A new way to deal with corruption (Colonialism Mod)

Here it is, my first post and my first mod, so please be kind.

Colonialism Mod

What is it?

Adds the colonialism tech to C3C after navigation. This tech allows the Slave Trader and Slave Ship units to be built and a new specialist - Slave Driver.

A slave trader is a unit with movement 2, population cost 1 and no maintainence cost that can only perform the join city action. A slave ship is exactly the same but travels across the sea instead of land.

A Slave Driver is a specialist who creates 10 gold and 10 unhappiness.


What's it used for?

Those far away cities which are so crippled by corruption that they can only ever produce 1 shield. The slave ship and slave trader allow you to transport citizens from that city to other more productive cities in your empire. Then, with only one citizen left, simply convert him to a Slave Driver and voila! A useless city is turned into one which just carries on pumping 10 gold into your treasury every turn (11 if you set it to just produce wealth every turn).

It is a way to convert otherwise useless cities into money making machines.


Known problems

As might be expected, in the couple of test games I've played, the AI isn't nearly smart enough to figure out how to use this tech and units, so it does tip the balance in favour of the player a little.

I added the 10 unhappiness so that the Slave Driver couldn't be abused and used in productive cities which is not what he is intended for. Unfortunately, if you have an exceptionally successful city with plenty of wonders/luxuries/a marketplace etc etc. then you can still use a Slave Driver in it and maintain productivity, however this is unlikely and will almost certainly do nasty things like ending a WLTKD.


Future plans

If feedback is good and there is demand, I will adapt this mod for vanilla aswell.

I'm thinking of changing things so that I can create a tech/wonder later in the game which abolishes slavery and changes the dynamic of how this system works.

Create my own units for the Slave Ship and Slave Trader. Make a female Slave Driver and make era-specific Slave Driver icons.

Try to devise a way of making the Slave Ship and Slave Trader units only buildable in the cities they are intended for, rather than to simply shift around population between productive cities.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Colonel Kraken and Kryten. I used their Ship of the Line and Settler Wagon units for the Slave Ship and Slave Trader units.


Download It!

Simply unzip this file into your Conquests/Scenarios folder.



Any feedback would be very much appreciated. And hello to everyone at civfanatics!!!

Nice!!! And welcome to posting on CFC.

There are several things I would like to know:
Isn't 10 unhappiness too much for any city? You would need 10 happy faces to stop it from getting into disorder...

My ideas:
How about making Colonialism a government available with the tech you created?
I made a few maps designed for colonization. Maybe we can modify them and add them to your mod, also add a real earth map only with European colonialist civs that all start in Europe, then improving your mod with a whole lot of ideas. So your mod would become a really serious one!

This looks a pretty clever idea. Good work! And definitely a good way to start posting...

Sounds interesting, I hope you find a way to do all the things you plan to!

thanks for the comments guys.

mirc: the 10 unhappiness doesn't affect colonies since the Slave Driver is the only citizen in the colony (all others having been removed by either the Slave Ship or Slave Trader to more productive cities).

A colonialism government sounds like an interesting idea - what attributes would you suggest it has? What are your colonialism maps? How are they suited so especially to colonialism?

I'd be interested in any of your suggestions on how to expand this mod. What I've tried to create in this mod and the main idea I hope to expand upon is to change the fact that in Civ3/C3C it only makes sense to expand into the territory of your neighbours rather than to conquer cities on the other side of the world because of corruption. This is both unrealistic - Collonial European nations did not expand throughout Europe but instead grabbed land in Africa, the Americas and all over the world. I think it also limits strategic options within the game and so I am trying to give a purpose to the seizing of overseas territory. I'd be glad to hear of any suggestions for how to expand upon that.

Wow, someone who thinks over gameplay Good luck Phall1007!

One thought from me to the corruption problem: Corruption was introduced to Civ 3 as a counterpart to the ICS (infinite city sprawl) - so the epilog in the Civ 4 handbook. So I think it is better to shorten the settler production to a settler autoproduced by the palace all ... turns and no normal settler production anymore. On the other side shorten the problems caused by corruption drastically by letting the governements deal much better with this "unfun" element. This works better with the AI.

But setting the palace to produce settlers would have the effect that it the civ with best placed capital will get to expand much faster.

As for other suggestions, it's too late to think (at least here, it's 01:12 AM).

No, because they would all get produced by the palace at regular intervals. However, that would be bad for any AI on a small island, because they'll have too many settlers that they can't do anything with until they build a ship, and they won't build a ship until they have less units.

Virote_Considon said:

that would be bad for any AI on a small island

Click to expand...

This would be the same with regular produced settlers - and: you can move your palace.

But I don´t want to "highjack" Phall1007´s interesting thread. Therefore once again: Good work Phall1007 and if you have some more ideas to improve gameplay, please post them.