies to protect the colony from the french, spanish, and independent locals, and not always for policing the colonists. garrisoned units may side with the colonists, but imported Hessians don't really care for more than colonist's daughters.

i think you're playing the game as though it were rush limbaugh modern times and 'tax rebellion and no-gun-control' and that's not realistic.

[DarthVeda]

This is how it should work:
1. Count soldiers against your revolution total (current situation)
2. Allow garrisoned soldiers to be converted to your side like any profession.

The result is this:
* It takes longer to get to revolution the more soldiers you have.
* Cities with large garrisons are taking an economic penalty because the rebel sentiment does not grow as quickly.

BOLT OF INSPIRATION

If we're still worried that players are entrenching and building overly large armies, just limit the number of troops allowed in a city. Furthermore, make it part of the upgrade process. That encourages them to play outside the city during Revolution.

No defenses - hold up to 2 soldiers.
Stockades - 4
Fort - 6
Fortress - 8

Not including non-combat units or sailing vessels. Probably vary this amount depending on difficulty.

[Ijuin]

I like the sound of that--you can keep only so many soldiers in a settlement, based on the settlement's defenses. The free Minuteman (when a colonist picks up stored guns to defend the settlement when there are no soldiers) would not count towards this total since he would not be a standing soldier. It would also give players a bigger incentive to upgrade their defenses and build Forts/Fortresses.

[probablymike]

why, realistically, would a foreign soldier want to side with you? anymore than i'd side with ben lawdn' if i were in iraq? the locals don't like you... you're a german or basque or arlesian peasant and your natural inclination in a vacation garden spot like the amazon/new rockland/vera diseasia is to rape and steal.

mod out the global if you want an easy win. it'd be cool to go for 'total realism civ4:col'

[Ijuin]

The thing is that they AREN'T foreign--they're your own colonists! It's the REF that is the "foreign" army.

[Aerion]

Originally posted by probablymike
why, realistically, would a foreign soldier want to side with you? anymore than i'd side with ben lawdn' if i were in iraq? the locals don't like you... you're a german or basque or arlesian peasant and your natural inclination in a vacation garden spot like the amazon/new rockland/vera diseasia is to rape and steal.

mod out the global if you want an easy win. it'd be cool to go for 'total realism civ4:col'

Why would you assume a professional soldier (i.e. Veteran Soldier armed and garrisoning my city) would be foreign? If he was born in America why wouldn't he support revolution? Heck, his folks back on the farm are probably going broke paying taxes!

Think about it this way. When you declare independence, do they join the revolution or revert to REF?

[probablymike]

it's because it's so expensive to keep soldiers, and the king is the only one with the population and funds to build a standing army -- you know how hard it is to even get 'common criminal'.

speaking of which, the bastards back home would judge and send people to the colonies for having committed virtually no crime at all. there ought to be far more 'common criminals' coming into some of these civs.

training a solder... that's a very expensive proposition -- you have to train them to trust that the body of soldiers itself will protect the individual -- you have to teach the soldier to conform and follow orders. that's why all the marching drill, and what a column of soldiers represented as they marched past: an effective weapon.

[Krill]

Originally posted by snoopy369


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?

Nice post. I do agree with your PoV wrt ICS; it seems like an elegant mechanic to deal with ICS in a game with no maintence or corruption.

But it doesn't answer the main problem: Build up a huge economy, build what you need, then disband every population point that can not be used as a military unit to decrease the amount of LBs required to initiate the revolution and hence the size of the REF. So the balance is screwed up and needs fixing.

[probablymike]

but, really, i see that you're responding to hessian, but i include french regionals for french armies, and, really, when it too almost a how many expensive days to coach from london to portsmouth in the 15th century, not to mention the weeks it took the poor, then there's no reason, in this age before the age of nations, why someone from one part of england would recognize or even understand the dialect of someone from a far other county. that's for real. it took a month to go by coach from paris to marseilles in the 18th century, though only a short time to go by boat. both were very expensive and i've read it that it cost the equivalent of twenty thousand current US to coach down. 'imagine if there were only a few small planes today -- 4 seaters -- and you wanted to fly 500 miles and gas was 200 dollars a gallon?

[probablymike]

yes, it overlooks help from 'friends of the rebels' -- other civs aiding you with money and troops. get foreign 'advisors' to train your citizens and free military and political moves from the sympathetic civ against your king. plus, an available market to sell your stuff and have some kind of income to pay your army -- some of your regions are still doing business with the king.

Originally posted by Krill



Nice post. I do agree with your PoV wrt ICS; it seems like an elegant mechanic to deal with ICS in a game with no maintence or corruption.

But it doesn't answer the main problem: Build up a huge economy, build what you need, then disband every population point that can not be used as a military unit to decrease the amount of LBs required to initiate the revolution and hence the size of the REF. So the balance is screwed up and needs fixing.

[Jorge.PT]

Originally posted by snoopy369


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...

I've just register to answer this post.

I'm a long time colonization player, and if you are also, why the need to make changes to the basic gameplay, it wasn't at your taste?

You don't start a revolution with nothing more then farmers, you have to build a army for that. And no revolution started with the original colonists... It was their "sons" who did it, and like so all the born free colonist should be pro-revolution at the same % then the city!

You can't just build a strategy game that as only 1 possible strategy for winning!!!! That's called a corridor shooter, not a strategy game... And against all the the spirit of a strategy game.

Oh and by the way in my country the last revolution was made by the military s, who dragged the population with them. And it wasn't a COUP D'ETAT, they started a democracy!

This game as no fun factor at this moment and I really hope to see a patch comming out to change all this

[snoopy369]

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I just don't see this being the problem people see it.

If you have more than 50% of your colonists outside of the city (garrisoned or walkabout), I think you simply aren't playing the game the way it is intended to be played. I can't imagine a reason to have even 30% of my colonists not doing useful things. A soldier holding a gun sitting in a city is a useless unit unless you are actively engaged in hostilities. This is NOT Civ4, people. You can swap between worker and military unit instantly with no penalty whatsoever.

Imagine in Civ4 if you took 1/3 of your population and kept them as citizen specialists. Then you posted on the boards complaining that you couldn't win. How long would it take for the rest of the boards to mock you senseless? Five minutes? Ten?

That is exactly what you are doing by taking your population and arming them, and leaving them in cities, prior to the DoI. There is literally no reason to do this. This is not "another way to play the game". It is something that simply doesn't make any sense to do at all, like taking your population off of tiles in Civ4. Sure, I'll agree that it would be nice if there were more than one way to win in Col - in the sense that you should have multiple actual victory types, as there are certainly numerous ways to win the game as it currently stands in the sense of play style - but there isn't, and we're not talking about that anyway. The fact that you should have your colonists working tiles and not standing doing nothing is bad strategy, and there's simply no reason for the devs to allow for it. They made it clear there was a reason they disallowed it (it allows you to DoI with basically no rebel support, if you simply remove everyone into garrison and have 1 population in a city that is >50% rebel) and so disallowed it.

I think it's a mistake that it wasn't made clear in the manual (if indeed it wasn't, I certainly didn't read that part of the manual carefully) and it's a mistake it wasn't made clear on the F3 screen. That hopefully at least will be corrected.

I do not think it is a mistake that it works this way, though.