Why is real world colonization a bad idea in CiV?

1) Unique (per continent) luxuries

I think there should be luxury resources that are limited to a single continent, or are VERY scarce in the others. Maybe instead of "Spices" we could have "Pepper", "Cacao", "Coffee" and "Tea", each limited to one continent only (or something along the lines).

This is a good idea and probably easy to do. Civ V map generator marks different continents/islands as Europe, Asia, America and Africa, resulting in a different look in all of the continents/islands. Such as America has orange/red forests IIRC.

This feature could be extended to have different resources only be placed in their appropriate continents/islands, such as Tea could be found only in Asia and Tobacco and Cacao only in America.
 
This one of the best ideas I`ve seen in a long time. Maybe it could be an expansion on its own? To implement this they should really work through the game mechanics to make new features like
- migration and immigration
- intercontinental trade system
- region specific reources
- colonization of existing population in the new world
- range system for ships - makes it important to have ports all over the world like the British Empire had
- civil wars, colonila wars and wars of independence
- different forms of goverment at home and in the colonies

This could be really nice.

Thanks for the compliment. I like your idea of the range system for ships. Actually this could apply to land units as well (simulating the supply lines) - it would also make warmongering more sensible.
 
There is alot of world maps around, that ppl have created. I am sure they have took into account where resources originate from. EG Cotton - North America, Spices - South America. and so on.
 
Rare earth metals later in the game other than aluminum would help with this too. Think about more raw materials that have become super important. Rubber is another one missing from this game.

You've given me an idea.

Rubber should be only found in jungles, and should be cleared when the jungle is cleared. Therefore, it will be extremely hard to find existing rubber on mainland continents by the end of the game. Remove the rubber necessity in units once plastics is discovered to not break the game on Pangaea and to simulate the end of the colonial/imperial era.
 
You've given me an idea.

Rubber should be only found in jungles, and should be cleared when the jungle is cleared. Therefore, it will be extremely hard to find existing rubber on mainland continents by the end of the game. Remove the rubber necessity in units once plastics is discovered to not break the game on Pangaea and to simulate the end of the colonial/imperial era.

I like this! Maybe we should create a Colonization mod? :)
 
Maybe it's just that none of the maps really support colonization well. If you have civilizations starting on every land mass at the same time and have to wait until astronomy to get to another continent, then all the territory is going to be occupied by civs at your technological level by the time you get there.

Suppose there were a "continents-like" map that had two larger continents (with half the AI civs starting on each one, along with most of the CS) and two slightly smaller continents (with only barbarians and maybe a few CS). If you combined this with luxuries that were unique to each continent, then there would be a better chance of having some place that you'd actually want to plant colonies.

I actually had one game on a small map of "Continents" that had 2 large landmasses and a smaller one in the middle. The civilizations shared the 2 bigger landmasses, while the central landmass was inhabited by only a few city-states. The AI (and me) colonized it due to strategic reasons. I had a Persian Domination Victory on that map because I launched a naval invasion on the second large continent from both sides. Colonization was indeed very useful.
 
I think Civ5 manages to do real-world colonization pretty well, actually. You just have to get your tech level about one era above everyone on another continent, sail over, kill them off, raze their cities, then you have plenty of space to colonize.

I mean...those vast, resource-rich and completely unoccupied continents everyone's talking about never actually existed, you guys know that?
 
I think Civ5 manages to do real-world colonization pretty well, actually. You just have to get your tech level about one era above everyone on another continent, sail over, kill them off, raze their cities, then you have plenty of space to colonize.

I mean...those vast, resource-rich and completely unoccupied continents everyone's talking about never actually existed, you guys know that?
Many of those continents may as well have been unoccupied though, given how low the population density was; i.e. they'd be better represented in CiV by empty land rather than by land belonging to a civ.
 
Many of those continents may as well have been unoccupied though, given how low the population density was; i.e. they'd be better represented in CiV by empty land rather than by land belonging to a civ.

Or at least land that might have other civs' cities around it but remains somewhat uncontrolled would make more sense. It's a conceit of the game that civilizations require cities, so maybe if there was some incentive for the AI not to go spamming them every four spaces, it would work.

As for resources, there already are biomes, and those of a given type do tend to cluster (luxuries more than strategic). Maybe if it were a little harder to trade between civs on opposite sides of an ocean, where you can't send your entire empire's worth of steel to the other side of the globe based on the vague notion that you maybe saw a French guy once, plus either less-packed cities or the chance of stealing some land when you found your own, there would be more reason to colonize in order to get them.

I just think that in a game where civilization = giant cities, it's correct to say that the land belonging to the Inca, the Aztec, the Iroquois, Songhai, etc. should just be empty space with a smattering of barbarians.

I mean, I guess you could dial it back and say the same thing of England, Germany, Spain, and so on.

What if you could set a game where you get three categories of AI opponents? Say you have the human players, the AI civilizations, but then a gaggle of AI "civs" who have all the same stuff as the ones you aren't using in the game, but have some kind of handicap that makes them lag behind in tech, border growth and city construction? If those clustered together, you might have a better "colonization" scenario, where you do have to take some land from people who are already there, but you aren't hitting a Wall Of Danes as soon as you cross the sea?
 
True, colonial empires (barring Terra-like maps and "conquered my continent already, time for conquering more" situations) are rarely seen in Civ. Not sure what can be done to remedy this, however.

I mean...those vast, resource-rich and completely unoccupied continents everyone's talking about never actually existed, you guys know that?
By "colonization" I don't mean necessarily "settlement" - West Africa, for example, was a French colony, but barring Algiers, it didn't see much settlement.

then a gaggle of AI "civs" who have all the same stuff as the ones you aren't using in the game, but have some kind of handicap that makes them lag behind in tech, border growth and city construction?
Dunno about city construction (see above) but something like this - a continent of deliberately handicapped civs, combined with better naval invasion AI (a hard task, I know) would solve the problem. However, I'm not sure of gameplay value of such a system.
 
Top Bottom