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These are my thoughts of this second version of a classic having played it a lot recently, and posted on another Civ site:
Well,
I feel this version has broken many aspects of the original game that worked so well.
Basically, the only thing that needed improvement in the original was the WoI (War of Independence). I haven't played the original since it was released +2 years, so forgive if I get my memory wrong!- about 1993 or something)
Education:
Free in the original and each trade had a set (fixed) period, and certain trades could only be learnt within a college or Uni'. In the long Fireaxis game a degree to learn farming that takes 224 turns or 76 years is not amusing. "Well son, I hope you enjoyed your education now you are 94 years old..." What planet was that Fireaxis? (The only good thing they did was to remove Veteran Soldier training and implement the Civ system instead). To change the old system to a new one, they could have asked you in advance what you wished the student to study, but that novel idea was lost on them clearly. (a flaw in the original).
Trade:
This is your income to counter the REF (Royal Expeditionary Force). In Sid's game it balanced, but only as the REF was so bad- you just knew you would win.
In this version price drops are hopelessly unbalanced against REF increases.
In both versions I followed a standard format: 3 expert factory workers for 2 specialist farmers of the product (Tobacco, Sugar/Molasses, Fur and Cotton), no more or less. Just one single factory for each type, containing just 3 workers. Within this version trying to simply sell the standard 300-600 per trade or each item will give you about 18-20 trades of each before prices match the raw materials.
Silver is even more sensitive, you actually lose more money by buying the miners, than you will earn, if effort to buy and move them to the new world, and then re-train them after is considered.
Specialist farmers:
In the old game a free colonist would become an expert if he worked for long enough- this helped if the Spanish on their rampage wiped out the only village that taught you one of these skills. In this version that option is removed, as is the Spanish rampage, sadly it's common to find no villages anywhere offer a given skill, thus replacing one problem with another whilst removing a solution to it. Mind you, they "solved this" by allowing any trade to farm 500 million tobacco leaves on any square, and in so doing making the special resource pointless- In the old game you could only produce one of the 4 special farming products if it had the "special resource" label on that tile, the rest simply produced food, ore or wood- so simple!
Native Americans:
A strategy in the old game was you armed the nearest tribe to your European rivals to give them gip. You had braves, armed braves, mounted braves and armed mounted braves- and boy could they pack a punch! Now you sell horses and guns to the tribes and nothing changes to the combat levels of a native american.
Trading with tribes:
They now have limited funds, if you correctly trade the right items to the right village you have 8-10 trades before the funds of that nation are finished. This would be fine if I actually had a product to buy back, but alas! this version is stuffed full of everything you need, right within your own colony tiles, so they have nothing to sell that you might desire to buy. simply to put some money back into the pot.
Free Colonists(FC), Indentured Servants (IS) and petty criminals (PC):
A huge change here- A free colonist could work at a job for long enough and become the specialist of that trade. An IS doing the same would eventually become a FC, whilst a PC would eventually become an IS.
A quick way around this long process was to turn IS and PC's into soldiers, each one or two victories by them changed the status of that colonist (PC->IS->FC->Veteran)- Like it or hate it, Virginia was founded, in part, by these people to some extent and the original Col showed this transition back into society for PC's.
In this version you can actually send a criminal to learn a trade with the natives- in the original, if you tried to do that it worstened your relations with the natives.
Combat with Europeans/natives:
The other colonial powers are utterly pacifist in this version- you simply will not get attacked by another European nation in the critical early stage of the game. You will however get an automatic DOW (Declaration of War) from the nearest native tribe to you once you build your third town and have a certain population size in one of them (over 3 I feel- not sure of the trigger?), unless you provide freebie finished goods/guns/tools, which of course you are unable to provide as you've only just started the game! Doh!
The King's demands:
In the original you got a 1% tax raise (exactly 1%) every 20 turns unless you pre-empted it after the first 3 or 4 raises by building a wagon train or two to load the goods the AI had decided it was going to demand a raise on- tools, guns and horses always went first, but hey! you had hills and building a stable produced horses every turn- the more you had in a town, the more they bred.
In this version the AI demands tax increases and King demands on a random basis- it is thrown into the random events at the start of a turn, which consist of the following, listed in order of most common appearance, if careful to not upset the natives:
1) A tax increase of 1-5%
2) A demand of 10-94% of your stored gold
3) A drop in Euro prices
4) A request for your map by a Euro
5) A request for help against natives by other Euro's
6) A request for help by natives against Euro's
7) A DoW by natives
8) A DoW by another Euro'.
(At game-start number 7 should be at number 1, and 3 at number 4)
The other less common one is a gift from the natives- in the original, correctly scaled to provide help at game-start, in this version scaled (it seems) to offer stuff only once you are throwing the stuff away due to Euro prices.
The REF:
This needs no comment- it is based on a straight forward multiplier that bears no relationship to how you are actually faring militarily in the game- it triggers from the total number of colonists (inside and out) of the towns, and they effect your liberty rating (the more you have the lower your liberty rating): The only thing that really needed fixing in the original has been destroyed in this version.
My summary of this version is this:
They have briefly looked at the game and then thrown a spanner into the bits that worked, whilst looking at the two original areas that didn't work (Trade and the REF) and decided to break those bits even more.
Looking at the utter lack of support this game has been given: Osterich-Fireaxis? aren't they the same? Thanks to Dale at least for trying to make a game from this code.
Toby
Well,
I feel this version has broken many aspects of the original game that worked so well.
Basically, the only thing that needed improvement in the original was the WoI (War of Independence). I haven't played the original since it was released +2 years, so forgive if I get my memory wrong!- about 1993 or something)
Education:
Free in the original and each trade had a set (fixed) period, and certain trades could only be learnt within a college or Uni'. In the long Fireaxis game a degree to learn farming that takes 224 turns or 76 years is not amusing. "Well son, I hope you enjoyed your education now you are 94 years old..." What planet was that Fireaxis? (The only good thing they did was to remove Veteran Soldier training and implement the Civ system instead). To change the old system to a new one, they could have asked you in advance what you wished the student to study, but that novel idea was lost on them clearly. (a flaw in the original).
Trade:
This is your income to counter the REF (Royal Expeditionary Force). In Sid's game it balanced, but only as the REF was so bad- you just knew you would win.
In this version price drops are hopelessly unbalanced against REF increases.
In both versions I followed a standard format: 3 expert factory workers for 2 specialist farmers of the product (Tobacco, Sugar/Molasses, Fur and Cotton), no more or less. Just one single factory for each type, containing just 3 workers. Within this version trying to simply sell the standard 300-600 per trade or each item will give you about 18-20 trades of each before prices match the raw materials.
Silver is even more sensitive, you actually lose more money by buying the miners, than you will earn, if effort to buy and move them to the new world, and then re-train them after is considered.
Specialist farmers:
In the old game a free colonist would become an expert if he worked for long enough- this helped if the Spanish on their rampage wiped out the only village that taught you one of these skills. In this version that option is removed, as is the Spanish rampage, sadly it's common to find no villages anywhere offer a given skill, thus replacing one problem with another whilst removing a solution to it. Mind you, they "solved this" by allowing any trade to farm 500 million tobacco leaves on any square, and in so doing making the special resource pointless- In the old game you could only produce one of the 4 special farming products if it had the "special resource" label on that tile, the rest simply produced food, ore or wood- so simple!
Native Americans:
A strategy in the old game was you armed the nearest tribe to your European rivals to give them gip. You had braves, armed braves, mounted braves and armed mounted braves- and boy could they pack a punch! Now you sell horses and guns to the tribes and nothing changes to the combat levels of a native american.
Trading with tribes:
They now have limited funds, if you correctly trade the right items to the right village you have 8-10 trades before the funds of that nation are finished. This would be fine if I actually had a product to buy back, but alas! this version is stuffed full of everything you need, right within your own colony tiles, so they have nothing to sell that you might desire to buy. simply to put some money back into the pot.
Free Colonists(FC), Indentured Servants (IS) and petty criminals (PC):
A huge change here- A free colonist could work at a job for long enough and become the specialist of that trade. An IS doing the same would eventually become a FC, whilst a PC would eventually become an IS.
A quick way around this long process was to turn IS and PC's into soldiers, each one or two victories by them changed the status of that colonist (PC->IS->FC->Veteran)- Like it or hate it, Virginia was founded, in part, by these people to some extent and the original Col showed this transition back into society for PC's.
In this version you can actually send a criminal to learn a trade with the natives- in the original, if you tried to do that it worstened your relations with the natives.
Combat with Europeans/natives:
The other colonial powers are utterly pacifist in this version- you simply will not get attacked by another European nation in the critical early stage of the game. You will however get an automatic DOW (Declaration of War) from the nearest native tribe to you once you build your third town and have a certain population size in one of them (over 3 I feel- not sure of the trigger?), unless you provide freebie finished goods/guns/tools, which of course you are unable to provide as you've only just started the game! Doh!
The King's demands:
In the original you got a 1% tax raise (exactly 1%) every 20 turns unless you pre-empted it after the first 3 or 4 raises by building a wagon train or two to load the goods the AI had decided it was going to demand a raise on- tools, guns and horses always went first, but hey! you had hills and building a stable produced horses every turn- the more you had in a town, the more they bred.
In this version the AI demands tax increases and King demands on a random basis- it is thrown into the random events at the start of a turn, which consist of the following, listed in order of most common appearance, if careful to not upset the natives:
1) A tax increase of 1-5%
2) A demand of 10-94% of your stored gold
3) A drop in Euro prices
4) A request for your map by a Euro
5) A request for help against natives by other Euro's
6) A request for help by natives against Euro's
7) A DoW by natives
8) A DoW by another Euro'.
(At game-start number 7 should be at number 1, and 3 at number 4)
The other less common one is a gift from the natives- in the original, correctly scaled to provide help at game-start, in this version scaled (it seems) to offer stuff only once you are throwing the stuff away due to Euro prices.
The REF:
This needs no comment- it is based on a straight forward multiplier that bears no relationship to how you are actually faring militarily in the game- it triggers from the total number of colonists (inside and out) of the towns, and they effect your liberty rating (the more you have the lower your liberty rating): The only thing that really needed fixing in the original has been destroyed in this version.
My summary of this version is this:
They have briefly looked at the game and then thrown a spanner into the bits that worked, whilst looking at the two original areas that didn't work (Trade and the REF) and decided to break those bits even more.
Looking at the utter lack of support this game has been given: Osterich-Fireaxis? aren't they the same? Thanks to Dale at least for trying to make a game from this code.
Toby
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