American War of Independence - Creation Thread

[AGRICOLA]

@civ2units

While playing, it struck me that the trade commodity list bears little semblance to the little I know about colonial American exports like salt cod, furs and timber for ships’ masts . Uranium was unknown in those days and, as EZRhino has pointed out, cotton was introduced after the AWI.

After checking out a number of sources on the Web, it became clear that New England, the central colonies and the southern ones produced and exported very different commodities. The table at the end of the post is as good a summary as I could find although it deals only with export to Britain.

I would suggest the following commodities might be appropriate for AWI trade:

Tobacco
Rice
Indigo (blue dye from indigo plant)
Salt cod
Iron
Furs
Potash (made from wood ashes, no shortage of those in colonial America)
Corn whisky (this was more like moonshine, burbon came later)
Lumber
Wheat
Ambergris (expensive, fragrant stuff from whales)
Ship masts (Britain had few suitably large trees)
Deerhides
Corn
Naval stores (tar, pitch etc)
Livestock

[EZRhino]

Excellent post Agricola. IMO I think trade should be taken out of the scenario all together, for both historical and gameplay reasons. First of all as McMonkey said, and Agricola amply demonstrated (as always) trade give a huge! advantage to the patriots. If they have healthy trade routes they will be able to buy practically infinite numbers of units. This doesn't make the scenario very challenging.

It's known that civilization 2 rewards players for trading with states they are at war with. "London" is on the other side of an ocean and is quite large; it is the natural city to trade with. But this is unhistorical because the colonies had been boycotting all sort of British goods since the 1765 Stamp and Townshed acts, leading up to a complete embargo on all trade with Britain after the first continental congress in 1774.

It is also unhistorical because it lets the colonies become quite wealthy when historically they were almost completely bankrupt for the entire duration of the war (and especially before the French and Dutch entry into the war). There are alot of reasons for this, but the main reason is that the continental congress did not have the power to enact taxes or duties on trade goods. The thirteen colonies were in theory supposed to help finance the war with voluntary donations to congress, however the states were concerned with their own affairs and failed to make any donations. Congress paid for the war entirely by printing continental scrip (which the British cleverly devalued by sponsoring counterfeiters).

[civ2units]

@Agricola and @EZRhino:
Thanks for the detailled trade commodities from this time, Agricola
I´m not sure what I should do with the trade. On the one way I´m thinking of disable the trade completely, on the other way I was thinking about to increase the costs for a merchant. So as a player you can´t build masses of merchants for trading.

[civ2units]

Does anyone know if there is any chance of disable building cities by settlers?
I´ve tried to delete the orders (build new city) in the labels.txt but it doesn´t work

[McMonkey]

You can remove the option in the drop down menu for players (I guess they can still press B for Build new city!?) but altering the GAME text has no effect on the AI.

[Cyrion]

Unless I am mistaken, if you want the AI to stop building cities you can hexedit a hidden value (fertility) allocated to every kind of terrain so that no terrain is attractive enough for the AI to build on it.

Others no more than I do on that topic

[civ2units]

You can remove the option in the drop down menu for players (I guess they can still press B for Build new city!?) but altering the GAME text has no effect on the AI.

Yes, if you remove the order you can still build cities by pressing "b".

[civ2units]

Unless I am mistaken, if you want the AI to stop building cities you can hexedit a hidden value (fertility) allocated to every kind of terrain so that no terrain is attractive enough for the AI to build on it.

Others no more than I do on that topic

Sounds interesting, is it difficult to make a hexedit (I don´t really have any idea how it works)?

[AGRICOLA]

According to Mercator's hex edit compendium, there is a fertility value for each square. Obviously, hex editing each of these values is not practical.

[Cyrion]

Can't you make a "global" editing where you set the value for all squares to 0 or whatever?

[civ2units]

I´m also thinking about disable settler units for the AI to avoid city building. For the player I make a house rule. This works very fine with my AWI scenario (because I´m working on two events; British and Americans).

In the ACW scenario it doesn´t work. If you play with the Union, you can liberate slaves (who will join the Union army), so the AI gets a settler unit. And the map is big so the AI will definitely find places to build new cities.

[AGRICOLA]

@Cyrion

The following applies to each map tile.

From Mercator's Hex Edit Compendium:
The last 4 bits concern tile fertility. Values for fertility range from 0 to 15 (0 to F in hexadecimals), 0 being completely infertile, 15 the most fertile. The AI uses this information to determine where to build its cities (it does NOT use the actual terrain production values from the RULES.TXT).

Civilization II only assigns fertility values to the Grassland and Plains terrains, all other terrains initially have a value of 0. And the AI only builds cities on terrain with a value greater than 7. If the fertility value is 15, the AI will immediately build a city there as soon as a settler finds it.

Fertility values of terrains other than Grassland or Plains can, however, increase because of tile improvements. Generally speaking, the fertility values on a map seem to even out, with fertile terrains losing fertility and "barren" terrains becoming slightly more fertile. This might be influenced by the map size, total land mass and amount of fertile land still available. Rivers, resources, farmland, mining, irrigation and roads may also have an effect, but I'm not sure how big this effect is, and if it depends on their productivity as described in the RULES.TXT. Fertility values within a city radius are decreased by a certain number, preventing the AI from building cities within an existing city radius.

[Cyrion]

Thanks for the info, Agri!

I might need it in the future!

[MacGalleo]

Does anyone know if there is any chance of disable building cities by settlers?
I´ve tried to delete the orders (build new city) in the labels.txt but it doesn´t work

And what about giving a terrain a number of foods and all other terrains 0 food?
I don't know if AI build cities on 0 food terrain...

[civ2units]

Interesting idea, but I don´t think that it works. The city terrain should get masses of food and all other terrains (like farmland) isn´t usable.