Non commercial economy

pvt chaos

pvt chaos

Warlord
Joined
May 19, 2006
Messages
114
Location
Holland
After playing a 4 hour long game where I produced thousands of liters of rum and enough clothes to dress all the population of europe, I thought : why I am doing this ?? Why I am doing al this micro to harvest sugar, processing that into rum, shipping it over the big lake and then sell it with a ridicilous 40% tax on it ?? Just so I can buy another distiller to produce more rum which will get even taxed more over time ? Slowly an idea started and I want to know your opinion, if it could work and what I could be overlooking.

The idea is to focus in the game only on the end goal and the means to reach that and thereby completely ingoring the commercial aspect. The end goal is independence and for that we need :

  • Food, feeding the population.
  • Bells, for getting that indepence feeling.
  • Crosses, to convince the others to join in.
  • Tools, improving the land, necessary for guns.
  • Guns, artillery, ships and horses for defeating the REF.

Thats it, nothing else needed. No sugar, tobacco, rum etc.

Advantage :
  • Only 3 type's of raw material to worry about : food, wood, ore.
  • Less goods -> less transport necessary. With your first caravel you will make it a long way because you only have to get the occasional colonist from the docks.
  • King's upping the tax rate ? Fine, just throw another cotton party because your economy does not depent on cotton at all. In this case you need bells and crosses, and there isnt a tax on that.
  • No diminishing returns, in a commercial economy you invest alot and over time you get less return because of the tax increase. Therefore you have to keep increasing your production to get the same amount of money. (And not to mention price drops because of over production)
  • No more waiting untill that rum factory is finally finished in your 1 :hammers: commercial city. In this strategy almost every town will have a carpenter and can focus on buildings like schools and arsenals.
  • Less food used by commercial people = more food to grow your colony.

Downside is that you still need a bit of money to buy eg a blacksmith or a preacher as they are not available from the native's. (or wait and get lucky at the docks). But scouting is a good alternative income source for this. And once you get the first specialist, set up a schoolhouse and teach the rest yourself.

Any thoughts / ideas about this ?
 
I think you need to have atleast one cash crop to speed things along.

Otherwise you should make a b-line to every village, ruin, and burial ground to be sure you get every bit of free money on the map. I usually do this no matter the strat, and at around turn 100 I'll afford a Galleon and then transport back 20k or so in treasure, not including the smaller gold gifts that didn't require transport.

Point is you do still need a source of income, or at the very least you need to add a specialist lumber city, then transport all that lumber to your other cities to produce buildings. Ore too.

So I guess, really, the list should be food, oar, wood: as main centers for those three could drive an economy like you're talking.

Adding in a "buy low sell high" strat for some extra cash (like giving natives horses, and guns) could help things along too.
 
Why I am doing al this micro to harvest sugar, processing that into rum, shipping it over the big lake and then sell it with a ridicilous 40% tax on it ??
Click to expand...

This is easily solved, just sell your load of rums to the natives, they don't impose tax. Their price should be constant over game-time.
 
Well, for example tools and horses cost 2 gold. You sell Cloth for 10. So, 100% non-commercial economy is not efficient, at the start it's better to trade. However, you don't need tons of Cloth either, 100% commercial economy isn't good either. I think the point is to find the right balance.

Then again, silver doesn't require any processing buildings so you may consider focusing on silver as a first step in non-commercial economy.
 
I think you're on the right path Chaos. Some people may want to insist that since there are so many goodies to trade Colonization is an economic game. And it's really not. All you need are guns, people to hold the guns and horses to ride, or if the old strategy doesn't work anymore, lumberjacks and carpenters, ore miners and blacksmiths to produce Cannon.

Cash crops are always the fastest way to build the infrastructure which produce Calvalry and Cannon--people and tools--but after that infrastructure is in place they become worthless.

The victory condition of Colonizaiton is purely a miltary one and the economic side of the game is relatively unitegrated into that. The higher your difficulty and the quicker your game speed, the more neccesary speeding this infrastructure along becomes, and thus cash crops. But they remain nothing more than a catalyst and eventually a distraction from the real game, getting Calvalry and Cannon.
 
pvt chaos said:
Any thoughts / ideas about this ?
Click to expand...

there are some flaws

first of all the price
im not totally sure how it works but it seems that selling too much of a single type reduce its price, so if you really wanna make great money you have to sell various types

but the most important thing is the second production of cities...
since every of them has some goods like tobacco or cotton its more reward at start to put a single non specialized colonist to work it instead of just ignore and waste it

im not sure of having a full chain of production for those
surely not worth spending tons of gold buying all specialists and training them and building top production factory, IMO

last but not least it depends on the terrain too, if you have a very cool cotton tile, its a waste not to use it
 
Ellestar said:
Well, for example tools and horses cost 2 gold. You sell Cloth for 10. So, 100% non-commercial economy is not efficient, at the start it's better to trade. However, you don't need tons of Cloth either, 100% commercial economy isn't good either. I think the point is to find the right balance.

Then again, silver doesn't require any processing buildings so you may consider focusing on silver as a first step in non-commercial economy.
Click to expand...

This is true and very important. It means you get five times as many tools by selling your goods and then buying the tools instead of producing them at a blacksmith.
 
Ok, I tried it out and its plays definitely different than a commercial economy.

In the beginning you can expand quite fast because emphasize on food, and start up an early guns and tools colony. However later in the game problems start to arise. Like the fact that you need 500 :gold: to train an elder statemen, something that I really overlooked. So you have to keep a positive bank account and think ahead in the future for which things you absolutely need money, like training the higher tier professions. Also building a road costs 20 :gold: , not much but if you dont have it its annoying.

This is true and very important. It means you get five times as many tools by selling your goods and then buying the tools instead of producing them at a blacksmith
Click to expand...

True, but I feel the only good worth it is silver. You can sell it for a high price and you dont have to invest anything in it besides maybe the expert miner. But its true that the price will drop if you overflood the market. One game I sold so much that the price had dropped to 5 :gold: !
 
I was doing the same thing as this today. I started making cigars because I had tons of tobacco and the price was high. With only one (of 5) cities building cigars...the rest focused on building ships and buildings. Capital was pushing out enough food to build troops for me, so I went ahead a put together an army. With army, you really don't need to many crosses...since the other euros will anger the natives and you can simply go to war with france, spain whoever at the same time since your army will more than likely be larger. Plus, I already had a fleet of frigates and ship of the lines...so they didn't too much back to the "motherland". Right now, I am sending no ships back home and focusing on materials for buildings and paying the king whatever...i don't think he will for money if you dont have any? Working out well so far.
 
I largely agree with your assessment. Came to the same conclusion myself last night. That being said, however, I can still see the need for a cash crop, or two. Depending on the map, difficulty level and various other circumstances, cash can be tight.
 
Sounds like the game mechanics are working exactly the way they are supposed to.
You're supposed to get pissed at the king for jacking your taxes.
 
Being independent is the whole point, isnt it? I came to the same conclusion when I realized that I produce all I need by myself. IMO the game starts out at a point where you focus on commerce and growth, selling goods both refined and raw is the most effective way. Eventually there is nothing that europe can offer that you cannot produce yourself, at this point the game shifts focus.

When you have all the experts, just educate when you need more. The money you get easilly from the indians. My strategy is to sell horses and arms to the indian tribes far away from me, preferrably those close to enemy colonies. Of course other goods are good aswell but tend to generate less cash.
 
With this strategy I hope you all picked Peter Stuyvesant. ;)

Edit: Really though, it doesn't sound very effective to me. How are you getting all the carpenters and lumberjacks etc you need? Sure you could get lucky and have all of them appear on the docks and the build schoolhouses and train more but that would probably take incredibly much more time than just getting a few cash crops going and buying all the specialists you need.
I usually transition to this though, sell less in europe as my colonies become more self-sufficient since I have the population and production to build/train anything I want.
Of course with diminishing returns in col2 on education I don't know if you can rely entirely on that for your non-basic specialist needs.
 
Gliese 581 said:
How are you getting all the carpenters and lumberjacks etc you need?
Click to expand...

In the beginning Im relying mostly on converts to work as lumberjacks and buy the occasional carpenter. Once I got my education colony running Im training the carpenters and lumberjacks myself. And remember that you are generating also alot of crosses much earlier than with a commercial economy.
Little trick : Generate crosses and if you really want a particular colonist from the docks out of the three, just rush buy it 1 turn before the cross bar is full. I had a weaver, indentured servant and a fisherman on the docks and could rush the fisherman for 70 :gold: .

Gliese 581 said:
Of course with diminishing returns in col2 on education I don't know if you can rely entirely on that for your non-basic specialist needs.
Click to expand...

Yes, you have to be a bit picky as whom to educate. My basic rule is that if a profession can be trained by the native's, I will never do it myself and save the education points for preachers and statesmen etc.

Gliese 581 said:
With this strategy I hope you all picked Peter Stuyvesant.
Click to expand...
25 % :hammers: extra is nice, but the french can be good too with the bonus for getting native converts and shorter training time.
 
I also use the trick of rushbuying citizens the turn before they're about to arrive automatically so that I can choose.
If you're buying some specialists then you are doing a hybrid sort of strategy which I expect should work fine. I was talking about not generating money at all beside what's needed for pioneers and such.
 
ramatheson said:
I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I'm not playing just to win. I'm playing to have fun, and half the fun is finding good places to gather and create a viable trade empire. Sure, I could just get guns and win, but that's not so fun to me. It's the journey, not the destination. :o)
Click to expand...

Same feelings here. :)
However, the idea of completely bypassing the economics is tempting.
 
No, usually I just buy the first needed specialists and train the rest myself. Most of the early money goes to the bank to buy a galleon (if im not already building it) so I can ship treasures back and have some savings for the later expensive education.

Off course I also play for fun, but I didnt have much fun with setting and microing all those trade routes when things get complicated later in the game. In this case most of my colonies are self dependent and I have less need for wagon trains.
 
Sorry, I dont agree its because of planning. The trade route system just doesnt work like I want it to work (eg no working max option) and it is very clumsy to setup orders or to change a route. And doing all the loading and unloading manually is also not a very fun way for me to play the game. Maybe they should have looked at games like Port Royale to see an example of a trade route system that works.
 
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