transport exploit

[The diplomat]

You can get around the warehouse limit by loading resources into wagon trains (or ships if you are in a coastal city) but not moving the wagon trains. Essentially, the transports become extra warehouses. Step 1) build a wagon train. Step 2) load the wagon train up with resources right before you are about to hit the warehouse limit. As your warehouse fills up, build another wagon train. Load up your wagon train, etc. You can produce as much of a resource as you need without ever hitting the warehouse limit.

I don't consider this a cheat but it is kind of an exploit since the warehouse limit does not matter anymore. If you use this strategy/exploit with guns, you can field a huge army.

[Krill]

I'm actually considering doing this with food...store up 5000 food in wagons, and the appropriate guns/horses, and the turn after declaring independance, cramming all of the food back into the cities so that you get a **** load of population that can become soldiers at a moments notice. Still need to test it, but the worst that it is is a little inefficient on food but really efficient on LBs.

[Dale]

This is a valid strategy, not really an exploit. Stockpile goods just before DoI so you can quickly muster an army from your colonies.

[Ijuin]

It's more that the problem is that there is zero maintenance cost for Wagon Trains, and no cap to the number of Wagon Trains that you may possess (in the original Colonization, you could only have as many Wagon Trains as Settlements). As such, there is nothing to prevent you from building as many Wagon Trains as you please.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Is it possible to put a limit on the number built in a mod/patch?

But I'm thinking for game balance, the nature of wagon trains being what they are (being drawn by horses), that there should be an addtional cost of fifty horses to building one. That should slow the building wagon trains exploit down somewhat.

[snoopy369]

I don't see why it would be considered an exploit... it's very expensive compared to a warehouse upgrade In general, why would you want to store so many resources up, anyway?

[Ijuin]

I like the fifty horses requirement--that way it costs you more than just a pittance of hammers to build a Wagon Train, but it's not prohibitively expensive.

[player1]

Make it 25.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Well, I've created my own little mod where it also costs 50 horses PLUS you only get one cargo space instead of two. What do you think of that?

BTW, does anyone know if you can stop the hurrying building for a unit, or at least the horses part? I want to make the player HAVE to have horses available.

[snoopy369]

I think modifying the wagon train in order to close this "Exploit" is a bad idea, because it does more harm than good. Compared to other elements in the game, I think being able to store things in a wagon train doesn't really do any harm... there's just no real benefit in doing so. You don't really need much more than 6 dragoons' worth of guns/horses anyway per city (and you can just store the rest in, well, dragoons), and if anything this would make beating the REF harder (which people already consider hard enough).

On the other hand, with any non-gun/horse item, there's no benefit to storing up the good above 300 - it's not like you need 500 cotton or anything, and any cloth/etc. that you're not selling is just wasting space anyhow.

Thus, not a good target for a balance fix, particularly with the plentiful other targets for such fix...

If you were to, though, I'd say don't require horses, and certainly don't limit to one space - both are significant harms to gameplay; requiring horses means you can't build wagon trains in the early game (when most players have no horses) and thus can't trade with cities inland early on, particularly if you have an area with much more terrain value inland rather than on the coast. Limiting to one space on the wagon train also significantly hampers the use of wagon trains for players with inland spots, and prevents you from selling two goods to indian villages (again, an unintended and negative consequence to the change).

No, if I were to try to fix this 'exploit', I would simply increase the hammer cost of the wagon train; it has the fewest negative consequences on other aspects of the game, and is the easiest change for the user to understand, as well. 80 hammers, maybe, or a bit less; easy enough and accomplishes the balance shift you desire.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Interesting thoughts. It might be good to find a way to increase the cost with each additional wagon perhaps?

They currently cost 40 hammers. A warehouse is 80 hammers so maybe 60 hammers, if you are going for fixed cost or start off with 40 hammers and an additional 20 hammers for each extra wagon.

[Unimatrix11]

Ramping costs almost always suck IMHO, since i cant imagine any logical reasoning that would justify it, and it almost always tends to be imbalanced and arbitiary. The horses requirement makes more sense, tho, and IMO (i only played the original yet, tho), getting horses isnt too hard - just buy a couple in europe. If you want to keep building wagons from self-bred horses, then you have your limit of wagons built in a given time. If not, you get your cost-ramp by the rising prices of horses in europe, which is only realistic (to some extend at least) and somewhat moderate. This way, it´s a soft-cap.

It would also be imaginable, to have two types of ´wagon trains´: A cheap and slow one with only one space and no requirement for horses, and the ´deluxe´ version with two space, being fast and needing more hammers and horses to build...

[snoopy369]

I still have yet to hear a good reason why it's a problem that you can build wagon trains to your heart's extent (and store things to your heart's extent), but certainly the 'two version' would be a reasonable solution if you consider it a problem. You could also (in a much more complicated fix) give wagon trains an upkeep cost...

[The Rusty Gamer]

An upkeep cost? Perhaps some of the horses die?

Actually, I was thinking of the idea of having a colonist specialist who has a pouch or backpack with one cargo space. What would you call him? A carrier? A porter?

You know, once the potential for mods is investigated more, there could be all sorts of variations and possiblities.

Is it also possible to have half cargo spaces? What if you set the cargo space to 0.5? Would that work?

[peege]

There are reasons to store things on wagon trains. Like the city has abundance of raw materials, and you are waiting for the factory to be built.

Or, the city pumped out finished goods and you are waiting for transport from the ship.

I also don't see why if a settlement has an abundance of wood, couldn't keep building more warehouses. The concept of the warehouse doesn't go out of style because a city gets larger. It just means more warehouse space needed.

When you make 60-70 of an item per turn, it gets hard to keep things under 900.

Its also nice to sell items in big bunches, due to the market price fluctuation. Why let silver trickle in and decrease in value when you can get a haul of 1800 units at once? for example. not that I could wait that long.

So people use their resources to store their goods. Makes sense to me. I think its a shame to have to use the wagons for that too, because I should be able to build more warehousing.


As far as waiting to flood the place with food and guns. That just doesn't make sense. Just let the people pick up the guns when they come out from the excess food instead of wasting time building wagons to store it and the guns. Also, a fisherman can fight as well as a colonist with 150 guns. So just have as many guns x 150 as citizens (-1, someone has to stay) and arm them when you are invaded.