Father Points Info (From XML)

Polobo

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In addition to the following point generators your colonies can also convert hammers into points (3 per hammer).

The following are taken from the XML - Did my best to interpret what the tags actually represent.

File: XML\GameInfo\CIV4FatherPointInfos.xml

• Exploration Points
○ 5 - Each land tile explored
○ 3 - Each water tile explored
○ 50 - Each Native Tribe Met
○ 50 - Each Native Village Encountered
○ 100 - Each Native Village Encountered First (giving you a goody)

• Religion Points
○ 250 - Each Mission Established
○ 50 - Each Church Built
○ 100 - Each Cathedral Built
○ 2 - Each Cross Produced

• Trade Points
○ 30 per 100 gold - European Trade Gold (Assuming Purchase or Sale)
○ 15 per 100 gold - Native Trade Gold (Assuming Purchase or Sale)
○ 100 - Each Dock Built
○ 200 - Each Drydock Built
○ 300 - Each Shipyard Built

• Military Points
○ 20 - Each XP Gained (could be 1 per 20 but this makes more sense)
○ 300 - Each Colony Conquered
○ 200 - Each Colony Razed (assuming mutually exclusive)
○ 50 - Each Stockade Built
○ 100 - Each Fort Built
○ 150 - Each Fortress Built
○ 100 - Each Armory Built
○ 200 - Each Magazine Built
○ 300 - Each Arsenal Built

• Political Points
○ 5 - Each Bell Produced
 
This explains the relative ineffectiveness of building political points compared to producing bells I noticed.
Free colonist gives 15 pp with bells, 12 by carpenting.
Elder statesman gives 30 pp with bells, carpenter gives 21 by carpenting. Of course if you get a carpenter early and no statesman then he's more effective in producing quick pps (but use up wood).
 
It is worse than that, as the 12/21 include the free hammer from the colony, and should only be 9/18 for a colonist carpenting. So if the colony has nothing better to build, it can always generate 3pps.

Then you need to account for any colonists producing lumber to turn into pps, and roughly halfs the points per colonist.

Only advantage of building pps is that it keeps your rebel sentiment unchanged, and with it the REF.
 
@ Gliese 581 & mboza: I belive you err for a number of reasons (individually different ones each, i hope its not to bad that i still answer comprehensively) to a certain degree:


Hammers have many other uses so getting master carpenters is by far more useful.

Master carpenters are far cheaper then elder Statesmen. About a ratio of 2 : 1. (thats by far the most important of the reasonable ones imo.)

REF-Change doesn't happen (biggest reason, but can be considered broken currently anyways. I don't consider it important because of that.)

Sawmill is by far the more useful and cheap building than printing press + newspaper taken together if im not utterly mistaken. (now you will need expert lumberjacks to provide them with enough wood. There are harder things to accomplish then getting 2 or 3 of those though.)

What is true is that you'll need a Lumberjack for Wood (and to a much lesser degree Food for keeping those pop fed). But on good tiles free settlers or especially converted natives will be enough for providing a carpenter if those expert lumberjacks are to hard to come by, at least until a Lumbermill is built. (at which point you'll need either experts or a second colony producing wood for your 3 hungry carpenters in the Lumbermill yielding 111 FF-Points of your choice for such a colony in total and consume 36 Lumber. You just won't do that with 3 elder Statesmen so easily and conveniently fitting into the rest of a sound strategy imo. At least under current conditions.)


So i think overall building the points you need (which means other points needed as well) is better gained in the sawmill than in the council. Sad thing sorts of imo. Another important thing: Its hard to get those military (those can be tricky especially if you play builder-style) / religious / exploration (if those whould be hard to come by anyways) / trade (also not to hard to get) points via bells.

I for one did wonder that the number for bells is acually so low (1:10 whould sound more reasonable under the current circumstances to make it feasible to run bells. Maybe even as much as 1:15). There honestly currently is no reason to run bells in my book exept if you need an FF real bad (and know someone else is going to grab him real soon) or want to shot for independence.

Actually at epic speed i find Carpenter + Lumberjack highly attractive early recruitements like in Col 1. (Don't know if natives still train Lumberjacks at times. Then it really gets easy.)
 
Does this mean you can get trade points by buying and selling silver?
E.g.
Buy 100 silver for 2000G - gain 66 points
Sell 100 silver for 1900G - gain 63 points

End result - for 100G you gain 129 trade points?!
 
Good find. :)

Native crisscross-trade (involving different Goods of course) might even be more feasible (or at least be a good addition to what you suppose) since:

a) you want to do it anyways as at least some leaders (most notably the french.)

b) you might get a very decent early income without losing money. And early income is hugely important imo. (Get them those guns and horses by the shipload...)

c) your Gold is not truly "lost" in the real sense of it. Because you can still get it from selling and natives will run out of money if you flood them with goods. Its still a bit of cash burn but the exact calculations are much harder and i whould guess you lose less overall...

d) you don't screw you sale-price in europe. Which sounds like it could happen if you do such a thing in europe with silver. Depends on how exactely its calculated. Now you might want to do it with something else than silver. You might even exploit it further by getting masses of needed goods cheap if! there is a bit of awkward calculation involved and you ruin the price of a certain raw material or something else you want to buy en masse or the other way around if the price goes up from that behavior. (not sure about that point. Maybe someone likeing deep analysis can figure it out for us... :p)

e) you get more Points from it as well on average.


But what you suggest clearly reeks of expoitation (if it does works at all that is, and there isn't a block against it somewere).

But it sure reeks of the most cost effective way to get many points in a hurry for early founding fathers.
And still get those carpenters + Goods for Natives first i whould reccomend. (You'll need the political points and production capacity which enables superfast wagon-trains anyways...)
 
Hammers have many other uses so getting master carpenters is by far more useful.

Master carpenters are far cheaper then elder Statesmen. About a ratio of 2 : 1. (thats by far the most important of the reasonable ones imo.)

yeah thats the point of buyng carpenters first and prefer them over, not to use them for a worse job :p


You just won't do that with 3 elder Statesmen so easily and conveniently fitting into the rest of a sound strategy imo. At least under current conditions.)

well for statesmen you dont have to necessary consider the top
even 1 statesmen is good, and bell increase EVERYTHING, pp that are used for every FF and over all the % increase in ALL colony
having like 20 30% more food and resoursec and productivity is very important

and in the ending phase building the latest building and ships without such a bonus is pretty impossible, you end up taking 10 turns for a ship or so

I for one did wonder that the number for bells is acually so low (1:10 whould sound more reasonable under the current circumstances to make it feasible to run bells. Maybe even as much as 1:15). There honestly currently is no reason to run bells in my book exept if you need an FF real bad (and know someone else is going to grab him real soon) or want to shot for independence.

im still considering to try and keep a good % in the colony, without building so many bells, i mean not boosting the REF but keeping a good bonus% at the colony to boost its productivity

not sure ofc its its better i still dont get exactly when the king is bothered, maybe there is a good rythm of bells that you can hold without risking a too large REF
 
ddd123 brought up an important part of bells: Raising productivity. In my current game I have a colony with only a single elder statesmen preaching to himself and he very quickly convinced himself 100% that he was right, giving himself a 50% boost in bell generation so what's really going on here compared to a city of 3 or more needed for lumberjack/carpenter/foodguy to put out 21pp/turn is one guy producing 9 bells = 45 pps/turn.
That's normally more than six times the productivity of building pps.
Even if the carpenter/lumberjack is on a riverside tile producing 4 food and feeding them both it's about 4 times the productivity.
Considering an elder statesman cost twice the amount of a carpenter that's a more than a fair deal (and then we don't count the cost of a lumberjack which would put the costs at about even).
Also consider that the statesman city can put 1 hammer into building a building or some other points that don't require lumber and that the output of the city center also gets the 50% bonus.
Now if you get the carpenter lumberjack etc on the dock before you can generate cash for a statesman then sure that is probably the most efficient early strategy if you want quick pps but given equal opportunity it's not the most efficient/fast way.
I've only been playing on explorer tops in terms of difficulty but I don't imagine the AI taking a backseat on getting Peter Minuit for example on higher levels. Rather they probably get a %bonus production so that you'll need to be as efficient as possible if you want to grab him, sort of like you need to really rush stonehenge/the great wall/the oracle in CIV on emperor and up.
 
Well it whould be if you couldn't chose and switch at will that whould hold true (+ carpenters are nearly as effective in getting FF-Points including non-politics-points as elder statesmen in the council hall. More effective even with a sawmill.). But you can (and you can't just change your investment if you bought an expensive colonist like a statesman in europe) making that point one for me unlike you think (since its just an option. Not mandatory.).
Capping the investment.
And relatively Statesman do poorer as Carpenters then Carpenters do as Statesmen if both follow their proffession (and provided one sees early bells (as opposed to politics-points) as a liability in itself as opposed to an asset. Which i currently do in a neutral case).
At least at the start, before the bonus to productivity really kicks in.
While for all other jobs (save perhaps education naturally. But that just requires them to be present so its only a question if not both are in the colony. And Education comes into play later on anyways.) they are equal i belive (it might be even more painful to lose the statesmen so its true only to a certain extent.)

And since founding fathers are grab first and points from sawmill+council-hall are capped at a certain max, its not clearly mutually exclusive either (but still much easier to max the hammers thing fast then the bells-thing. And much less problematic + much more feasible in the short run which hugely effects the long run. If im not utterly mistaken.)


And because of the current situation i don't consider it as one of the worse jobs actually. But its known to be broken. So it might well be temporary and is to be taken as a pinch of salt. Still makes Carpenters even more valuable for sure then without those serious REF-issues which sounds to throw the balancing off a bit.


I consider flat out buying! statesmen nonworthy until lategame because of it. At least if i have the choice
(as opposed to the 3 immigrants up for grabs cheaply, one of them beeing Statesmen / Carpenter / Lumberjack or even a mix of some / all of them. But thats out of the players base of influence anyways more or less. And a lot of the early game for me just resolves around that variable (that makes for a good part of the replayability of col 1 and in Civ4:Col as well for sure. So thats naturally a big plus for the game. Now i did get 2 sesoned scouts there in my currently running game :eek:. Go figure how i found that one in comparison to a carpenter or statesmen. :D)...
If i should get a statesmen there early and nothing else interesting that might radically change my perspective. Will happen one day for sure. And you can bet i use em if they come walking to me cheaply on own "free will"...)


If the thing in the "cheasy but easy-thread" holds true though it might indeed be still feasible to get statesmen / bells early and then just outright stop using them for their master-duty. But thats exploit anyways. Big time. Even if i whouldn't feel bad about it (right now) if the king is such a jerk currently. His fault. :p


I have to admit that since i haven't (obviously) factored in the productivity-thing because of the drawbacks have been known to me and i didn't want to burn myself in my first few games (so that impression may be way off. I hope my reasons for ignoring that part are somewhat understandable even if it makes me do some faulty comments possibly. Still a "newcommers perspective").
But! the council-hall has 3 Slots and the carpenter (base) has just 2. So relativly specialists pay off there more (until sawmill kicks in at least. Which oddly might in the short term be an even better investment than a carpenter. Especially if one is waiting to immigrate soon anyways instead of the need to buy one.).
And a Statesmen + one nonstatesmen (money issues at the start) does not produce more than 3 'normal' colonists (some small food-issues which exist asside.).

Some things that reduce the lumber-problem a bit:
chopping trees brings lumber which does make sense for other reasons as well at times.
Lumber unlike other needed things actually seems to be cheap as dirt in Europe. (4 per unit is not all "that expensive" as a quick-fix for an up-for grabs FF. As might! be food to compensate for people cutting lumber instead of farming. But i could not really imagine a case were that really kicks in. Save food bought from indians.)
Lumber unlike bells can be pre-produced.
+ all those 3 thigs are cumulative not a substitute.
So the issue is not that bad as it seems in the first place...


Now don't get me wrong: Im not trying to say that devoid of all other factors, for getting FFs (especially of the politica and exploration categories and to a lesser degree trade FFs) and especially politics-points, carpenters are the better choice than elder statesmen.
But, that the overall deal is netting out by far better. Makeing the Carpenter (+ Lumberjack?) the better deal for a given neutral game overall (which includes the very real possibility to throw in some politics-points as needed and then diverting those resources elsewere.).
Thats the reason why i say under current! conditions a qouta of 1:10 or 1:15 per bell whould be better balanced compared to the whole deal a carpenter delivers. Given one very important assumption wich makes the whole thing a bit more situational: Liberty bells having a huge drawback.

So its more diversity vs. specialisation.
And you can be sure at the start i favor diversity of a very desirable commidity instead of specialisation in a very situational and intangiable good that comes with quite a drawback (which besides political FFS might not even accomplish getting the FF you need faster depending on category. Unlike a carpenter.).
(Important additional thing to take into consideration. Im starting to find an early partial buy of a lumbermill incresingly attractive (equaling the insta-buy of 3 master-carpenters more or less even if reducing the cap in the long run.). Something i couldn't imagine doing with a printing-press early under any circumstance right now, let alone a newspaper. For obvious reasons.)

Thats the very reason why i find the overall opportunity cost (including the one base hammer) is a point for my argument of carpenter > statesmen not against it (since hammers are by far more versatile than bells or politcs points and because you can freely chose when and where unlike with bells to such a degree). In spite of what you say.
I hope its still possible to grasp all that long gibberish i write here. ;)

And the statesman agitating himself until he is really convinced beeing right and the king beeing wrong is big fun to picture. :p
To elaborate my point broader though, picture the following: 2 colonists of whatever profession argue long and broad in the council hall about politics (as opposed to one statesman agitating about politics) while the poor Carpenter (all the while cutting out some wooden tablets about politics for them... :p) has to listen to all that pestering arguments and is only slowly convinced. Now one day suddenly, those 2 colonists get fed up with wasting their time agitating that beleagered poor Carpenter and leave the city. Now that they leave him alone for some time to think about it, he suddenly gets convinced by their arguments and works better then never before (100 percent sentiment as well). Whould that work as well? (some minor food-issues aside which are fixable at least according to my experience)
So all i can see as an advantage in the statesman agitating himself right now is some safed food. At the price of half the yield of 2 colonists doing other jobs instead of 1. (So my point beeing that its not a real huge advantage to get an elder one until either you got 2 of those or you got 1 elder and 2 other colonists to spare for producing bells.)

All that said under the current! conditions. If things change, the base of all things i said change as well. So take with caution and a pinch of salt!


Sorry for the time it took. I think the most rought things are put out now. Happy commenting (and im sure i have missed some important things. Thanks for helping me understand the game better. :))


On the AI: i have my doubts about that one (again: Thats another possible glitch which i whould very much see beeing founded in a multiplayer oriented design for civ4:Col).

At least closeby AI can be finished of by either kicking in their door with soldiers or paying a few hundred gold to let the indians do that job.
Which should do more securely (heresay: Even on higher difficulties sadly. And the indians vs. early colonies seems like big REF vs. Mayflower pilgrims... ;)). So its the player not takeing the backseat here the AI very much seems to be unable to handle the military-part unlike in Col1 (but even there early AI closeby means dead AI closeby... :p).

Now that said we are leading sorts of an hearsay-argument here. ;) Which is fine by me.
Other players though are a much! different matter. (Now there the Europe-starting setup plays a huge! role. And the winning conditions might be different so the REF seems more or less moot there according to some posts in this forums here. Which whould make bells a way more viable thing there.).

But that said i don't care for competative multiplayer. A bit. (coop vs. AI is a different matter alltogether. But only if the AI is capable of anything in revolutionary.) If you do lean to competative multiplayer strongly, we speak of more or less different games anyways. Nothing bad in that. And at rare times i may venture into competative multiplayer as well just to have a peak. Still expecting few from it.
 
Wow that's quite a post! :eek:

I might not have extracted everything from it but here's a couple of points I got out of it:

Carpenters can get other points than political ones relatively fast. Yes this is true and it applies well to military points which you can't otherwise get without attacking someone in a war (until you can afford privateers). The other points beside political you get quickly.

Carpenters are more versatile and useful for different tasks, so it's good to get that setup early.
I strongly agree! However also consider that the 2 pops that are not needed to feed the statesman in his solitary work can be of any kind and used for anything elsewhere so there's plenty of versatility in that as well. Carpenters and statesmen are actually both a priority for me if they appear in the queue. I haven't bought statesmen from the specialist list in europe very early yet as a normal colonist generating bells have been enough on the difficulties I've tried (up to explorer) but I will buy carpenters early unless they appear in the dock queue.

However I would still probably prefer to have a colonist work in the town hall and use the carpenter to get necessary infrastructure up asap as the returns for the first couple of builds seems huge (wagon trains for transport/inland trade, docks for your coastal colonies and warehouses to effectivise trade or a church if you happen to random-draw a firebrand preacher).

I was mostly arguing about statesman vs carpenter from a pure pp generating perspective and trying to show that the statesman is vastly superior here in terms of speed productivity and cost on this very issue non of the others being counted. It would be kind of bad actually if he wasn't since that's his specialization!
Now the question becomes: Fine, but do you need this extra pp generating power and is the tradeoff worth it?
Well to that I guess we'll just have to wait and see and find out more about the game, also consider possible future patches.

I can certainly see, as I mentioned in my previous post, how high difficulty levels might require good bell generation if you want to grab some early FFs before the AI but the jury is still out on that one.

All military considerations of easilly conquering neighbours I try to leave aside a little bit in discussions since I'm pretty sure that it will either be fixed or I will quit playing this game since it's such a broken part of the whole experience.

Edit: Oh and yeah I'm talking single player only as that is what I play for this kind of game.
 
well that does exsplain why i get so many religious and trade and exsploration points early.
you see i buy muskets and horses and tools in europe and sell them to the natives for a quick start. and then i set up missions, because i need converts/crosses and happy natives.

If i had known that i would only build political points.
Thx for the info, it was really useful!
 
okay,

I sold 51 tons of cigars for 612 gold.

I started with 368 Trade Points. After the sale my points increased by 183. That is 1 point per 3.33 gold. I'm playing on Marathon.

this is different from 1/30 from the original post for normal speed.
 
The elements in question are:
iEuropeTradeGoldPointPercent (30)
iNativeTradeGoldPointPercent (15)

I think I missed the "Percent" part of the tag the first time around; though I am guess that this particular number is used as part of a more complex equation that results in your experience (I never tested the numbers just interpreted the XML). Maybe someone with SDK experience so look into how these tags are used?
 
that did it... it was 30%.
 
Hello everyone,

I am not as experienced in the game as you all seem to be, however I found that I often earn an elder statesman and a carpenter when rushing them as migrants on the first turn of the game. I only play at the easiest levels at the moment, so I guess that you don't have as much when starting at the more difficult levels.
 
Okay, so this is an old and inactive thread, but I'm trying out Colonization for the first time, so here goes anyway:

Where else could I be getting politics points? From the list in post 1, it appears that the only ways to generate them are with bells or turning hammers into them. I have done neither of these things, yet my total seems to be steadily rising, to the point I am being offered founding fathers round about the time South America is mostly explored (I'm playing the normal size Western Hemisphere scenario). What gives?
 
Your capital automatically produces 5 political points and 2 religion points per turn, regardless of whether or not you have statesmen or preachers employed.
 
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