Öjevind Lång
Deity
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2005
- Messages
- 2,371
As you can tell from the headline, I am disappointed with Col II. There are some good things in it, which is unsurprising given all the good advice the people at Firaxis have received in various forums and newsgroups over the years, but they made a poor job implementing them. Here followeth my rant:
GOOD THINGS
1. The stunningly beautiful graphics. However, I am sure they are a mere bonus because the people at Firaxis happen to be working on Civ 5. All I can say is that I hope they take their time and do a proper job with Civ 5, and that they remove some of the clutter that infests Warlords and BtS. (Vanilla Civ is much superior to the expansion packs.)
2. The fact that ships and wagons now don't automatically stop for the rest of the turn if they reach a city. That was very irritating in the old Col.
3. The introduction of cultural borders instead of having your competitors surround your settlements with dragoons, as in the original game.
4. Being able to found cities after you declare independence, and also trade with Europe if you choose the "Monarchy" option at the declaration of independence. You might call it "the Canadian solution", or the Brazilian solution, for that matter; Brazil declared its independence with the son of the Portuguese king as their emperor, known as Dom Pedro I; this happened with the father's approval. (When Napoleon was rampaging through Europe, the Portuguese court resided in Brazil, for safety, so the prince had plenty of people to pick for his own new aristocracy and court. He and his son, Dom Pedro II, ruled Brazil rather ably for a total of 80 years. Then Dom Pedro II was deposed because he abolished slavery, poor honest man.)
5. Being able to play on after your victory. That may actually be more fun in some ways than preparing for the showdown.
6. The fact that you no longer can get new colonists simply by capturing enemy soldiers.
7. The fact that you *can* capture enemy pioneers; they are now simply the workers from Civ IV.
8. You can now actually contact your king, and if you have been a good boy and acepted paying contributions to him, he will sell you troops at a discount. However, he always adds troops to his own army when selling ones to you, so one should only buy troops from him in an emergency.
9. The fact that an Indian village teaches the same profession any number of times. You can even send two colonists to it to get trained simultaneously. However, the fact that they also train Indians, who then magically turn into European settlers, is not a good thing.
10. Pioneers who never need to be reequipped. You give them 50 tools, and they last forever. If you reassign a pioneer to another task, you get 50 tools in the city where you do it. Instead of all this rigmarole about giving him new equipment every few turns, you have to pay a little money for each improvement he makes. That is much superior to the old system.
11. Indians who are deeply impressed by your culture may peacefully dissolve a village and cede the land to you. This is comparable to the assimilation of many Indian villages in Latin America.
12. You can now train Indians, and after that they can be used as militiamen, specialist carpenters, specialist statesmen or whatever you want.
13. The new school system, where you simply send the trainee to school and then decide which profession he will have; you don't have to take anyone else out of production. All you need is to pay a fee for the education, the size of the fee depending on how advanced a training you choose. Cheap for a farmer, expensive for an elder statesman. You decide and pay when the trainee has been treained.
That may look like a quite impressive list. And there are other good things that I forget. But here is a partial list of all the things that are buggy or plain wrong:
BAD THINGS
1. The rancher system, as presently implemented. I think that feature is absolutely moronic. I much prefer the old model where the horses would naturally increase but where a stable helped. By all means, one could have ranchers to make them breed faster, but the present system is insane. Without a stable or a rancher, the horses sit around for a hundred years without thinking about the birds and the bees, so to speak. Horses *should* be able to multiply without a human to help them by explaining the realities of life to them.
Also, ranchers are somewhat anachronistic: they lived in the West in the 19th century, not in the east during colonial times. That icon of the rancher as a gunfighter squaring up at the OK Corral is priceless.
2. This brings me to another example of sloppy execution. When, after one battle turn during the war for independence, the AI had sent one of my dislocated farmers to work at the ranch, I discovered that in the city screen, the farmer icon is just about half the size of the rancher. That poor li'l peasant was cowering between two huge ranchers.
3. The lack of an option to gain independence by peaceful means. You know, nifty economical and political manoeuvering, that kind of thing.
4 The fact that now wars in Europe have no effect on your relations with the other colonizing powers in the New World. In practice, you are independent from Day One except for the obligation to pay taxes. The game has lost a dynamic element here. When forcing you to go to war against your European rivals, the king would give you some money and troops to do it - less of both as the game advanced, which nicely reflected the growing alienation between colonists and the mother country
5. The buggy city governor. When the enemy attacks one of your cities, the game ignores your instructions to the city governor to keep his cottonpickin' fingers off. It equips your citizens at random for defence, even if you have lots of troops in the city, and it reassigns people in a completely haphazard manner. After one attack, one of my three Elder Statesmen was suddenly gone, apparently missing in action. During other enemy attacks, I lost my carpenter and my blacksmith in the same mysterious way. That is to say, I lost some of the most vital civilians in the city. And after another attack, one of the two ranchers in the city was suddenly in uniform and carrying a rifle without me saying so. And I was *not* running out of troops at that stage; I kept a stream of fresh meat coming in from the interior, and I also shipped luxury goods to Europe (God knows I had heaps of luxury goods rotting in my warehouses), bought food and turned the food into instant colonists in America and sent them into battle.
Furthermore, when some of the city people had to be moved by the AI because the squares they were working were now occupied by the enemy, the game dealt with that in an extremely strange fashion. After one turn, I discovered that my cathedral was suddenly full of fishermen and that the preacher who worked there had been sent off to help out at the ranch. I have no doubt Jesus would have approved of it, but in this new version, the production of crosses is supposed to help even after you declare your independence.
6. The extremely convoluted and clumsy way one has to do some things, such as the tasks of reassigning military units fortified in cities or creating/editing trade routes.
7. That horrible Europe screen, which is obviously the one they used while building the game, and then they didn't bother to add some art.
8. The fact that in diplomacy, the Indian chiefs often use incongruous language from Civ IV. For example, Sitting Bull saying: "May there be peace until there is no more room to expand". Well, that one could be interpreted as meaning that he suspects you will later on encroach on his lands, but there are others which are completely unsuitable. Some of them are simply ridiculous for Indian chiefs. For example, in one game Mangas Coloradas of the Apaches suggested a defensive pact to me, and when I agreed, he said those dread words: "Excellent! I am quite pleased. Let's sit down and have a jolly cup of tea, shall we?" Some people may find this funny, but I think there are things that break the illusion too much, in the wrong way. Not to mention that it's lazy to lift diplomatic exchanges straight from Civ IV. (In fact, this particular one goes all the way back to Civ III, when it was only used by Elizabeth.)
9. The fact that suddenly, my merchantman got stuck in Europe and couldn't be budged. I tested things by buying a new merchantman, and that one also refused to leave the harbour. However, galleons and other ships still came and went as they pleased. Of course, that could be the king's revenge for my refusal to pay contributions, but in that case, it should be explained somehow. I suspect it's just a bug.
10. The sloppy way the animations for declaring yourself independent, and the victory animation (complete with the Stars and Stripes) are used for *all* the colonizing powers, even though they are explicitly about the Americans and the British.
11. The fact that the leaderhead for Samuel de Champlain (one of the French leaders) is simply the leaderhead for Joao of Portugal with his hat removed and his clothes and beard dyed a different colour. And the leaderhead for Simon Bolivar is Brennus with a haircut and 18th century clothes. Take about trimming costs!
12. The fact that when you trade with Europe after declaring yourself independent, it still is that same old stripmined Europe screen... And you still pay taxes! And the goods that the king stopped trading with you are still banned! That is so inane I could scream. Presumably, you are not going to the capital of the enemy you are fighting against to trade there.
13. The lack of the old Colony information screen from the original Col game, the one where you could see exactly which and how many military units you had in your various cities.
14. Also, the lack of the old naval screen, showing where your ships were and where they were headed and what they were carrying, *and* of the screen about your trade balance with the mother country.
15. You can no longer order a ship to "go to" a given city - only to Europe.
16. The manual and the game info in the Civilopedia. They are disgracefully careless and unhelpful.
17. The disgusting heads of the European kings. They are over the top, just like Ragnar flinging the snot from off under his nose in Civ IV. Bring back the fat, funny, bugeyed old king from the original Colonization!
18. The crappy, jerky animations at the beginning, for your declaration of independence and for your victory. They did not hire a modern Rembrandt to do those. The simple ones for the original Col were much better.
19. Oh, I forgot: the extremely diffuse symbols for trade goods. The sugar symbol and the silver symbol are practically identical. The same is true of the symbols for tools and guns. The other symbols also take some getting used to/learning to recognize at once. Why not a bottle for rum instead of a barrel that could contain anything? Why not use the old symbols if they couldn't think up some good new ones?
20. The almost invisible roads.
21. The difficulty discerning in the city screen what someone is producing. Is that colonist there growing tobacco or corn, or is he chopping wood? You really have to gaze hard.
22. I simply must add the single worst thing in Col II, and it is the fact that your bell production affects the size of the king's forces. In the original game, the king simply added to his troops from time to time, whatever you did or didn't do. So early independence was certainly desirable, but you didn't have to be afraid of generating bells. This change is moronic and almost destroys the game. Also, the rate at which taxation rises is much too steep, even on the easiest levels.
23 Furthermore, I think they should bring back the old time limit of 1850. There were several stages to the game: founding your first settlements and exploring the map, trying to get on terms with the Indians or not, building up your colonies, quite possibly fighting your European rivals, prepare for independence and then fight the war of independece. Now, everything is grimly geared to preparing for rebellion from the first day.
24. They should make the Indians more aggressive, sometimes having some braves attacking one of your settlements and destroying something or stealing something just for the fun of it, as in the original game. Or because the Indians are becoming restive and need to be appeased with some trade or a gift. At present, the Indians only exist to attack your European rivals and raze their settlements, and to train your colonists, including their own converts who then become ordinary colonists. Moreover, the rival European civs should be made less pathetic militarily.
25. Finally and ultimately, there is the circumstance that this is plainly not "an independent game using the game mechanism from Civ IV". This is a mod of Civ IV, nothing more, and done on the cheap to boot. Let me stress that my list of things that aren't right with this game is far from exhaustive.
GOOD THINGS
1. The stunningly beautiful graphics. However, I am sure they are a mere bonus because the people at Firaxis happen to be working on Civ 5. All I can say is that I hope they take their time and do a proper job with Civ 5, and that they remove some of the clutter that infests Warlords and BtS. (Vanilla Civ is much superior to the expansion packs.)
2. The fact that ships and wagons now don't automatically stop for the rest of the turn if they reach a city. That was very irritating in the old Col.
3. The introduction of cultural borders instead of having your competitors surround your settlements with dragoons, as in the original game.
4. Being able to found cities after you declare independence, and also trade with Europe if you choose the "Monarchy" option at the declaration of independence. You might call it "the Canadian solution", or the Brazilian solution, for that matter; Brazil declared its independence with the son of the Portuguese king as their emperor, known as Dom Pedro I; this happened with the father's approval. (When Napoleon was rampaging through Europe, the Portuguese court resided in Brazil, for safety, so the prince had plenty of people to pick for his own new aristocracy and court. He and his son, Dom Pedro II, ruled Brazil rather ably for a total of 80 years. Then Dom Pedro II was deposed because he abolished slavery, poor honest man.)
5. Being able to play on after your victory. That may actually be more fun in some ways than preparing for the showdown.
6. The fact that you no longer can get new colonists simply by capturing enemy soldiers.
7. The fact that you *can* capture enemy pioneers; they are now simply the workers from Civ IV.
8. You can now actually contact your king, and if you have been a good boy and acepted paying contributions to him, he will sell you troops at a discount. However, he always adds troops to his own army when selling ones to you, so one should only buy troops from him in an emergency.
9. The fact that an Indian village teaches the same profession any number of times. You can even send two colonists to it to get trained simultaneously. However, the fact that they also train Indians, who then magically turn into European settlers, is not a good thing.
10. Pioneers who never need to be reequipped. You give them 50 tools, and they last forever. If you reassign a pioneer to another task, you get 50 tools in the city where you do it. Instead of all this rigmarole about giving him new equipment every few turns, you have to pay a little money for each improvement he makes. That is much superior to the old system.
11. Indians who are deeply impressed by your culture may peacefully dissolve a village and cede the land to you. This is comparable to the assimilation of many Indian villages in Latin America.
12. You can now train Indians, and after that they can be used as militiamen, specialist carpenters, specialist statesmen or whatever you want.
13. The new school system, where you simply send the trainee to school and then decide which profession he will have; you don't have to take anyone else out of production. All you need is to pay a fee for the education, the size of the fee depending on how advanced a training you choose. Cheap for a farmer, expensive for an elder statesman. You decide and pay when the trainee has been treained.
That may look like a quite impressive list. And there are other good things that I forget. But here is a partial list of all the things that are buggy or plain wrong:
BAD THINGS
1. The rancher system, as presently implemented. I think that feature is absolutely moronic. I much prefer the old model where the horses would naturally increase but where a stable helped. By all means, one could have ranchers to make them breed faster, but the present system is insane. Without a stable or a rancher, the horses sit around for a hundred years without thinking about the birds and the bees, so to speak. Horses *should* be able to multiply without a human to help them by explaining the realities of life to them.
Also, ranchers are somewhat anachronistic: they lived in the West in the 19th century, not in the east during colonial times. That icon of the rancher as a gunfighter squaring up at the OK Corral is priceless.
2. This brings me to another example of sloppy execution. When, after one battle turn during the war for independence, the AI had sent one of my dislocated farmers to work at the ranch, I discovered that in the city screen, the farmer icon is just about half the size of the rancher. That poor li'l peasant was cowering between two huge ranchers.
3. The lack of an option to gain independence by peaceful means. You know, nifty economical and political manoeuvering, that kind of thing.
4 The fact that now wars in Europe have no effect on your relations with the other colonizing powers in the New World. In practice, you are independent from Day One except for the obligation to pay taxes. The game has lost a dynamic element here. When forcing you to go to war against your European rivals, the king would give you some money and troops to do it - less of both as the game advanced, which nicely reflected the growing alienation between colonists and the mother country
5. The buggy city governor. When the enemy attacks one of your cities, the game ignores your instructions to the city governor to keep his cottonpickin' fingers off. It equips your citizens at random for defence, even if you have lots of troops in the city, and it reassigns people in a completely haphazard manner. After one attack, one of my three Elder Statesmen was suddenly gone, apparently missing in action. During other enemy attacks, I lost my carpenter and my blacksmith in the same mysterious way. That is to say, I lost some of the most vital civilians in the city. And after another attack, one of the two ranchers in the city was suddenly in uniform and carrying a rifle without me saying so. And I was *not* running out of troops at that stage; I kept a stream of fresh meat coming in from the interior, and I also shipped luxury goods to Europe (God knows I had heaps of luxury goods rotting in my warehouses), bought food and turned the food into instant colonists in America and sent them into battle.
Furthermore, when some of the city people had to be moved by the AI because the squares they were working were now occupied by the enemy, the game dealt with that in an extremely strange fashion. After one turn, I discovered that my cathedral was suddenly full of fishermen and that the preacher who worked there had been sent off to help out at the ranch. I have no doubt Jesus would have approved of it, but in this new version, the production of crosses is supposed to help even after you declare your independence.
6. The extremely convoluted and clumsy way one has to do some things, such as the tasks of reassigning military units fortified in cities or creating/editing trade routes.
7. That horrible Europe screen, which is obviously the one they used while building the game, and then they didn't bother to add some art.
8. The fact that in diplomacy, the Indian chiefs often use incongruous language from Civ IV. For example, Sitting Bull saying: "May there be peace until there is no more room to expand". Well, that one could be interpreted as meaning that he suspects you will later on encroach on his lands, but there are others which are completely unsuitable. Some of them are simply ridiculous for Indian chiefs. For example, in one game Mangas Coloradas of the Apaches suggested a defensive pact to me, and when I agreed, he said those dread words: "Excellent! I am quite pleased. Let's sit down and have a jolly cup of tea, shall we?" Some people may find this funny, but I think there are things that break the illusion too much, in the wrong way. Not to mention that it's lazy to lift diplomatic exchanges straight from Civ IV. (In fact, this particular one goes all the way back to Civ III, when it was only used by Elizabeth.)
9. The fact that suddenly, my merchantman got stuck in Europe and couldn't be budged. I tested things by buying a new merchantman, and that one also refused to leave the harbour. However, galleons and other ships still came and went as they pleased. Of course, that could be the king's revenge for my refusal to pay contributions, but in that case, it should be explained somehow. I suspect it's just a bug.
10. The sloppy way the animations for declaring yourself independent, and the victory animation (complete with the Stars and Stripes) are used for *all* the colonizing powers, even though they are explicitly about the Americans and the British.
11. The fact that the leaderhead for Samuel de Champlain (one of the French leaders) is simply the leaderhead for Joao of Portugal with his hat removed and his clothes and beard dyed a different colour. And the leaderhead for Simon Bolivar is Brennus with a haircut and 18th century clothes. Take about trimming costs!
12. The fact that when you trade with Europe after declaring yourself independent, it still is that same old stripmined Europe screen... And you still pay taxes! And the goods that the king stopped trading with you are still banned! That is so inane I could scream. Presumably, you are not going to the capital of the enemy you are fighting against to trade there.
13. The lack of the old Colony information screen from the original Col game, the one where you could see exactly which and how many military units you had in your various cities.
14. Also, the lack of the old naval screen, showing where your ships were and where they were headed and what they were carrying, *and* of the screen about your trade balance with the mother country.
15. You can no longer order a ship to "go to" a given city - only to Europe.
16. The manual and the game info in the Civilopedia. They are disgracefully careless and unhelpful.
17. The disgusting heads of the European kings. They are over the top, just like Ragnar flinging the snot from off under his nose in Civ IV. Bring back the fat, funny, bugeyed old king from the original Colonization!
18. The crappy, jerky animations at the beginning, for your declaration of independence and for your victory. They did not hire a modern Rembrandt to do those. The simple ones for the original Col were much better.
19. Oh, I forgot: the extremely diffuse symbols for trade goods. The sugar symbol and the silver symbol are practically identical. The same is true of the symbols for tools and guns. The other symbols also take some getting used to/learning to recognize at once. Why not a bottle for rum instead of a barrel that could contain anything? Why not use the old symbols if they couldn't think up some good new ones?
20. The almost invisible roads.
21. The difficulty discerning in the city screen what someone is producing. Is that colonist there growing tobacco or corn, or is he chopping wood? You really have to gaze hard.
22. I simply must add the single worst thing in Col II, and it is the fact that your bell production affects the size of the king's forces. In the original game, the king simply added to his troops from time to time, whatever you did or didn't do. So early independence was certainly desirable, but you didn't have to be afraid of generating bells. This change is moronic and almost destroys the game. Also, the rate at which taxation rises is much too steep, even on the easiest levels.
23 Furthermore, I think they should bring back the old time limit of 1850. There were several stages to the game: founding your first settlements and exploring the map, trying to get on terms with the Indians or not, building up your colonies, quite possibly fighting your European rivals, prepare for independence and then fight the war of independece. Now, everything is grimly geared to preparing for rebellion from the first day.
24. They should make the Indians more aggressive, sometimes having some braves attacking one of your settlements and destroying something or stealing something just for the fun of it, as in the original game. Or because the Indians are becoming restive and need to be appeased with some trade or a gift. At present, the Indians only exist to attack your European rivals and raze their settlements, and to train your colonists, including their own converts who then become ordinary colonists. Moreover, the rival European civs should be made less pathetic militarily.
25. Finally and ultimately, there is the circumstance that this is plainly not "an independent game using the game mechanism from Civ IV". This is a mod of Civ IV, nothing more, and done on the cheap to boot. Let me stress that my list of things that aren't right with this game is far from exhaustive.
