I've been a long time Civ, and Col player, since the days of Dos, and Windows 3.1, and well this is a question that I've been wanting to ask people for a while... how many colonies are you averaging a game.

In the old Col, it was nothing to build 13 - 20+ Colonies, and control the entire continent, but in my second match of Civ4: Col, I won with 5 colonies, I'm curious as to what peoples averages may be, and if this is the way the new game is just balanced to play.

I'm averaging about ten. It all depends on how much favorable territory you find, and how many doubloons you have in your coffers.

I used to finish with as few colonies as possible. The only thing you need to win in the original is a wide enough food base to produce as many horses per turn as you lose. So the king would land about 6 units per landing, and your worst odds are while the king is on flat land, so his dragoon vs. your continental calvalry is 5 strength (plus 50% attacking bonus) against 6. You can do the math, but that generally means you won't lose more than four times a landing. Four losses = 200 horses. Landings come every three turns or something, and the maximum number of horses you can produce per turn is like 23. So you can beat the entire expeditionary army with about 10 continental calvalry and four colonies, provided they can manage to turn a 23 food surplus per turn, which is not difficult.

I haven't finished a game yet of the new version, but I suspect you need many more colonies, because instead of just needing to produce horses to have an invincible army, you also need to produce colonists and muskets. My prediction is that the bottleneck will be colonists to hold the guns and ride the horses you're producing.

And naturally this assumes the king will land in a nice controlled manner like in the original.

And naturally this assumes the king will land in a nice controlled manner like in the original.

Its been years since I played the old colonization so I don't remember. In the new col the king in my games have sent attacks on 3-4 different cities (Always on the east coast of my continent though)... sometimes he even attack cities straight out of the ships

I finished a pioneer game with 4 colonies. I didnt realize how insanely difficult it would be from the original colonization, and I found out after declaring independence the first time that turtling does not work like it did earlier.

Lost a colony and I had to reduce population by all the colonies down to 1 to fend off the last waves. I won with 2 regular soldiers remaining :-D

Specialization is a lot more important in this game, so you typically need a few more cities. If you plan on building Ships of the Line to counter the REF's Man of War fleet, then you'll probably need 1.5-2 specialized tool/gun cities per lumber/carpenter city producing the ships.

I used to finish with as few colonies as possible. The only thing you need to win in the original is a wide enough food base to produce as many horses per turn as you lose. So the king would land about 6 units per landing, and your worst odds are while the king is on flat land, so his dragoon vs. your continental calvalry is 5 strength (plus 50% attacking bonus) against 6. You can do the math, but that generally means you won't lose more than four times a landing. Four losses = 200 horses. Landings come every three turns or something, and the maximum number of horses you can produce per turn is like 23. So you can beat the entire expeditionary army with about 10 continental calvalry and four colonies, provided they can manage to turn a 23 food surplus per turn, which is not difficult.

I haven't finished a game yet of the new version, but I suspect you need many more colonies, because instead of just needing to produce horses to have an invincible army, you also need to produce colonists and muskets. My prediction is that the bottleneck will be colonists to hold the guns and ride the horses you're producing.

And naturally this assumes the king will land in a nice controlled manner like in the original.

You don't just lose the horses in col2, the whole unit is killed if defeated.

You don't just lose the horses in col2, the whole unit is killed if defeated.

That makes sense, actually, but it really means the war for indeendence becomes difficult, which it wasn't in the original.

I take it you also no longer can get a lot of colonists simply by capturing soldiers from the rival civs? That was one of the sillier features of the original game.

Where I live (in Sweden), there's been a glitch in shipping the game from England, so we won't get it until late next week, at BEST. Grr!

I don't know who one would want more than three cities in Col1...it was very winnable with three.

However, I haven't yet won NewCol. I'm really not getting something, can't wait for the first comprehensive guide to be written. I'm definitely not growing as fast as other people who play.

In the original colonization one of my favorite tactics was to build one coastal city (my capital) and then 5-8 inland cities for raw materials. The King would always attack the one coastal city so you could pile your defenses there and win very quickly.

I just started playing COL. I wanted to bring this question up again since it has been a few months that people have been playing, and maybe there is a clearer answer to this.

In Old Col I'd always get slaughtered by the REF. True but sad!
In New Col there's a couple of tactics. Cheats (really early revolution so there's only a tiny REF) and strategies (produce no Liberty Bells until late in the game) to help.
I started playing with LOTS of towns, but the REF grew to 5-600! Oh sure, they only landed like 100 at a time... owie!
Now I try to keep the town ## low, and the Liberty Bells later. This helps a lot!

Overall, the sheer number of towns isn't all that important, more a matter of playing style. The key is to keep the REF small, and your defences sharp! The New Col will go after your best cities, even ones not close to your Capital. So free those slaves, and have lots of Guns and Horses to make them Dragoons!

I usually build about 8 colonies, which is more than I need but I like colony management. Late in the game I will add 2 or 3 specialist 'statesmen' colonies (just 3 elder statesmen and a farmer) to increase liberty bells before independence.

I build 2-4 colonies and have won 16 games so far (playing each country at each of the first 4 difficulty levels).

I think the number of cities is a function of your desired play style for the particular game. So far I've been in the mood for relatively easy colony management, so I've kept my number of towns down. I think the most I've bothered with is six with two of them very small. The more towns--correction, the higher the headcount, including troops--the slower the ramp-up of rebel spirit so the larger the REF. That means if you want 10-12 towns you're going to be facing a very large REF.

If I want a quick game I'll go with two (or usually three) towns, only one on the coast, and use the "Late LB" strategy.

Just for grins I did the one town on Revolutionary, lightning-fast (about 45 turns), but that's serious exploitation of the mechanics! It is amusing to see that normalized score over 10,000 up there, but I can't take credit for it!

Welcome to the Forums 65604267. :beer:

City Specilization is pretty key, you'll want at least 3 big towns, for me these towns get to around size 20 by the end.

1. Producing Horses, so much food double this up as your university town.
2. Producing Ore/Tools
3. Producing Guns/Cannons

With the Free Men civic though, build a ton of other small towns with just a church, warehouse & printing press, you only need 3 pop in each of these towns, one for a food tile, one for a lumber tile and the last working the woodshop, these can produce nothing but political points after these 3 buildings are built. Distribute a warehouse full of horses and guns to each of these towns. When you Declare Independance, you'll have an entire army of indentured servants and can then keep your entire current infrastructure fully functional and pumping out full bore so you can easily replace your losses when the King lands his troops on your shores.

Two colonies are enough. Enough for the needed troops, enough to supply the money to equip them (about 10k) and enough to raise your rebel sentiment to 50%.

I have tried one colony too, it can be done but it takes a long time to raise the rebel sentiment. You have to disband colonists in the end.

As the game is now there is no particular reason to use ranchers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths unless you really want to.

There are a lot of complaints on the forums that the game can only be won one way, but it's nice that the strategies of both phoulishwan and PeaceGuy can work. One produces weapons and horses, the other produces *no* weapons or horses. I've been following the latter strategy mostly, including exporting ore rather than reducing its value by making it into tools...(??)

Welcome to the Forums PeaceGuy. :beer:

Thanks Sup49er :)

Back to the subject I think Firaxis should give some incentive to build more colonies. From what I read and from my experience you make your life harder if you build many. Which is funny, 2 colonies more successful than 10? It should be the opposite.

Also tools as Herman mentioned are cheaper than ore... strange to say the least.

I cant believe you all just like to play with six or so colonies. In my games i like to average around thirty cities (love to play huge western map on marathon). I play as the spanish and settle on cuba first, build the city with my veteran soldier, improve my land with the pioneer and send my ship back to europe. after a number of turns i buy horses and send them back to cuba, and by this time it is usually around 1518-1519. I settle my pioneer in my only city, take out my veteran musketeer as a veteran dragoon and ship him to mexico to fight the aztecs (or whatever natives happen to be living there). after conquering all of mexico i send my dragoon south into south america, spend the rest of the game selling silver to buy military forces to expand my borders, and by the end of the game i have ten horse wagons shipping resources to my eight caravels.

I build up four amazing cities, usually in locations of modern day Mexico City, Panama City, Lima, and Buenos Aires, and Havana (optional). they usually have populations of around five to thirteen and they make guns and horses, while havana may make industrial goods. By the 1650 i have an empire so large that no player would have the time to beat me..... unfortunately, the micromanagent is a living hell.......

by the time of the revolution, i have produced roughly two thousand guns and horses, and with freedmen constitutional amendment i have more then enough soldiers to devastate any army. also, i trade with europe still during my revolution, because while you guys can't use ships when the royal navy arrives because of your limited borders, i can trade anywhere. If the royal navy arrives in the carribean i ship my resources through panama city to the pacific; if they arrive and blockade all of south america i'll ship my resources through san francisco; if they block off all of north america, i ship my resources through buenos aires. Although by that time my silver prices have dropped to two, so i sell mostly industrial goods by that time (because of i have so many cities, i don't have to build buildings to produce more industrial goods as three cities can produce the same amount of that good as an industrial metropolis).

I am sure this strategy would not work with any other civ, and it is best used with simon bolivar ( while you are conquering south america with your dragoon, your borders in the north expand and destroy more indian settlements peacefully =).

Playing as the famous spanish empire is the most rewarding experience......

also, for this strategy to used effectively, you need to have hernan cortez in your congress (free stockade in every city). During indian wars and revolutionary wars, it becomes essential to win.

I've been through that hell of micromanagement in various generations of Civ and wouldn't be eager to take it on here! In my current game I'm up to eight, the highest I've tolerated so far (and two of those exist to help feed my oversized industrial cities). I may try 12 but that's about it.

Question: how do you choose to handle LB with such a large empire? Even with eight towns I'm going with the Late LB Surge.

You would be surprised how managable it is. When you destroy a town i only get one converted native, but instead of collecting them into bigger cities, i spread them out to collect more diversified products. So, by the end of the game, i end up having roughly four metropolises (six to thirteen pop.), five cities (pop of three to six), and twenty one "colonies" that have a population of one to two. It's much faster to produce LB's with cities with one population so they mostly make up for my decent sized cities, although it would still take forever without ( can't remember the founding father, he gives three LB's for a town hall?). It may take me anywhere between two decades (if i acquired the elder statesman in my major cities) to about four decades. Although this strategy increases the amount of troops you have to face at the end, the increased borders limit indian attacks (especially if you're simon bolivar) as they destroy their settlements and give you more time to react to their attacks; which is huge when you have such large borders to defend.

Besides, you end up with so many LB points that you pretty much can get the best founding fathers before the revolution; just another bonus.

To your statement concerning micromanagment: you are right, the game takes forever to get through a single turn. My current game has already cost me twenty hours of my life, and i am only at year 1657. If one wants to attempt it i would suggest this: build your cities and organize their economic production along the lines of "mini states" or vicerroyalities. For instance i have around seven divisional areas that i use to to organize my cities (usually along the lines of the vicerroyalities of spain in the seventeenth century.). I have six cities that make up the vicerroyality of Peru. they make mostly silver, but also ore, and by the late game (when silver inflation makes silver worthless), i build up lima to include an armory and blacksmith, so my peruvian colonies mass produces tools and guns. In my my latin american colonies i trade lumber and silver, and in my New Mexican and New Spain colonies i trade cotton, tobacco, and later on, wool and cigars. In La Plata (argentina) i build horses, and in my colony in florida and in the carribean i produce sugar and rum, while New Granada ( columbia, venezueala, ecuador, panama, and costa rica) harvests silver and is the breadbasket for the empire. i usually have one to two wagons collecting resources in these vicerroyalities shipping these resources to panama city to send to my ships waiting there. my ships collect there because it is in the middle of my empire as well as it's position between the atlantic and the pacific to collect these resources from my vicerroyalities.

I hope this has provided you guys with some reasons to pursue making large colonial empires to aid in the revolution. Just trying to demonstrate that there are other tactics for victory out there that are a lot of fun.

Your vicerroyalities (say *that* three times fast!) sound like an excellent method of organizing your empire.

Question: back to LB generation, do you start generating early or do you do a late surge? I may generate a few bells early to push a couple of borders but then I stop until I have three elder statesman for each colony then slap them in all at once, going from zero to rebel in about 10 turns. [Note that those early bells add to the REF but do nothing in the long run for rebel spirit as the impact evaporates.]

Also, do you end up giving away those Caribbean colonies? I find islands to be indefensible (and a real nuisance if I have to hunt down stray REF units).

[Edit] Speaking of 20 hours of your life, I just had a game as France where I built 8 (and bought 2)SoL to face 4 or 5 MoW of the REF, started my LB surge, and three turns into the surge John Adams won. That was 23.5 hours of my life. <sigh>

Totally know how that feels, but ya i do leave my caribean colonies to the royalist troops, besides the AI doesn't heavilly defend them, so it doesn't take long to retake them later on.

For my LB's i have some cities going through most of the game, while the majority are left just collecting resources. For instance, as simon bolivar i let my borders in Mexico City expand for almost the entire the game while i am conquering south america. Mexico City's borders usually kills about two indian settlements and after a while of paying off the natives to avoid war, i have bought two cannons and a veteran soldier with my silver to protect the city. Eventually the indians declare war.... i mopp the floor with them... get more settlers.... expand... and then i take off the LB production on mexico city. :king:

Then around 1650 i do a complete surge in LB production, leaving my cities to produce raw resources while LB production goes up. It's at this point that I collect a huge amount of FF's. i would like to know though, does anyone know if the king sends troops by the amount LB points you have or just the percent of your empire's population that are revolting. I ask because in the beginning, with the establishment of Mexico City, I have a single City producing LB's and the king almost never increases royal troops, but by the late game surge he adds more every other turn. I don't know..... this might change my strategy slightly if it's based on LB points because i rack those up fast, but if it's percent of pop. then i am fine because my empire's pop is so large that mexico City's LB production has almost no affect on the percent of my populations revolt rating.:confused:

And sorry about the failed French Game. Just out of curiosity..... did you get those SoL's in a epic speed game or marathon because if it's on epic you are like a god at this game?!:lol:

Because it takes me so long to produce LB's the other europeans have a better chance of getting to independance first, but due to my large empire i have the largest army in the world (before Revolution i have about two dragoons, two veteran musketeers and one colonial militia, and about seven cannons, and they all have a huge amount of experience from the indian wars). when the european colonies begin to think about independance, i sail over there with my merchant marine with about seven units and demolish thier entire colonial structure. In the last game, the dutch had colonized all of the eastern seaboard, so i ravaged and pillaged their colonies (the AI never have an effective army or navy!!!) and they were so hurt by the war that they never again came close to getting to independance again.

That was on Epic and thank you, but I am *far* from a god at this game! That was just a good 3-product economy, 8 colonies, and the patience to spend about 16 turns per SoL. I think I was up to about 80% taxes by the end so buying the ships wasn't practical (I managed to buy 2, I think).

I've been using the Dale/Snoopy PatchMod which is probably the main reason that John Adams won. You see, in that mod the AI *does* build up troops prior to declaring. In another PatchMod game when I went to invade I managed to land my troops just before the British SoL showed up and cut me off from reinforcing or withdrawing my troops (can you say "Aboukir Bay"?) There were about 6 colonies, each Pop 12 or so and each defended by at least 3 units. I ruined him but it cost me all of my experienced units.

About the LB and REF, additions to the REF are based solely on LB accrued to date (i.e. from the start of the game), while rebel sentiment is a function of the rate of LB production. The percent fades if you stop producing LB so early LB add to the REF but don't add to your later rebel sentiment unless you maintain LB production, driving the REF size through the roof. (PatchMod does reduce the rate of increase of the REF.) To see the math in gruesome detail, see Axxon's excellent work in the Strategy Articles section.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=293730

BTW, I really appreciate the thought you've put into your messages in this thread, you've given me a lot to think about.

BTW, I really appreciate the thought you've put into your messages in this thread, you've given me a lot to think about.

I'll second that. I can't imagine managing 30 cities myself but it is good to read how you go about it. A very interesting thread.

There is something interesting in the game (not sure if it is a bug though) ... one cannot declare independence with only one colonization.

I have a rebel sentiment of 99% inside this colony but in the advisor screen (F5) .. the number of people supporting independence is 34% and I cannot start the revolution.

In the old Col one used to win with only one colony (although I always like to win with the multiple specialized colonies) .. but does anyone know why I can't start the revolution with only one colony in the new Civ4Col? Does it need extra things to do?

There is something interesting in the game (not sure if it is a bug though) ... one cannot declare independence with only one colonization.

I have a rebel sentiment of 99% inside this colony but in the advisor screen (F5) .. the number of people supporting independence is 34% and I cannot start the revolution.

In the old Col one used to win with only one colony (although I always like to win with the multiple specialized colonies) .. but does anyone know why I can't start the revolution with only one colony in the new Civ4Col? Does it need extra things to do?

The rebel sentiment in your advisor screen refers to your whole population, not just those in your colony. It is based on the number of liberty bells you produce per turn. You can calculate the maximum RS % for your current population as:

Bells per turn x 25 / total population

Your total population is 'All Units' minus 'No Profession' from your the Military Advisor.

Your current RS % will trend towards this maximum value over time. In most cases it is just a matter of increasing liberty bells by adding elder statesmen but with a single colony this will be more difficult.

In most cases it is just a matter of increasing liberty bells by adding elder statesmen but with a single colony this will be more difficult.
Alternatively one can disband colonists. Exploiting that I won with one colony on Revolutionary in 45 turns. I think Turinturambar did it in 34 turns with the Dutch and their speedy merchantman (and a lot of luck in the WoI). [I was following his strat, not my own.]

I built a city for each of the following:
Cigars
Rum
Cloth
Silver
Coats
Guns
Food

Seven total cities, if all commodities are present in the area. If the area lacks something then one less city.

I do not produce horses, because they are cheaper at the docks then spending the time and money building up a city just for them.

I build only one sea port on the east coast and the rest inland. I don't worry about local indian lands. Becuase I plan to massacre the closest tribe early on to build up my military points and get a leader or two.

Do you find that many resources, or do you use specialists?

Welcome to the Forums Lee1776. :beer:

Yes I do use specialist. I have been lucky to find atleast two bonus sites. But I never use more the one raw material specialist per city, one factory specialist and a factory. Gun Smiths are my only exception to this single specialist rule.

I like playing the Dutch. This allows me to flood the market with the finished product without the market colapsing to quickly.

This has worked for me to win on Revolutionary.

But I could see how setting up a one pop city on a remote raw resouce collection tile could be used to bring the raw product for manufacter in a large specialized city. But without an abandoning colony option, that make this a little more difficult.

Well, instead of abandoning a colony you can give it away. I did that with a remote silver colony.

If you would like to have more reason to raise horses and build guns and tools you might want to try the Dale/Snoopy PatchMod. Basically triples the prices of horses and tools in Europe, and jacks up the Guns to where selling them to the natives is barely profitable. In my current game the price of guns is up to 18 per and I have virtually no ore in my territory...