How to win on revolutionary in 40 turns.

Turinturambar

Prince
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
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368
Pick Simon Bolivar as your leader.
Turns 1-5: Settle your colony next to a native settlement as close to europe as possible. The surrounding land is pretty unimportant, just make sure you have 1 food resource or 4 food on the main tile.

Sell your starting tools and muskets to the natives and rush back to europe. Send the ex-pioneer visiting native villages. Do not step on ruins unless you feel lucky. The soldier starts producing bells and you want to manufacture politocal points.

Turns 5-15: The caravel travels back to europe with Dragoons recruited from the dock. One of your recruit goes to the townhall, the other becomes a scout who explores in the opposite direction from your ex-pioneer. The remaining horses and muskets get sold to the indians.

Turns 15-25: You will be offered the Founding Father that has 1/2 travel speed to Europe. Take him. Shortly afterwards you will be offered Peter Minuit, take him as well. The caravel makes more trade trips.

Turns 25-35: Once you get Minuit, buy a second caravel and cannons in Europe. You should be able to buy ~6 cannons and 100 muskets/horses. Once your caravels are back in the new world, delete all your colonists until you have 100% rebel sentiment. Declare independence, pick all men are free and the bell-enhancing civics. Your veteran soldier and one of the indentured servants become dragoons. With 6 cannons and 2 dragoons sporting a +100% combat bonus defeating the Royal Expedition force is trivial.

Turn 40-45: Congratulations you have successfully exploited the broken game mechanics.
 
Been there done that already....
 
"delete all your colonists until you have 100% rebel sentiment"

That's the broken game mechanic.. I beat the game a couple times and it really doesn't have much replay value until they fix the "small colony has an easier time beating the king than a big one does."
 
Just add two things - you can change your colonist in docks into dragoon, so you can get extra horses/guns for trade and also colonist in docks counts against bells so did not forget get rid of them.

And yes winning that fast is broken. Show me fast win like this in Civ on standard map on highest difficulty. Civ had also its exploits, but Col punish you for expanding on so many different levels, that it just force you play this way.
 
"delete all your colonists until you have 100% rebel sentiment"

Not necessarily a broken game mechanic... Just because you can use that to increase sentiment; then again, players look for all methods to exploit the game. - If you have a problem with this, simply don't do it...

"small colony has an easier time beating the king than a big one does."

With a bigger colony you're gonna be having a bigger military, better economy, trade, etc. than a smaller colony. - REF scales exponentionally on the size of your colony, so that doesnt necessarily mean a 'smaller' colony will have an easier time beating the king than a 'larger' colony if you play your cards right in both cases.

I was talking to a buddy about this issue, and we think that the REF and bell issue isn't as big of an issue that players make it out to be, and just because you think winning the game early, makes the game broken, doesn't mean it is.

Although we think the cannons price should be increased to a starting price of ~600, to prevent cannon spamming, and the starting REF should be larger; (for ex. 20 soldiers, 17 dragoons, 12 artillery, 10 man-o-wars)... Then it should increase slower than it currently does for generating a lot of bells; so we have an incentive to create a decent colony-size; or early bell production.

I think the current REF and bell system Col currently has is good, and will be even better with a few small fixes.

I'm enjoying the game more than ever, and remember... If there is a game mechanic that you feel is broken, or you don't like it... Then simply don't use it. ;)

-Aegore
 
This is clearly broken. The sad part is if they just made the starting REF a decent size (increasing for each skill level) and reduced the REF growth caused by bells there would not be this problem.

I thought this was the exact kind of thing you had Beta testers for. Seems very sloppy.
 
You make a good point, but 40 turns is just too short. I can't see anyone enjoying a game like that even if winning meant everything.
 
Beating the REF pretty easily isn't a problem. Although the changes Aegore mentioned would be good, your primary rivals should be the other colonies IMO.
 
Question for the people who have tried this: what normalized score does it give you?
 
I thought this was the exact kind of thing you had Beta testers for. Seems very sloppy.

I though we all know that we pay Firaxis for privillege to be betatesters :crazyeye:

There must be done lot of fixes, like redone FF, slower inflantation of crosses and learning, usable UI for seting trade rotues, competent and more agresive AI.

But fundamental flaw in this game is too much focus on beating REF. The main concern should be other colonies and natives. Otherwise this game become pointless, you need feel clock on you. WIh curent state of game, you can do practicly whatever you want, other colonies are no treat and REF grow as fast as you choose to grow, I can skip first 100 turn on hardest difficulty and still win.
Even when they made good AI that will be able to beat REF, tehrer remain problem that each time AI start revolution, it will face not just royal forces but also human player. In my opinion REF should be constant or at least grow lineary with time (and on hardest difficulty computer need face like 1/4 of REF you will be facing). But building of colony should be harder with more agressive AI and natives and you should need more bells or something. Also I absolutely don't get why price for buying specialist is constant, when every other possibility to obtain him becomes harder with time (schools, missions, crosses). And probably rising colonist be food should become also harder in this case. Now that should make competetive enviroment so you will not need so big REF. And with better AI, that get serious bonuses, game should become really hard on revolutionary.
 
Not necessarily a broken game mechanic... Just because you can use that to increase sentiment; then again, players look for all methods to exploit the game. - If you have a problem with this, simply don't do it...



With a bigger colony you're gonna be having a bigger military, better economy, trade, etc. than a smaller colony. - REF scales exponentionally on the size of your colony, so that doesnt necessarily mean a 'smaller' colony will have an easier time beating the king than a 'larger' colony if you play your cards right in both cases.

I was talking to a buddy about this issue, and we think that the REF and bell issue isn't as big of an issue that players make it out to be, and just because you think winning the game early, makes the game broken, doesn't mean it is.

Although we think the cannons price should be increased to a starting price of ~600, to prevent cannon spamming, and the starting REF should be larger; (for ex. 20 soldiers, 17 dragoons, 12 artillery, 10 man-o-wars)... Then it should increase slower than it currently does for generating a lot of bells; so we have an incentive to create a decent colony-size; or early bell production.

I think the current REF and bell system Col currently has is good, and will be even better with a few small fixes.

I'm enjoying the game more than ever, and remember... If there is a game mechanic that you feel is broken, or you don't like it... Then simply don't use it. ;)

-Aegore

"If you have a problem with this, simply don't do it..."

* You can do this for any exploit in any game, so I guess nothing ever needs to be patched.

"Not necessarily a broken game mechanic... Just because you can use that to increase sentiment;"

I just can't imagine being in the colonies and the government saying "hey not all of you agree with the revolt so we're going to kill half of you so we can start this revolution."


"With a bigger colony you're gonna be having a bigger military, better economy, trade, etc. than a smaller colony. - REF scales exponentionally on the size of your colony, so that doesnt necessarily mean a 'smaller' colony will have an easier time beating the king than a 'larger' colony if you play your cards right in both cases."

* Smaller colonies will always have an easier time winning; the problem is that the large REF takes forever to defeat (and in many cases if it's really really large, it bugs out.)
 
Not necessarily a broken game mechanic... Just because you can use that to increase sentiment; then again, players look for all methods to exploit the game. - If you have a problem with this, simply don't do it...

This sounds.... just like it came from one of the original beta-testers.

Hmm!
 
/sigh

It is not the end that is the reward but the path we take to get there. Everyone should do this once so they can say they 'beat' the game, fine, now play to have fun. Did you ALWAYS play Civ with the leader you know you can win with? No, you try different varieties of play for the challenge. Did you ever try an OCC? Yes, that is limiting your play not based on any game mechanic. I'll agree that there are exploits in this game, and they'll likely be addressed, but what you've described has no replay value, is fun once but it is the variety that makes Civ fun no?
 
/sigh

It is not the end that is the reward but the path we take to get there. Everyone should do this once so they can say they 'beat' the game, fine, now play to have fun. Did you ALWAYS play Civ with the leader you know you can win with? No, you try different varieties of play for the challenge. Did you ever try an OCC? Yes, that is limiting your play not based on any game mechanic. I'll agree that there are exploits in this game, and they'll likely be addressed, but what you've described has no replay value, is fun once but it is the variety that makes Civ fun no?

There's a problem with col2 that you practically can't lose regardless of difficulty, leader and regular or occ game because of the broken mechanics. All that is left is roleplaying, knowing all the while that you are artificially limiting yourself at every turn to give the king a chance.. well that's boring if you ask me.
If you play chess with a little kid and let him win, you might enjoy his happiness at winning but can you apply that sentiment to getting beat by the AI in a computer game because you didn't do what you knew was the right chocies to win? I suppose one could tell ones friends that you let the king win and they might say "that was magnanimous of you" if they don't play games and actually think "AI" is a correct description of the computer opponent and not merely a vastly exaggerated term. :p :crazyeye:
 
I see that people disband units to increase the rebel sentiment, I find this cheap and unrealistic. How about a independence condition that depends both on total population AND percentage of rebel sentiment?

To reward/need bigger population to achieve independence.
 
There is in fact no need to disband people early. Just turn them into missionaries and send them off to the native settlements.
 
The real problem with the game is that the victory condition is not open ended. Unlike Civ4, where there are multiple routes to winning, the only goal here is defeat the REF.

As long as that is the case gameplay will inevitably degenerate into this type of strategy. Anything else is just roleplaying. That's fine if it's your thing, but a large part of the enjoyment from playing games for a lot of people is beating the game.

When I figured out that all you need is some money to buy troops and that 90% of the things the game lets you do are irrelevant I did exactly the same thing Turinurambar did - beat it twice on Rev and haven't played it since, probably never will again.

It isn't cheating, it's winning.

I don't think that the game can be patched in a comprehensive way to force people to use all of the game mechanics - increasing the size of the REF doesn't mean that now I have to build a trade network and start weaving serious cloth, it just means that I'd mine silver real quick and do the same thing. It'd just take longer to get the money you need.

isi is right. I feel that the best solution to make the game experience more complete is to introduce more victory conditions -- kill all the natives, destroy the other colonies or make your economy bigger than the home country's, and even then I'm not sure that would work.

Until then we'll just find the fastest route to get some cannons and goons.

I do appreciate that the game was priced below the going rate for a "complete" game at the store, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the game is complete.
 
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