Easy victory strategy

[Supr49er]

Welcome to Apolyton TimmyKGB.

[TimmyKGB]

Thanks for the welcome SUpr49er.

Another point I wanted to make about this thread is who the best civ is depends a lot on the map settings, the dutch are absolutely absurd at the speed settings, but I think the spanish are probably best at marathon/epic. The reason is on the fastest setting you can spam 7 instant purchase guys on turn 1, and by the time you travel to europe pick up 4, travel back, drop them off to europe you can afford a 10th.

Provided you have a good start location this is absolutely absurd pretty quickly.

Similarly on Marathon the spanish have the combat bonus vs the natives, and the game settings give them time to actually move around. This means they can get an army going, go on a killing spree, build up a bunch of XP and great generals. Also, the merchantman is somewhat nerfed since your initial spending spree of characters is 3, which makes 2 at a time far more manageable.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I also fail to understand any logic behind too many/ too few colonies.

I know fore sure Sid thinks the same.

Firaxis nerfed ICS for this reason. For the same reason the 2-3 colonies stragegies should not be viable as well, as they are more of an exploit than a strategy.

According to Sid Civ4 reaches its maximum strategic depth at around 9-12 colonies, and hence people should be encouraged to build this number of colonies.

I understand colonization is not civilization, but again I prefer to be faithful to my good old colonization. I can assure you that 2-3 colonies strategies were not viable strategy at viceroy level at colonization vanilla (at least you wouldn't achieve the highest score like that).

Anyway, I think this game can be played and be very enjoyable with 12 colonies as it is. If there is any problem is this stupid early independance rush, which I think it has been addressed by Dale/snoopy already.

Reading what you two have written I don't think you have a fundamental disagreement at all. As 4-5 colonies are definitely not 2 or 3... But again 4 is bit too low. I would raise the threshold to minimum 5-6 fruitful colonies for higher difficulty levels.

Running 6 developed colonies suggests the player understands trade routes and has established a prosperous trading network.

The more the number of colonies increases, the more complicated it gets to run them (it is easier to run 2 colonies than 10!). Hence, I would like to see this complexity implemented in difficulty levels as well. This is a game about trading, not playing hide and seek of your population with the King.

At the same time I would hate to see people playing with 50 underdeveloped colonies!

Again I think, I am not far from what both of you have already said... and I would agree with both, although I know you disagree with each other....

Thanks!

[Arrian]

Shouldn't there be some sort of cap on how big the REF can get (adjusted by map size & game speed)? The mother country is powerful and all, sure, but its resources are not infinite. Since the game does not include intervention by other European powers ala the real Revolutionary War, capping the amount of force the motherland can use against you could be a proxy... England can't send its entire army & navy against you, b/c France would take advantage of the situation (or is already fighting them, just not "in game"). Anyway, that would allow you to get big & strong enough that you wouldn't be outnumbered 5 to 1.

...

So far, I'm having some fun, but I'm also finding some things frustrating. Some of it may simply be ignorance, having never played Col before. I'm figuring more stuff out as I go. Some of it is design (like the fact that you can never work the "full" fat-cross radius like you can in Civ. That pisses me off).

Something that may just be ignorance: can I load exact numbers of things into transport units? Like, say I have 77 tools in a city. I want to take exactly 50 of them to another city. Can I do this? So far, all I've been able to do is take all 77, which is irritating.

I've installed AoDII, which is nice. I especially like the warnings about running out of/having too much of a resource.

-Arrian

[wodan11]

Originally posted by Arrian
Something that may just be ignorance: can I load exact numbers of things into transport units? Like, say I have 77 tools in a city. I want to take exactly 50 of them to another city. Can I do this? So far, all I've been able to do is take all 77, which is irritating.

Hold down the shift key.

[Arrian]

@ me.

Thanks.

-Arrian

[Hermann the Lombard]

Originally posted by Arrian
Shouldn't there be some sort of cap on how big the REF can get (adjusted by map size & game speed)? The mother country is powerful and all, sure, but its resources are not infinite.

Some of it is design (like the fact that you can never work the "full" fat-cross radius like you can in Civ. That pisses me off).

Well, colonial resources aren't infinite either. If you can support 50 dragoons, shouldn't the mother country be able to support more (or at least have a greater qualitative advantage)?

True, you can't work the fat cross (and I miss that too), but you can productively put the towns closer together, incidentally making them easier to defend. Besides, colonial towns were indeed rather small, not major cities.

[wodan11]

Originally posted by Arrian
@ me.

Thanks.

-Arrian

np. We all do it at one point or another.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Saying that guys... I would love to see "the call for a foreign power help" when you reach XYZ amount of bells....

Like good old col!

[BigFree]

The game is indeed too easy when building only 3 colonies. It gets increasing difficult (and tedious) to win when you have upwards of 9 or more colonies.

Frankly, there are just not enough strategies to win and keep me interested.

All this means is that the game has very limited replay value to me.

[wodan11]

Welcome to the club.

I do have some small hope, that after a couple of months, Dale's mod will be to the point where it's worthwhile.

[jahoooma]

I'm not sure if you are aware of it or not, but on civ fanatics there is a similar thread:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=293581

The difference between these two threads is that they have figured out how to win in about 40 turns with one city. Their strategy involves killing off all but one of your colonists to achieve 100% rebel sentiment while storing cannons to handle the troops. Now I don't know about you, but that sounds absolutely broken. So I tried it myself, and it works. Granted, it took me 46 turns, but that's not that much of a difference.

In that thread they continue to discuss possible ways to address this exploit, so I invite you to read it. The gist of what they suggest is to make it so that rebel sentiment cannot be raised by losing colonists and to make the REF much larger at the start of the game.

This is a really big problem IMHO. I hope you see that too, and that you wonderful programmers can fix it and make colonization more enjoyable for us all.

Cheers,

Jahooma

[Supr49er]

Civ Fanatics?!?


Welcome to Apolyton jahoooma.

[Hermann the Lombard]

Originally posted by jahoooma
The difference between these two threads is that they have figured out how to win in about 40 turns with one city.

Rather than saying "they" you might want to give credit to Turinturambar.

This is a really big problem IMHO. I hope you see that too, and that you wonderful programmers can fix it and make colonization more enjoyable for us all.

Please check out Age of Discovery II which goes a long way toward addressing these issues, beginning with increasing the starting size of the REF.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I am back guys. I only play AoD II, because I think the "vanilla" version is too easy and not enjoyable.

Original colonization used to be a far more interesting than this new colonization.

If recommend you to play AoD II, which brings back the good old col feeling.