Useless colonies!

[Grumbold]

I've built several productive colonies. I've found colonising a luxury in the early stages very useful to combat anarchy. It depends whether the resource you want is somewhere you would normally put a city. Colonies should always be inside your empire borders though, not outside. They can be easily protected, intruding settlers can be ambushed or diverted and eventually your culture absorbs your own work.

I'd have been happier if the concept retained its use for longer but with the founding square always generating resources and culture expanding to 3 tile radius fairly smoothly there are few places a city cannot go, especially after railroad makes even irrigable desert an acceptable city site. If the cities started with a 0 tile culture radius rather than 1 I expect we would see a lot more use of them initially.

[player1]

I think that Firaxis, while betatesting, had both colonies & cities with starting radius of 0. Colonies worked fine.
But later they changed it.
Then they didn't have time to playtest and see that they CONSIDERABLY lowered usefullnes of colonies.
So, I think that by having colonies with border radius of 1, would be much more interesting for gameplay.

[Akaoz]

Again I agree with player1. There is simply no way to protect colonies without resorting to war. Even surrounding it with units will not help. The AI can still build a city close and then assimilate the squares that the soldiers are standing on and force them to move.

Also, what was that about putting them inside your borders? As far as I know that can’t be done...

-Alech

[Robert]

that's right, colonies don't last forever.
again, like IRL.

[Akaoz]

The thing is that Civ3 isn’t ‘real life’. What ever that is...

The way I see it colonies where intended to give a civ a way to harvest resources from unfavorable areas without using up the rather limited ‘ideal city’ quota.

I don’t have a problem with founding a city on a faraway resource in the middle of a desert because it will be corrupt. I have a problem with it because it will make ALL my cities more corrupt.

-Alech

[Robert]

grow more culture, and build cities around the desert.
that way you can get all desert-resources without colonies and / or cities planting in the desert.

Soren Johnson said he was working on an AI tweak that would take care that the AI won't put cities in the center of your empire. (ie it looks if the city would be surrounded by your borders)

of course civ is not like real life, but that doesn't mean that everything does have to be different.

[Trifna]

England, France, Spain and others got colonies far away from home. And they weren't taken culturally that easily. People had the culture from the city which the came it seems. I guess it's not normal to see such.

[Karol]

Colonies are useful in higher levels (than Monarch). Especially when You're not Religious. You just may choose different direction of expansion than building city in Jungle or Hills/Mountains. Of course You should build city near them as soon as possible - but this is not easy decision in early high-level game...

[Fredric Drum]

Originally posted by CyberShy
later in the game, when the AI expansion has ceased,
colonies get evenmore usefull !

AI expansion does not seize. Raze a city, and another civ will show up with a settler and escort before you can say "cheese cake".

It's annoying... you better make sure you cover ALL of your continent, cos if there's only ONE available space, some moron will settle there. Once the AI showed up on my continent with a settler and the escort consisted of three tanks, two mech inf and two marines!! We were at peace, but landing this kind of troops close to my border is not acceptable, so I kicked them out.


Fred

[JHood]

You gotta love how the AI loves to build cities in the arctic tundra with no good squares available right up next to your borders.

No wait..... I hate that.

Wasn't there alot of effort put into reducing the advantages of ICS? Then why does the stupid AI attempt that strategy?

Then the city realizes my culture is better and they want to join my civ? I don't want some stupid tundra city to add to my already out of control corruptoin problem.

I wish you could choose to raze a city that you acquire by culture. Now that would be funny.

[Zorkk]

I have to agree with player 1 also.

Colonies need a 1 tile border, to make them usefull. I build one colony my very first game of civ, and when i found out that it didn't have any borders, i was very dissapointed.

It's completely pointless to build colonies. Your worker time would be better spent improving the area you were thinking of colonizing, and rush a settler there to build a city.

Colonies SHOULD have borders. Think about it, real life, or game, doesn't matter. You've gone out there, and established some sort of control over an area, and sent some of your people there to work in it. As far as i'm concerned that would be MY land, and I want to keep it. Having it so the AI can just move a settler in, plop down a city, and get rid of your colony is terrible. It makes it so the only real sense of building a colony would be inside your borders. But wait.. if you have a resources, inside your borders, you don't need a colony there to harvest it... ergo, colonies are useless.

If they add a border around a colony, then they would be VERY usefull, and allowing them to be assimilated by other cultures would balance out their usefulness, because your still forced to get over there and protect your colony with your own city close by it.

Zorkk

[JHood]

Oh ya... sorry I forgot.... I think colonies are useless too...

If they had borders I might use them.

[Akaoz]

Originally posted by CyberShy
grow more culture, and build cities around the desert.
that way you can get all desert-resources without colonies and / or cities planting in the desert.

You asked us to reply to your points, so I will:

This is nothing but a work around. Building cities in a circle around the Arabian peninsula is not really an option and a bunch of new cities in the desert will increase the corruption problem in my other cities. The fact is that colonies do not work the way most people would expect them to. IMO that makes them misunderstood at best, and broken at worst.

-Alech

[ColdWizard]

i've found colonies to be very useful in securing needed/wanted resources in areas that can't be settled right away. as for ai putting down cities next to them, that just means that colonies need some protection.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by player1
The point is that the concept of colonies doesn't work like it is designed (or like Firaxis wanted at start).
Now, if there are workarounds, OK.

But, it's same as saying that since you know now to handle corruption by cutting trees, making poplation farms or super tax cities, that corruption is working the way it is intendend.

Actually colonies work exactly like firaxis intended, check the manual, it describes using them to access resources right outside your borders that you didn't get because you didn't know they were there when you built the city, close enough that your cultural borders may expand to include them.

Also corruption is working as intended, but its just a little too harsh. Huge empires should have a hard time maintaining themselves, but the one shield per turn thing is ridiculous, improvements for corruption should be able to improve on this in most cities with a good government. It should get high enough to make you consider razing a city to avoid increased corruption but not so high to make practically mandatory.