Indonesia discussion

Yzman said:

Trade embargo against their unique resources I would assume?

I am not sure if other civs will like that, especially if they are trading for them.

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You assume correctly. In my games that is a non-issue given that no one trades resources without a horribly imbalanced deal.

I think this belongs here

From the 4th Q&A session.

Could you elaborate on Indonesia's ability?

The first three times Indonesia founds a city on a brand new continent(where it hasn’t yet founded a city) it gets two copies of a special resource: Nutmeg, Cloves, or Pepper. This resource cannot be razed or destroyed. Indonesia has the option to trade any of these resources it wishes.


Link
http://www.2kgames.com/blog/the-civilization-v-brave-new-world-team-answers-your-questions-part-4

Indonesia seems pretty lackluster to me. A few free resources, some faith and a gimmicky swordsman.

The resources won't make them a filthy rich trader, or put them in regular golden ages. The swordsmen aren't going to win a domination victory by themselves, and the Candi relies on other civs spreading their religion as well as your city being on a river; it's a situational buff that you may not ever even see.

Compare this to someone more focused

The Zulu field larger armies, have what may be the most deadly pre-gunpowder unit in the game, and a barracks that puts their units on steroids. When it comes to war, the Zulu get things done.

The Portuguese can get many more free resources than Indonesia with their Feitoria, have potent trade routes and a Caravel that gives them free money because free money. When it comes to wealth, the Portuguese get things done.

What does Indonesia get done? Nothing in particular.

Do we know that the Candi will require a river? It may be a Garden replacement, but after all the Austrian Coffee House is a Windmill replacement that can be built on hills (or indeed anywhere).

Indonesia's UA seems very lackluster to me. They need to build cities on four different continents to gain the full power of their UA, and even then it seems a fairly meager power to me.

Can someone educate me on what constitutes as different continent?

All I could have seen from game editor is that when map is created there is a continent theme assigned for cosmetic purposes (i.e. plains on america style continent has more reddish hue). And that is not relevant when actually classifying different continents I guess?

If being seperated by water is a must then all connected landmasses counts as one continent?
(Even the 1-tile connection as in sinai or istanbul in our world?)

Also in plus maps, is every single island considered as different continent?

Katharsis said:

Can someone educate me on what constitutes as different continent?

All I could have seen from game editor is that when map is created there is a continent theme assigned for cosmetic purposes (i.e. plains on america style continent has more reddish hue). And that is not relevant when actually classifying different continents I guess?

If being seperated by water is a must then all connected landmasses counts as one continent?
(Even the 1-tile connection as in sinai or istanbul in our world?)

Also in plus maps, is every single island considered as different continent?

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If the ability of Spain's conquistador to settle new continents is taken as a benchmark, then continents have to be separated by water, and yes, every single island counts as a continent.

I guess it means any landmass, not a "continent" as we define it. Anyone know for sure?

blackcatatonic said:

Do we know that the Candi will require a river? It may be a Garden replacement, but after all the Austrian Coffee House is a Windmill replacement that can be built on hills (or indeed anywhere).

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Yes, it was in the same demo of indonesia that showed of the kris upgrades i think. Candi will require fresh water.

VainoValkea said:

I guess it means any landmass, not a "continent" as we define it. Anyone know for sure?

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I don't see how or why a UA could differentiate landmasses by size instead of simply separation. You can have as small an island as you like an the UA will still work, you'll just end up with a useless city that can't be razed as a trade off

Im pretty sure its only 3 continents. The new QA says when a city is founded on a continent that you have not founded a city yet. It makes no sense that the first one would not be included in that since its your first city. Also, why would they exclude the capital city from being part of the established civs identity?

True_Candyman said:

I don't see how or why a UA could differentiate landmasses by size instead of simply separation. You can have as small an island as you like an the UA will still work, you'll just end up with a useless city that can't be razed as a trade off

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There could be a worldgen time separation of continents that assigns one or more close landmasses to a single continent. Alternatively, coast tiles only wouldn't count as "ocean" for separation purposes.

The Q&A muddies the issue rather than clarifying it. The Indonesian ability as we've already seen it explicitly says that the first three cities "founded on continents other than where Indonesia started" get the resources. This would mean that Jakarta doesn't get a unique resource, but that the three cities that do can be on the same continent as each other, but not as Jakarta. The Q&A says it's the first three cities on any continent where it hasn't already founded one, which may or may not imply Jakarta gets one, and means you need three separate continents (or four, if Jakarta doesn't count) to get all the resources. Either the answer in the Q&A is worded badly, or they decided after releasing the Indonesia reveal that the ability was OP and decided to scale it back.

As far as I know, the game defines "separate continent" as "you can't walk from this tile to that one without embarking", regardless of art style, size of landmass, or proximity to another landmass. So small islands would count, but another huge landmass connected by a narrow isthmus would not. In real-world terms, they could start at Jakarta (on Java), place a city on the Malay Peninsula to get a resource, but--according to the Q&A, at least--could not get another resource by putting a city in France, because it's on the same continent as the Malay Peninsula. But they could get another one by hopping the Channel and putting a city in Britain, because it's separate. I believe that is how the game judges "continent".

So if there's a lot of islands on the map, the UA will still be a good one. A map with just a couple of large landmasses will be a lot less useful. It would be nice if they'd revise the Continents map script to include more islands--I've thought for a long time that those maps needed more small islands--but I'm not holding my breath for that. I'm starting to wonder what percentage of games including Indonesia will even see all three resources appear, outside Archipelago maps.

I agree with the sentiment about Indonesia's UA. It's the most restrictive of all UA's. According to the description, it does nothing on Pangea maps. Not even the Ottoman UA is that restricted. Even maps other than Pangea don't always have four continents.

I hope it will be changed to give 1 copy of the special resource if the city is on the same continent, and 2 if it's on a different one.

Hopefully its counting the capital and it will be a total of 3 cities on 3 landmasses. I for one prefer playing with 3 cities and only expand up to 4+ if im playing a war civ.

VainoValkea said:

Indonesia's UA seems very lackluster to me. They need to build cities on four different continents to gain the full power of their UA, and even then it seems a fairly meager power to me.

Click to expand...

I agree that it's kind of situational, but seem to me that it will be awesome for REXing up to 3-4 cities (you just need to get the "boat" techs first). Isn't the goal for early expansion to get a resources under every city?

VainApocalypse said:

Indonesia seems pretty lackluster to me. A few free resources, some faith and a gimmicky swordsman.

The resources won't make them a filthy rich trader, or put them in regular golden ages. The swordsmen aren't going to win a domination victory by themselves, and the Candi relies on other civs spreading their religion as well as your city being on a river; it's a situational buff that you may not ever even see.

Compare this to someone more focused

The Zulu field larger armies, have what may be the most deadly pre-gunpowder unit in the game, and a barracks that puts their units on steroids. When it comes to war, the Zulu get things done.

The Portuguese can get many more free resources than Indonesia with their Feitoria, have potent trade routes and a Caravel that gives them free money because free money. When it comes to wealth, the Portuguese get things done.

What does Indonesia get done? Nothing in particular.

Click to expand...

Well I think that is the point, it is a rather cunningly disguised generalist civ. From the resources we get, as you say a little happiness and some to trade. Probably more important than direct trading of resources is the resource diversity for international trade routes that this guarantees. Then a little faith here, a few fancily promoted units there and you have a whole lot of little bonuses to help you compete on any victory track. Nothing earth-shattering, and certainly more useful on some maps than others, but nothing contemptible either.

Hans Castorp said:

Well I think that is the point, it is a rather cunningly disguised generalist civ. From the resources we get, as you say a little happiness and some to trade. Probably more important than direct trading of resources is the resource diversity for international trade routes that this guarantees. Then a little faith here, a few fancily promoted units there and you have a whole lot of little bonuses to help you compete on any victory track. Nothing earth-shattering, and certainly more useful on some maps than others, but nothing contemptible either.

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This is how I see it as well. With some carefully picked city-sites Indonesia could dominate.

1) UA: Obviously, this isn't intended to benefit your first several cities. It doesn't really kick in until you find some off-shore sites to colonize. But once you find the right spots, you get a few happiness, maybe a city-state quest completion, and a thing to swap with the AI. Additionally, it will modify the value of any Trade Routes coming into or out of the cities that have them.

2) UB: We know that religious pressure moves back and forth on Trade Routes. So, if you use a city with a Kandi (and hopefully a unique luxury) as a trade hub, you will have a diversity of religions present in that city, thereby maximizing Faith output. Indonesia can leverage the high Faith output into Holy Warriors, any of the Faith buildings, or save it up for buying post-Industrial Great People. The Reformation Beliefs also hold some interesting potential for synergy with the Kandi.

3) UU: While the unique promotions are a bit random, and the Swordsman itself is a technological backwater, it wouldn't hurt to pump these guys out, get the fancy promotions and sit on them till you have fancy Musketmen. Mold your tactics to fit the promotions that your units have. It's like having multiple Unique Units that replace the Swordsman.

SammyKhalifa said:

I agree that it's kind of situational, but seem to me that it will be awesome for REXing up to 3-4 cities (you just need to get the "boat" techs first). Isn't the goal for early expansion to get a resources under every city?

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Yeah, and don't forget an extra resource at Indonesian cities will attract more trade routes from other civs, which benefits Indonesia as well.

I think other than archipelago, the best map for indonesia would be continents plus with city state placement edited out of the XML. that map script gives really good island chains that are worth settling.

Yig said:

Im pretty sure its only 3 continents. The new QA says when a city is founded on a continent that you have not founded a city yet. It makes no sense that the first one would not be included in that since its your first city. Also, why would they exclude the capital city from being part of the established civs identity?

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the Q&A response was meant to clarify what is written in the game, not modify the game rules. there is a contradiction between what is written in the game and the Q&A, but i think it's much more likely that the developer responding to the Q&A made the (fairly subtle) mistake. the Q&A response is probably something that was written in 30 seconds or so and probably received no content editing, whereas i'd hope the in-game text would receive a lot of content editing.

so i think "continents other than where Indonesia started" is more likely (but not definitely) correct.

Zet said:

I agree with the sentiment about Indonesia's UA. It's the most restrictive of all UA's. According to the description, it does nothing on Pangea maps. Not even the Ottoman UA is that restricted. Even maps other than Pangea don't always have four continents.

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i don't see how this is such a big deal. a lot of the civs' UAs can end up being useless or nearly useless in certain cases, say if you don't start near the relevant terrain. indonesia also has the issue of not being useful on a pure pangea (or an all land) map, but that's something you can control before the game starts. isn't that a much better than not realizing your UA is useless until playing the game for a bunch of turns?