Easy victory strategy

[Clio]

Originally posted by Victor Galis
I'm pretty sure it's a function of raw LB numbers. Which also seems silly. If a city is at 100% rebel sentiment and keeps producing Lib Bells, it's shooting you in the foot.

Not exactly.

See, even if a city is at 100% sentiment, it needs to keep producing LBs to keep it at that level. Take away all LB production, and the sentiment is going to drop.

So, what you said is true only if you produce more LBs in a 100% rebel sentiment city than what is required to maintain that city at that level.

I'll try to get some testing done tonight to see whether a city with some % of rebel sentiment with no LB production does indeed cause the King to add to the REF.

[snoopy369]

If you have NO LB production colony-wide, you will not have any REF expansion, no matter what your current REF or LB or SoL numbers are at ... there's an explicit check for this somewhere (Dale?)

[kazper]

Having an education that included learning good Game Design I would have to agree with Snoopy on what does constitute good design.

That said Colonization in it's current form doesn't live up to that. It's not equally easy to win being large or small - it's much, much harder to be big. I would even go so far as to say that the difficulty doesn't just rise - it rises exponentially - as you go above 3-4 cities max. As you grow you can smash the other European colonists - and grow even bigger, but you will be totally annihilated by your king come revolution day.

By staying small and following AgentTBC's tactic you can indeed win easily on every difficulty every time.

The thing is - this is working EXACTLY as it did in the original Colonization. That was the strategy I found to be best then, and apparently it still is. And TBH I'm a little disappointed that it (IMO the greatest weakness of the original) wasn't rebalanced.

[Clio]

Originally posted by kazper
By staying small and following AgentTBC's tactic you can indeed win easily on every difficulty every time.

In a multiplayer game, against opponents who see what you're doing -i.e., going small and trying to grab an early victory-, they'll be doing everything they can to stop you. And mind you, that's not much.

The same goes for a good AI.

So: perhaps it is better to say that this is not bad game design, but rather bad AI programming.

[AgentTBC]

Originally posted by Clio So: perhaps it is better to say that this is not bad game design, but rather bad AI programming.

Most people don't actually ever play multiplayer, so bad AI programming IS bad game design. The AI is the single most important part of a strategy game (leaving aside those few games which are multiplayer only). There is no such thing as a good single player strategy game with a bad AI. There are good strategy game engines with bad AI, but they are still bad games.

Bad AI in a strategy game = bad strategy game.

Right now, unfortunately, Colonization has very bad AI. I understand that good AI is probably the most difficult thing to get right in a game. That doesn't make it okay to have awful AI.

[kazper]

Yes. AgentTBC is correct. I like being able to play (almost) any game multiplayer, but for some games - and Turn-based strategy chief among those - multiplayer is simply a fringe-benefit and 9 out of 10 games (at least) will be singleplayer.

That means you have to fit the game design to the AI and vice-versa. The best game design in the world will not save the singleplayer experience if you can't build an AI to challenge you properly within that framework.

Note that I know exactly how hard good AI programming is - but if you can't fit the hand to the glove (The AI to the rules) then you have to fit the glove to the hand (the rules to the AI), so that the AI can manage to compete.

[Montrose]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by Clio

"...Cons of having more cities:
-...In any case, you'll want to declare independence late in the game (turn 250 or so) to maximize the benefits gained from your large industrial base.

...and vice versa for fewer cities. I agree with the above poster that either avenue is balanced vis-a-vis the other."

Although I do enjoy the game while immersed in it, my experience with 6 cities has been different. On Governor as the Dutch, I had 6 cities and a large pop, so I was stuck at 37% rebel sentiment until I disbanded about half my units, just sticking with a basic economy to generate political points (carpenter + lumber + food for them in each city) plus 3 statesmen/town hall to keep earning LB's. That got me to 50% immediately and I declared in 1735. One wave of troops came two turns later, and I wiped them out. A second wave a couple of turns later, and I wiped them out. (Regular royal soldiers seem pretty easy to kill; I had to nail these guys with foot soldiers instead of cannons because they didn't take the city I left defenseless for them to walk into.) Then that's all she wrote--I spent the last 50 years waiting for the rest of the 40-odd REF units to show up. It's no fun watching MOW's cruise your shores while nothing else happens.

I came away from this experience convinced that you have to declare at least by 1692, earlier if possible. (I won my first game on the easiest level using the general strategy espoused on the forums to hold off LB's till the last minute; declared in 1692 and won in 1714.) I imagine there is a way to do that with 6 cities (I was perfectionist about filling every production square) but I do not think declaring independence in turn 250 is going to help you get the most out of having a larger number of cities. (Unless I am missing something about why the REF never shows; my take-away from the forums is that there is no help for it except to declare as early as you can.)

[Rusty Nail]

How do you know you will get a statesman in the colllege and not a lumberjack or something else, since all you can do is assign students but not teachers? I must have missed something here.

[Montrose]

Originally posted by Rusty Nail
How do you know you will get a statesman in the colllege and not a lumberjack or something else, since all you can do is assign students but not teachers? I must have missed something here.

If you click on the college while your students are being educated, you will see a drop down listing all the possible professions you can assign the next student who graduates. If you have an elder statesman in the city *and* you have 500 gold, then Elder Statesman will be one of the options. If you are pursuing the usual approach of delaying liberty bells as long as possible, you buy an elder statesman from Europe and put him to work somewhere in your college town (working a tile or in one of your buildlings) before you start putting students in your school building.

A mistake I have made a couple of times is to graduate a student when I didn't have 500 coins in the bank. If you don't have 500 coins, then Elder Statesman will not be one of your choices from the graduation dropdown menu, even though you have an elder statesman working in the college town.

[Hermann the Lombard]

A couple of noob questions about the mechanics of this strategy:

1. "...you want a scout right away. Sell your initial pioneer..." I didn't know I could do that (and I don't know how to do that). What's the procedure?

2. The point is to buy a scout in Europe?

3. I thought I would buy horses and mount a unit (the pioneer), or does that only produce a scout from former natives?

4. "sell treasure even if you don't have a galleon" Isn't selling treasure the only way I could afford to get a galleon (as a noob playing the Dutch)?

-- Hermann

BTW, long time no see! I've been off playing Oblivion (and Hold'em).

[snoopy369]

1,2,3: Take your ship over to Europe, select the pioneer, and you can then select to change him to another type of unit- it will sell your tools and buy horses, basically.

4: No, you could trade for a galleon also But often you're right (selling treasures -> getting galleon is often the normal path).

[N35t0r]

Except when the king taxes you the 50% he didn't take as a transport fee.

Wouldn't it be better to change the soldier for a scout?

[snoopy369]

Selling your initial guns == bad idea...

[N35t0r]

Mind you, sailing around and capturing the other powers' colonies used to be my favourite strategy. Not any more, since you can't easily steal their colonists now.

But, at least in SP, I rarely get into trouble that early on, and a pioneer working the land usually nets you enough profit to re-buy them relatively soon.

[TimmyKGB]

Holding off on LBs works very well in ICS also.. if you can move 100% of your population into generating liberty you will declare pretty fast. As long as your plan doesn`t require education most things scale in your favor. Also having a task force to clear out the land for your sprawl means you will end up with veteran units that get great promotions and will kick the crap out of inexperienced REFs.