I have not yet founded a colony myself, but I have read in one or two threads that if you do so the colony can trade your techs away. Is there any possible way to prevent this? I usually go for tech dominance and play relatively peacefully, if colonies do this I would lose my advantage and then die. This would be horrible, and I will never found a colony if they are going to trade away my tech lead for their own benefit. How could having a colony be good in such a case?

I know that vassals can't do this since they don't get your techs to begin with...Are vassal states therefore better to have than colonies?

So, on a related note, if they are indeed better, would it be possible to help them grow a bit by gifting a settler to them every now and then? I never tried this before (gifting a settler) so don't know if it will work...

I have not yet founded a colony myself, but I have read in one or two threads that if you do so the colony can trade your techs away. Is there any possible way to prevent this? I usually go for tech dominance and play relatively peacefully, if colonies do this I would lose my advantage and then die. This would be horrible, and I will never found a colony if they are going to trade away my tech lead for their own benefit. How could having a colony be good in such a case?

I know that vassals can't do this since they don't get your techs to begin with...Are vassal states therefore better to have than colonies?

So, on a related note, if they are indeed better, would it be possible to help them grow a bit by gifting a settler to them every now and then? I never tried this before (gifting a settler) so don't know if it will work...

i haven't built a colony in BtS yet except for experimentation. like you, i'm paranoid they'll trade away my tech advantage for a song. i do tend to keep vassals when i fear my colony expenses will get too high, and then liberate cities back to them if my expenses get too high. in one game the entire reason i attacked Brennus was that he had fur and whales which were going to be obsolete for me really soon. i captured the city with both resources in it, but then liberated it back to him after he capitulated, so that then he'd trade them to me. i then directed his research away from the techs that would obsolete those :) resources that i wanted to benefit from.

you can liberate cities to vassals / pre-existing colonies individually; it's not "give them everything at once or give them nothing". i haven't had a vassal turn down a city that used to be theirs. my guess is that if you use a settler to create a city near their territory (but not in their borders yet of course), they're likely to accept that city as a gift too. you can improve tiles first to give them a headstart, make a few key buildings and stuff like that, and then hand it over when you're ready.

if you do want to make a colony but aren't sure that you want the colony to control that entire landmass, make the colony early, when you have only a couple cities and not the ones you might want to keep for yourself. that's part of what i experimented and testing. in contrast to the vassal situation, when a colony if first created, the cities you give them control over are all or nothing. the new civ gets every city you currently have on the landmass, so you can't hold back "well i want to keep super-deluxe-commerce-potential city". but if you make the colony early, you do have the choice to gift individual cities to them after the fact.

if you follow that theory and create a colony during a war, early enough so that the battle lines are still nearby, the colony will of course be at war too and they're not that great at wars when they're newborns. in that case it's best to have extra troops that can temporarily leave offense to server as bodyguards to help keep the baby colony alive until the battlelines are safely far enough away that the colony will survive on its own.

I'm an old hand at colonies....I believe that if you play with "no tech brokering" enabled, colonies can't trade away any techs they "inherit" from you.

I also *believe* that colonies don't "inherit" any techs that you didn't research with no tech brokering on..... (Haven't confirmed this though.)

I'm an old hand at colonies....I believe that if you play with "no tech brokering" enabled, colonies can't trade away any techs they "inherit" from you.

I also *believe* that colonies don't "inherit" any techs that you didn't research with no tech brokering on..... (Haven't confirmed this though.)

the only part of the game i'm any good at is diplomacy. a big part of that is tech trading and avoiding wars due to the bad guys liking me. i haven't tried no tech brokering or no tech trades, altho i really should one of these days. it would be interesting to know if colonies don't inherit the techs you can't trade if you have NTB on. my guess would be yes they do, but that's a SWAG.

@KmadCandy: If they are gonna trade away techs I''ll let them die.

@jkp1187: I don't suppose there's any way to enable no tech brokering in the middle of a game? I left that one unchecked, never thought it would apply in this situation. What you say makes sense though - there should be some way to form a colony without handing them all your secret weapon blueprints and top secret documents. I don't think England would have founded a colony and immediately taught them how to drill like redcoats and build ship-of-the-lines and such.

So basically the only good thing about a colony is to get resources from it?

@KmadCandy: If they are gonna trade away techs I''ll let them die.

trick is to find someone to kill 'em in time. you can't do it, and you can't even bribe somebody else to do it! you'd have to declare war first and hope the bad guy aims for them ;).

I've been playing with No Tech Brockering turned on lately and although I never create colonies the AI does create lots of them. Every time I'm able to trade with the new born civs and get all the juicy technologies they just got from their master, knowing that they can not trade my techs to others :lol: It's rather cheesy in fact. You can get all your enemy's best techs and in return you just have to give yours to a looser colony.

Ya, this was kind of a shocker to me too. But there is really no other good way to deal with things when you are conquering civs on another continent. The colony expenses are outrageous, so you kind of have to start a colony with the cities you capture. Destroying them all leaves you with little foothold in their lands. As long as the colony never gets too big and you are going for conquest/domination it isn't too bad.

If you are purely peaceful. In my opinion, it can still be worth it to found a colony on a deserted island area, if you do it early in the game when you aren't ahead in techs (and still trading to get the ones you didn't research). They can provide the resources on the island, trade routes, something for your pirates to blockade, an ally to be another target in wars, more diplomatic votes for you, and if you do get warlike, they can come in handy as a midway station for troops on the way to the next continent you want to conquer.

Edit: From what I've seen they only get your techs when they are formed. Then they develop normally after that and don't get any techs of yours unlesss you trade them.