My expansion stability is always 1 star with a down arrow. I keep trying different things and reloading. I try to stand pat. I try to conquor. I try to colonize. It just stays at 1 star with a down arrow.
I have resettlement. I have 3 cities in scandanavia, 2 in sounth africa, 4 in australia, 1 on solomon islands i guess, 3 on the western side of south america, 3 in canada, 2 in US. It is around 1650. My civics are the bottom ones (free religion, environmentalism, etc).
What should I be doing at this point? They are always telling me to expand and asking me to build settlers. Do I keep colonizing or what?
You've made the logical mistake of thinking that expansion means just that, expand as much and as fast as you can. Thing is, Rhye sort of thought that that would make this mod a tad too easy, so expansion takes a more ambiguous definition, you see, you can both underexpand and overexpand. Underexpansion means not expanding outside of your initial starting position too much, which especially for colonising civs like England is rather unhealthy. Overexpansion means you're placing too many cities in too many places too quickly, which is precisely what you're doing, my friend.
First off, don't listen to the messages that you have to build more settlers. That pop up's part of the default Civ 4 which doesn't taken the changes in RFC into account. Secondly, it's really not necessary to build so many new cities so quickly. And third and perhaps most importantly, is historical location. England, Britain, or the UK never settled in places like Scandinavia or the Western coast of South America. Settling here anyway will give you a stability hit, represented through expansion.
Now, this perhaps conflicts with the English UHV which is "build 3 cities on every continent by 1670" (correct me if I'm wrong with the date) That's the entire thing about the UHV, it gives it that extra challenge to balance out stability and be able of reaching the industrialisation/modernisation goal. I'll give you some tips on how to generally improve stability.
Civics can and do help, however, not in the way you'd always expect. The bottom civics aren't always the best for each civilization, and this is dependent on a bunch of factors. Small, technologically advanced empires thrive with the combination of representation, beurocracy, and caste system, while huge expansionist empires work better with a combination of police state, nationhood, and state property. There's an entire list of variables, which I hope someone can provide in this thread, and it requires some mixing and matching to get it right. Regardless, as a colonising nation, I'd suggest definitely using the Resettlement civic once you have Astronomy.
Also, another tip, certain buildings help with stability, which is especially handy if you're going to go for the entire large empire thing. Courthouses and jails are the two most prominent examples, but I believe intelligence agencies and several other buildings did the same. Wonders also add to stability, so if you have the capability to build a few that'll help you without it taxing your general empire-building too much, it can also give a handy boost.
Hope this already helped a bit. This mod really is pretty complicated, isn't it?
