Love the original, but this game has issues

colonization

Chieftain
Joined
Apr 6, 2012
Messages
42
Hello. I made this act just to post this msg.

I'm a big fan of the original colonization, but well, let's face it - it's a dated game. I recently got my hands on this remake and really loved it at first - it's colonization with a CIV 4 interface (I love civ 4 too).

Then I tried to win. I did what I remember doing in the original colonization, just being really expansion-oriented, grow grow grow, funnel everything to the factory city, and once the food and economy were up and running, start spam-training statesmen. That's when I found out that this remake has some serious issues.

Now, I've won this game before, but not until facing some strange scenarios, like 400 regulars that were part of the REF that never showed up AFTER 100 TURNS OF REVOLUTION WAITING FOR IT. Because they never showed, because they were chicken and DID NOT TAKE A SINGLE ONE OF MY COLONIES, INDEED I DID NOT EVEN LOSE ONE SOLDIER AFTER KILLING THEIR ENTIRE INITIAL LANDING PARTY, I lost.

Or, like getting hit with a tax hike EVERY OTHER TURN, AT TURN 30. This using the Dutchman that doubled the wait time between tax hikes.

Or, like building a schoolhouse in a new settlement to train statesmen away from the university, only to find out that the first colonist to be trained there had to wait over 100 turns to graduate...this in a game that spans less than 300 turns.

Or, like building 5-10 universities to train enough statesmen, only to find out that the king's taxes were so prohibitive that the 500 gold to train each of these statesmen was sucking up your entire 15-city, 4-galleon economy.


I understand that they built in some new scaling to make the game a bit less formulaic than the original colonization...however, I really think they goofed up the scaling. After all, if you want the game to scale slower or faster, that's what the various difficulty levels are for, no? The way this game is designed, it highly discourages an expansive strategy of any sort, since it makes you have to train a ton of statesmen to get the % to revolution up...except you can't, because there are only a certain number of specialists maximum you can ever train in your universities NO MATTER HOW MANY YOU BUILD. And, why would you ever build more than one university in this remake? And, why is there a FF that gives you bonuses for extra universities when all of those extra universities are wholly useless?

Then there's the issue with taxes, which no one seems capable of explaining. I always play with the Dutchman that doubles the wait time between tax hikes, yet still ended up with a 70-80% tax rate before revolution when I won the game. I then got the bright idea to begin tool parties and fur parties very early in the game, which led to the scenario where I was faced with a tax hike EVERY OTHER TURN. I kid you not, by turn 35, I had 6 products boycotted, two tax increases that I caved into, and 4-5 attempts at extortion (I only agreed to the small ones). Why even bother with including that option, if that option leads to something far worse than just agreeing to a 40% tax mid-game?



Then there's the whole REF fiasco. On a certain level it makes a lot of sense. The monarchs are going to tax you because you are nothing but cattle to them. Once you get the idea into your head that you may be able to chart your own destiny (liberty bells) then they get antsy and raise an army to fight you. Even the concept of fast sentiment rate (i.e. surprise buttsex with your hidden statesmen) makes a lot of sense, as it gives the monarchs less time to prepare their army once your true intentions are revealed.

However, there is a massive flaw in how this game executes this concept.

1) The idea is to train a lot of statesmen late-game and quickly on the back of your thriving economy and farm towns, and use them only when you are ready to revolt. However, because of the abysmal school-system dynamic, this forces you to either not use your school system for anything other than statesmen, or buy these statesmen late game. Even if you start early, say before turn 50, training these statesmen, you will not have enough time to train more than 10-15 (if you're lucky). Then you need time for these guys to go to work.

2) Or, you can buy them outright en masse, but this reveals another flaw in the game. A thriving economy requires robust trade, primarily with Europe. However, robust trade primarily with Europe seems to be the leading cause of tax increases. Refusing the king's demands accelerate the rate of his demands, which either leads to all goods being boycotted, or an exhorbitant tax rate once you trade enough with Europe. There is probably a maximal dollar amount that you can ever trade with Europe before the tax increases become prohibitive. This means that at a certain stage of the game, buying statesmen will be competing with buying military gear. You can make the gear at home, but the more effort you devote to this, the more statesmen you will need to "revolutionize" all of those extra blacksmiths and gunmen, as well as all of those extra farmers needed to support them. And we have already discussed possible ceilings between education and economy that may prevent you from getting enough statesmen, especially if you went hog wild on the economy.

3) Trading with the natives may solve this problem, but there is a definite ceiling on how much you can trade with them, in that even if you want to just dump 8 loads of tools on them, they may not even have the money to pay 100 gold for it.



SOLUTIONS TO THESE BIZARRE PROBLEMS

1) The school system

I liked how they made it progressively harder to train additional colonists in a school. This makes sense to prevent abuse in building 10 farming colonies to feed that one university cranking out statesmen (even though this is how it works in real life).

However, where they went wrong was to make this progression global. Basically, even if you went to the trouble of building universities in all of those 10 farming colonies, you would still get slapped with the time it takes to train the Xth colonist, even if it was the first one to be trained in the new university.

This concept is familiar to me because it is almost exactly the same as how the "great people" worked in civ 4. However, this isn't civ 4. You can win civ 4 without paying great heed to great people, but you absolutely need to use the school system to train statesmen in colonization. If instead you devoted early game to training farmers and fishermen in your schools, thinking that your future colleges and universities would be enough to overcome the scaling late game to train statesmen, tough luck. You can build 20 universities using all of those colonists that you trained as farmers, fishermen, lumberjacks and carpenters that trained in the schools that were replaced by the universities they built, only to find that 19 of those 20 universities are wholly useless.

What this means is that all of those farmers, fishermen, lumberjacks and carpenters that you spent so much time growing and feeding are now costing you the game. You must kill them off. Yes, the only way to win a game of colonization is to kill off all of the colonists that you worked so hard to raise. The fewer the better. Just keep enough on hand that can be swayed by the 15-20 statesmen maximum that you were able to buy/train. The rest are not only useless, they are the reason you are losing. THEY ARE YOUR WORST ENEMY.

The solution to this problem would be to make each school scale, i.e. not make it global. This would mean that you would be given incentive to build new schools in all of your new colonies, spend the time and lumber to build them up to colleges and universities, and then ship specialists over there to get them to mentor new colonists. Then, get enough statesmen in each of these colonies to sway them to revolution. In fact, there are a lot of FFs that help this process, like de Tocqueville and the other FF that gives you free schools in your colonies. This seems to be how the game is supposed to work. Instead, you are faced with the scenario where you build a new school, wanting to train a fishermen there, only to find out that it will take 75 turns to do so, because you have trained so many other fishermen, carpenters, and statesmen in all of those other schools in other cities that have nothing to do with this one.

2) The economy

This doesn't need a fix IMHO, as long as they fix the school system. The king is out to get you, so of course he will raise an army if he thinks you're going to declare independence. However, it would be nice to have other options besides the king for your economy, say an option where you sell all of those coats and cigars to your own people at a huge discount - hey, it's better than having all of that rotting in your warehouses. Put in an option where your own people will pay 25% of what market rates are charging in Europe. This will allow your economy to function if it is big enough, if it is robust enough, and if Europe is being snobby enough. In the original colonization, there were work-arounds for European boycotts, but in this remake EUROPE IS EVERYTHING, and they WILL SHUT YOU DOWN. Even the warehouse extensions are subject to the atrocious boycotts/taxes, and this after their inherent 50% discount.

There are some nice parallels with real life here. China is essentially doing what the colonists are doing in this game. They are doing all the work, making all that stuff that we buy, and we hate them for it, and we want them to "pay their fair share". (my major was east asian economics) They can't buy their own stuff because they can't afford to do so. Their only option is to dump what they make on us at any price, as long as we buy it. This price tends to by abysmally low. This is essentially a gigantic tax on their labor, like the king's tax on the colonists. The moral of this story is that there are no easy answers. Because of this, I think the economy in this game is working just fine, in that it is just as bad as real life. However, the school system sucks. Fix the schools. End of story.
 
Nope. :D I have no idea how they work.

Then I guess, you should give them a try. :)
You won't regret it. :thumbsup:

I suggest TAC for a start.
(And if you like TAC you should definitely also try Religion and Revolution once we release it.)

Trust me, you will never want to play Colonization without a mod again. :D
 
You miss the point. This remake shouldn't need mods to work properly. There was a good game that needed graphical updates, why f it up? I've gone back to original and never looked back.
 
Then I guess, you should give them a try. :)
You won't regret it. :thumbsup:

I suggest TAC for a start.
(And if you like TAC you should definitely also try Religion and Revolution once we release it.)

Trust me, you will never want to play Colonization without a mod again. :D

Ok, thanks for the link. I like most of the ideas you guys incorporated into your mod. It sounds like a great concept.

However, I speak english. I'm not German. Your english mod is not complete it seems:

"We are working to translate TAC in English, but we haven’t translated TAC completely yet. The current version TAC 2.02d_inofficial is playable in English. But the English texts of the ingame library aren't complete, and a translation of our manual doesn't exist yet. We hope that we will present an almost completely translated in 2012."
 
First question - have you patched the game? The education system in the original release was seriously flawed but it was fixed in the patch and now works fine. Each colony now operates it's own schools independantly. I build a school on every colony and two or three colleges and universities overall.

The tax system still has some issues however. If you turn down a tax increase you will get hit with another immediately so you really have to accept every raise (in the original game of colonization I was able to play the entire game with zero tax by manipulating boycotts, but it is not possible here). However as your taxes go up so does your production so for most of the game you can still earn good coin by trading with Europe. And of course trading with the natives is tax free. There are up to eight tribes depending on map size and each has their own treasury to draw on.

The Kings demands are optional though. If you want to stay on good terms with him by all means give in to his exhorbitant demands. It may mean you can buy cheap military units from him but it has no other effect.

Yes the REF gets larger if you are producing a lot of liberty bells, but if you prepare well they are only cannon-fodder. In my last game I faced a 560 strong REF at Revolutionary level and only lost 16 units defeating them.
 
Then there's the issue with taxes, which no one seems capable of explaining. I always play with the Dutchman that doubles the wait time between tax hikes, yet still ended up with a 70-80% tax rate before revolution when I won the game. I then got the bright idea to begin tool parties and fur parties very early in the game, which led to the scenario where I was faced with a tax hike EVERY OTHER TURN. I kid you not, by turn 35, I had 6 products boycotted, two tax increases that I caved into, and 4-5 attempts at extortion (I only agreed to the small ones). Why even bother with including that option, if that option leads to something far worse than just agreeing to a 40% tax mid-game?

...why do you treat your king so miserably by turn 35? What's the big deal about an early 1% or 2% tax?

As far as his "extortion" attempts go, you could mitigate some of this by actively trading with your neighbors. Having a big, fat treasury that just keeps growing (in my opinion) is just begging for the king to come along and take a piece. Solution: tie it up in commodities. Make purchases from the natives. If you want to curry favor with them, give them more than they ask for. Make the gold seem to disappear, and then when you're ready send full shipments (versus partial) to Europe and time your manufactured goods trades with natives to end on the same turn and HOCUS POCUS! There's your gold again, and the King doesn't have the time to react before you make the big purchase from Europe you wanted, the strategic land buy from the natives, or whatever it was you were saving for.

As far as having a fur, tobacco, ore etc. party goes, I wouldn't make that decision lightly. That's something I might consider once my expansion / development plan was pretty much set, and I knew that I could process the raw materials / create manufactured goods, as well as store / sell either of them efficiently enough that it would be wasteful to bother sending them back to Europe.
 
dalgo,

Thanks for the info. I'll have to patch the game up then. That was my biggest glaring gripe with the game, the schools. Totally agree with you on the boycotts and taxes.

I also ran into the problem of the REF simply not attacking. They would wait until they spotted some sort of weakness. This meant that if you were TOO well prepared, you would lose. Ridiculous.

The way I ended up winning was by abandoning my capital, letting the REF sack it, retake it, abandon it again, REF resack, I retake, etc etc until they died. Stupid.



yturk39,

The idea was that if tax demands were set on some sort of random timer (implied by the dutchman's specialty, increasing the length of that timer), then refusing the early 1-2% increases by sacrificing trade with useless commodities like food and lumber would mean that at midgame, you would have 25-30% taxes instead of 35-40%. That's a big difference, especially if the only cost is that you can't trade food, ore and lumber with europe.

But, the game simply doesn't work that way. The moment you refuse the king's tax demands, he then decides to demand for more tax every other turn. It's ridiculously stupid to include that option if you simply cannot take it. Shouldn't the king's anger already be sated by boycott?


Anyway, even though I've been able to win, the way in which I had to go about it was not very satisfying. The demands of the game are too rigid and do not leave much, if any, room for non-linearity - that is a far cry from the original colonization and even further from civ 4. I'll probably not be playing this in the near future and will probably just stick to civ 4.
 
In fact they may have overcompensated for the original education system problems. Now I find it easy to train 50+ veteran soldiers as well as all the statesman I can use before Independence.

I must admit I have never run into that problem of the REF not attacking, either before or after the patch, although I have seen it posted before. Maybe it's a function of the difficulty level? Perhaps they've dumbed down the AI too much at lower levels. In all my games the REF lands continuous waves of attackers on my beaches every turn. Plenty of targets for my vet dragoons. :)

I think that tax problem is almost certainly a bug. As you say, the boycott option should allow for the same time interval as accepting the tax rise but it doesn't work that way. I just automatically accept every tax rise, it's a minor part of the game and I always have enough cash on hand to do what I want anyway.

I have never played Civ IV but still play Civ III regularly. How would you compare the two games?
 
In fact they may have overcompensated for the original education system problems. Now I find it easy to train 50+ veteran soldiers as well as all the statesman I can use before Independence.

I must admit I have never run into that problem of the REF not attacking, either before or after the patch, although I have seen it posted before. Maybe it's a function of the difficulty level? Perhaps they've dumbed down the AI too much at lower levels. In all my games the REF lands continuous waves of attackers on my beaches every turn. Plenty of targets for my vet dragoons. :)

I think that tax problem is almost certainly a bug. As you say, the boycott option should allow for the same time interval as accepting the tax rise but it doesn't work that way. I just automatically accept every tax rise, it's a minor part of the game and I always have enough cash on hand to do what I want anyway.

I have never played Civ IV but still play Civ III regularly. How would you compare the two games?

To me, Civ 3 was a much needed improvement over Civ 2, which I disliked because it was more a remake of civ 1 than any stand-alone product. Civ 4 vastly improved upon Civ 3.

Civ 3 is still generally rather linear, like the original civ. Just expand, expand expand, pack those cities in, build and build, and conquer. Civ 4 introduces several factors that limit this kind of single-minded behavior. (I've played the expansions, but I find vanilla to be better)

First of all, maintenance was greatly improved. Now you are heavily penalized for over-expansion (it is no longer just distance, but also number of cities and civics maintenance), unless you choose a civilization that can specifically compensate for it (organized civ leaders like Caesar or Mao). This makes it so you have to think hard about every city you place, and whether or not you choose to war indefinitely for more cities that you may not be able to handle.

Second, there are various city strategies. There's the commerce/cottage hub, which is generally spammable, the one "great person" hub, which has only farms and mines (more farms than mines), and the production hubs, which have more mines than the great person hub. Finally there are resource hubs (like dyes, silk, and gold), which are extremely important in Civ 4 (don't recall how important they were in Civ 3). Note that ALL CITIES are hubs in Civ 4...every city is very important. There is no incentive to just city spam for the free central tile. This makes it so you have to plan your civilization very carefully.

Third, religion is a highly prized commodity. Religious centers have the potential to be gigantic cash cows (I usually build the Wall Street wonder on my state religion center). They also give various bonuses with the right civics, along with happiness bonuses (innate +1, and temples - you need religion to benefit from temples, makes sense, right?).

Fourth, the border concept was greatly improved. Well-developed cities will also radiate culture, which can be used as a weapon in certain situations. This actually works quite well in colonization too from my own experiences, especially against the first natives you encounter.

Fifth, the great person concept is integrated into every aspect of the game. They are needed to build the religious shrine for the $$$ in your religious center, academies for more science, instant wonders for those key wonders, and instant "lightbulb" for instant tech. There's also the "Marco Polo" type option where you can send a "great merchant" to get a huge one-time inflow of $$$. There's also the "culture bomb" in the "great artist".

Sixth, the civics concept, while taking some time to get used to, was exceptionally well-thought-out. I can see nearly every civic fitting a certain strategy. There are some suited for war, some suited for peace, some suited for technology, some suited for commerce. You can mix and match to get whatever your situation requires. Maintenance is also a central concept for civics, which means that you will need a very robust economy to support certain civics. Once you play the game, you will see how certain civics fit the time period very well. You are also not flooded with civics early on...most of them require a lot of tech. This gives you time to adjust to the concept.

Seventh, pollution was phased out for "healthiness". Health is just like happiness, in that you need buildings or resources to maximize health and thus the size of your cities. For example, instead of the aqueduct just increasing your max city size, it now gives you +health, which is much more adaptable to various strategies. A metropolis no longer needs an aqueduct, if it already has access to a large amount of health resources (deer, corn, fish, etc), and buildings like grocers and harbors. Hospitals and genetics also greatly increase health and thus city size, if your cities were limited by unhealthiness. Factories, coal plants and proximity to jungles, among other things contribute to unhealthiness.

Eighth, the combat promotion concept is exceptional. In colonization you only get a (very) small taste of what is offered in Civ 4. It may seem clunky and incomplete in colonization, but in civ 4, the promotion system heavily influences how you wage war.

As you can see, I can go on. They took risks and added a slew of new concepts and totally renovated the franchise. I don't know how civ 5 is like, but civ 4 is a very large departure from civ 3, much more so than civ 3 was to civ 2, or civ 2 was to civ 1. It's still civ, but much more complex than the original. Much of the complexity aims to enhance the realism of the original game without making it into a gigantic math equation. I think they largely succeeded - it feels a lot more "organic" than previous civ versions.



Oh, and regarding taxes on colonization, I ran into the problem where I would get upwards of 70-80% tax before turn 200 because I was trading THAT much with Europe. I literally ran into the problem where I could not afford enough statesmen because of the tax rate - even the home-schooling option became cost-prohibitive. This while using the dutchman that doubled the period between tax increases. A galleon full of manufactured goods netted around 1500 gold max, meaning that I could barely afford to purchase a statesman from Europe with this kind of trade, and only if I got Minuet early - in this attempt I estimated I needed at least 20 more statesmen than what I currently had because my cities were simply that big. Then I had to wonder about how to militarize...if I bought weapons from Europe, I didn't have the cash to do both guns and statesmen, and if I did it myself, I had to double statesmen production, which I already had trouble affording. All because I over-expanded...something the game simply does not tell you not to do. It also seems to run counter to the entire concept of "colonization". You are severely penalized for being too successful with your economy in this game, and unlike the original colonization, there is simply no effective work-around this problem. The only solution I've been able to come up with is to train nothing but statesmen (and maybe 2-3 preachers) in my schools, and after buying up enough workers to fuel my economy, then just buy more statesmen with any spare coin I earned. If I deviated from this prioritization I would lose. If I trained anything other than this bare minimum of 2-3 preachers, then I would run the risk of not having enough statesmen. If I kept farming cities up and running, I ran the risk of having a colony so big, that did so much trade with Europe (and thus jacked up taxes to an obscene degree) that I would not be able to keep training/buying statesmen at a rate necessary to win the game.
 
Thank you for that description of Civ IV, sounds like an entirely different game. I may well try it now. You say the vanilla version is OK without any expansions?

One thing to know with the Col tax system is that tax increases are triggered by the volume of goods traded, not the value. So avoid buying cheap goods such as tools in Europe when you can easily make your own, and sell manufactured products there rather than raw materials. Also use your own goods for trading with the natives rather than buying them in Europe. I always make it a priority to develop the manufacture of tools and guns early so I don't have to buy them.
 
dalgo,
yturk39,

The idea was that if tax demands were set on some sort of random timer (implied by the dutchman's specialty, increasing the length of that timer), then refusing the early 1-2% increases by sacrificing trade with useless commodities like food and lumber would mean that at midgame, you would have 25-30% taxes instead of 35-40%. That's a big difference, especially if the only cost is that you can't trade food, ore and lumber with europe.

But, the game simply doesn't work that way. The moment you refuse the king's tax demands, he then decides to demand for more tax every other turn. It's ridiculously stupid to include that option if you simply cannot take it. Shouldn't the king's anger already be sated by boycott?

I don't think it IS a random "timer" that determines tax rate. I think it's more of a BS tolerance the king will take before he decides to hike your taxes. Assume all kings put up with an equal amount; Van Der Donck's bonus would be that he could get away with twice as much BS before the kind got tired of it and pushed for higher taxes.

The king isn't entirely blind to what is happening in your colonies.

1) He can see your map's topography (but not resources). This is evidenced by the comments he makes, at times, when you attempt to settle somewhere he wasn't expecting.

2) By extension, he can see when you have encountered other tribes or colonists (this being shown on your map), and by growing (or receding) borders whether or not you've been taking over (or losing) land to your rivals.

3) He can (kind of) get an idea which resources you can obtain more easily than others by what you trade back to Europe, and which specialists you express a preference for through either purchase or prioritized transportation.

Etc., etc.

The point being, the king's demands, how they're worded, and when they occur sometimes provide important clues as to where his blind spots are (some other times, believe it or not, they're actually hints to HELP you). If you openly behave with hostility toward your king at the very beginning of the game (versus gradually) it makes all the sense in the world that he would retaliate and do the same to you via taxes, assuming he believed he could get away with it.
 
Thank you for that description of Civ IV, sounds like an entirely different game. I may well try it now. You say the vanilla version is OK without any expansions?

One thing to know with the Col tax system is that tax increases are triggered by the volume of goods traded, not the value. So avoid buying cheap goods such as tools in Europe when you can easily make your own, and sell manufactured products there rather than raw materials. Also use your own goods for trading with the natives rather than buying them in Europe. I always make it a priority to develop the manufacture of tools and guns early so I don't have to buy them.

Yeah, I think a lot of people on this forum seem to agree that the vanilla is good enough, and that the expansions add a lot more complexity without necessarily making it a better game. Personally, I've played it forever and still feel like I just scratched the surface of the game. It's amazing how you can pick a different leader, and really feel like you are playing with a completely different set of cards. For example, I like Washington, who favors economy mixed with controlled aggression (financial, organized). I usually build a lot of commerce cities along with an early production site as well to kill my nearest opponent early. He begins with early access to bronze working, a key military tech.

This kind of strategy would be wholly unsuited for Gandhi, who is much more suited towards a pacifistic approach. He begins with early tech access to several religions, meaning that his play style is much more suited towards spreading religion. While it is still possible to early conquer with Gandhi, his starting techs mean that at higher difficulty levels, and without Washington's financial advantage, he will be harder pressed to research and exploit the key early military techs. Also, Gandhi's industrious trait prioritizes diverting production away from military usage to wonder building. A lot of early game wonders are game-breaking, and Washington has a very difficult time in exploiting the power of early wonders. Gandhi on the other hand is almost perfectly suited to build them, along with getting a lot of the key early religions. It would be a waste to divert that production from cheap wonder-building to military production, at least for Gandhi. That's just two examples.

I know the expansions did do a good job in fixing some balance issues...cavalry and Caesar's Praetorian are ridiculously strong in vanilla civ. However, along with the balance fixes they added a LOT of additional content and completely reworked a lot of the leaders, many of whom required completely different playstyles from vanilla. Vanilla civ 4 was already enough for me to enjoy (I think I've tapped maybe 10% of the potential of that game, and I can beat it on emperor on huge), and leaders like Washington are just not the same anymore in the expansions.


Regarding colonization, I think I've gotten down a really good system in developing trade very early. It's extremely effective with the Dutch, where after you sell your 50 guns initially you can continually fill your merchantman with dragooned colonists to trade with the natives and get a galleon by turn 20 or so. You also speed up city development immensely by packing your cities twice as fast than with any other country, and getting the early galleon allows you to use the merchantman to speed up exploration. If I get carpenters early, I can gun straight for factories before turn 50, and have enough labor to feed it. The early trade and exploration means I can buy a preacher and statesman outright very early if they weren't already on the docks - getting the FF's are generally pretty easy.

What this means is that I tend to use an extremely trade-heavy strategy and almost totally ignore the other euro powers. This seems to really jack up my tax rate to obscene levels early in the game no matter what I do. I'm playing on a low difficulty level too, so if I'm getting 50% taxes by turn 150, then I'm wondering how high they would be on revolutionary. Still, from what I've read here, it seems that difficulty levels affect diplomacy a lot, and make the markets a lot more sensitive, much like how it worked in col1 - it seems to leave taxes alone. If that's the case, then my strat should work on revolutionary too.

Imma try it some more on the harder difficulty levels and see if I can write up a strategy later.
 
Spoiler :
I don't think it IS a random "timer" that determines tax rate. I think it's more of a BS tolerance the king will take before he decides to hike your taxes. Assume all kings put up with an equal amount; Van Der Donck's bonus would be that he could get away with twice as much BS before the kind got tired of it and pushed for higher taxes.

The king isn't entirely blind to what is happening in your colonies.

1) He can see your map's topography (but not resources). This is evidenced by the comments he makes, at times, when you attempt to settle somewhere he wasn't expecting.

2) By extension, he can see when you have encountered other tribes or colonists (this being shown on your map), and by growing (or receding) borders whether or not you've been taking over (or losing) land to your rivals.

3) He can (kind of) get an idea which resources you can obtain more easily than others by what you trade back to Europe, and which specialists you express a preference for through either purchase or prioritized transportation.

Etc., etc.

The point being, the king's demands, how they're worded, and when they occur sometimes provide important clues as to where his blind spots are (some other times, believe it or not, they're actually hints to HELP you). If you openly behave with hostility toward your king at the very beginning of the game (versus gradually) it makes all the sense in the world that he would retaliate and do the same to you via taxes, assuming he believed he could get away with it.

Well, it would be nice to know the precise mechanics of the tax rate. I looked all over the forum for it and couldn't find it. I found a bunch of other stuff that parsed the code out, but not for this specific part of the game. I'm guessing it's because there's just not that big a fan base for this game because of what they did to it.

So, that leaves me to go by the game description:

Charismatic: 100% time between tax increases

It's obviously not set in stone that the tax increases happen on certain turns...there's some sort of randomized element to it. But by this description, part of the formula involves some sort of set timer, one that is lengthened 100% if you choose the Dutch. Even with this advantage, I can still get my taxes jacked up to obscene rates well before 1700.


I can see what the devs were thinking...let's just remake this game with the improved graphics and leave it all the same...but wait! Civ 4 was great, and one reason it was great was because we put limits on mindless expansion. The key difference is that in Civ 4 this is very clearly conveyed to the player through multiple avenues, whereas in colonization (key difference - COLONIZATION, meaning you colonize, whereas in CIVILIZATION you civilize) they totally forgot to inform the player that halfway through the game, if you continually colonize the map, you will lose, and lose badly, even on the easy difficulty levels. This doesn't make any sense on multiple levels...why play a game of colonization if you're not supposed to colonize? For civilization, it made sense that mindless expansion may be detrimental to your civilization, but this isn't civ, isn't it?
 
yturk39 I think you are giving the AI way more credit than it deserves. I play at Revolutionary level and I know at that level I will get a tax rise after I have sold 201 tons of goods in Europe. Regardless of the goods, regardless of their value, regardless of my relationship with the King (although that is probably a moot point because I am never on good terms with him at that level).

I can sell 200 tons and then explore the map at my leisure, or just hit end turn repeatedly but there will be no tax rise. One more ton and a tax rise is inevitable. It may not come the very next turn - there is probably a random time factor involved, but it will come and it is unavoidable.

At lower difficulty levels I would expect that trigger point to be higher to give the player a better chance.
 
yturk39 I think you are giving the AI way more credit than it deserves. I play at Revolutionary level and I know at that level I will get a tax rise after I have sold 201 tons of goods in Europe. Regardless of the goods, regardless of their value, regardless of my relationship with the King (although that is probably a moot point because I am never on good terms with him at that level).

I can sell 200 tons and then explore the map at my leisure, or just hit end turn repeatedly but there will be no tax rise. One more ton and a tax rise is inevitable. It may not come the very next turn - there is probably a random time factor involved, but it will come and it is unavoidable.

At lower difficulty levels I would expect that trigger point to be higher to give the player a better chance.

Ok, that's interesting. 201 tons is exactly one ton over a full caravel. That could mean that the Dutch advantage is that you get your first tax increase at 401 tons, or exactly one ton over a full merchantman. Like everything else in the game, there is probably some sort of linear scaling that makes the next increase at twice the original, then three times the original, or what not. It probably gets accelerated if you ever choose to boycott.

Anyway, just won at revolutionary. I swear it is easier on revolutionary than on pioneer (what I was playing on before) because the natives are very rich on the higher difficulties (like the original game). I remember interacting with the natives actually made the game a lot easier, and that the harder difficulty levels made trading with them very profitable. Ditto on the remake. You can actually survive much of the game just trading with the natives if you so choose to do so. The extra $$$ makes raising an early army to wipe out whatever is close to you extremely easy. Then just make sure to control your expansion and you got an easy victory.
 
Congratulations on beating the game on the highest difficulty level - now you can go back to Civ IV satisfied :)

I also spend a lot of time and effort in trading with the natives. In my latest game the Aztecs and Incas started with around 15,000 gold each and the other six tribes about 5000 gold each so that made at least 60,000 available from native trading, and I took most of it. There is a trick to trading with inland villages. You can take a wagon by ship to a coastal village and unload it there, then transfer goods from ship to wagon. This means you can trade with any village on the map.
 
Congratulations on beating the game on the highest difficulty level - now you can go back to Civ IV satisfied :)

I also spend a lot of time and effort in trading with the natives. In my latest game the Aztecs and Incas started with around 15,000 gold each and the other six tribes about 5000 gold each so that made at least 60,000 available from native trading, and I took most of it. There is a trick to trading with inland villages. You can take a wagon by ship to a coastal village and unload it there, then transfer goods from ship to wagon. This means you can trade with any village on the map.

Thanks, and that's a neat trick :D
 
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