Age od Discovery(world map)

Presently, things are working well on with my changes to get it to run properly on my laptop, but the turns are taking longer. I think that I need to cut down more on the Barbarians again, though. I will be shipping to the Netherlands my first Treasure from my Trapper Camp in Newfoundland, and will soon be shipping back Treasure from the gold in Cuba. I am at war with both the Inca and the Maya, and I have three Missionaries moving through the Amazon region, doubling as Explorers. So far, I have gotten one ship completely around North America, and she should be reaching port in Panama soon, along with one ship, a frigate, around Africa and across the Pacific, presently docked in Panama, soon to be heading to Antwerp to complete its Round the World voyage. I also sent a frigate completely around South America as well. The main area still to be explored is the Northwest Pacific, around Japan and China. I did get one explorer, promptly named Henry Stanley, completely across Africa, to meet the circumnavigating frigate, but lost him to the Barbarians on Java. THEY WILL PAY FOR THAT!

Victory point wise, I am still ahead of England, but it is close. I am hoping that the Treasure shipments will get me some breathing room. I will be putting them on an East Indiaman, and then escorting with a ship-of-the-line. There is a lot of highly aggressive privateers in the Atlantic.
 
Nexxo, this is a great start! I've enjoyed it very much. Played England & had a game crashing error in 1585: file not found Units\DutchFluyt\FluytRun.wav.

Some other notes:

-Most of the Great Wonders require a resource that England does not have access to. It's odd that England can't build Shakespeare's Theater or the Adam Smith wonder, especially since they were historically English.

-IIRC, the Great Wonders are all or mostly English ones. Perhaps you can find some appropriate wonders for the other civs.

-The European AI don't really found colonies. In my game, the French placed two colonies in Canada early on, but those were the only colonies I didn't found in 1585. The Native American civs & the French were the only ones to place new cities.

-Pollution is a problem. It was popping up all over England & Ireland. Perhaps it's intended to limit population, but it would be better to adjust food production rather than the player have to send Workers to fight pollution every turn. I didn't want to, or need to, build Mills because of the pollution already rampant & because I didn't really need more production.

-It seems very odd to have the Berbers in the New World with two cities in 1490... Looks like you did this to simulate the pirate havens. I think that if the Europeans can be made to actually colonize the Americas, piracy will follow. They are building pirate ships in Europe.

-The Medicine tech doesn't seem to do anything.

-Would look good if the civ color of England were red so the redcoats would actually have red coats.

By 1585, I had founded Cape Town, Bermuda & Savannah & was about to found Charleston. Was really enjoying exploring, fighting & colonizing until the game crasher occurred. Please keep up the great work!:goodjob:
 
-The European AI don't really found colonies. In my game, the French placed two colonies in Canada early on, but those were the only colonies I didn't found in 1585. The Native American civs & the French were the only ones to place new cities.

I am not having that problem in the version of the game that I am playing. The Portuguese have several colonies in North America, a one in the Caribbean, while the French, English, and Spanish all have a presence there. It might be a quirk in the starting RNG for the game.

-Pollution is a problem. It was popping up all over England & Ireland. Perhaps it's intended to limit population, but it would be better to adjust food production rather than the player have to send Workers to fight pollution every turn. I didn't want to, or need to, build Mills because of the pollution already rampant & because I didn't really need more production.

You can evade the pollution problem by changing the settings for Town and City in the General Settings menu. I have Town set for 9 and City for 21, with no ability except for Shakespeare's Theater to build a city larger than size 2. I use the hospitals solely as a basis for getting Battlefield Medicine.

-It seems very odd to have the Berbers in the New World with two cities in 1490... Looks like you did this to simulate the pirate havens. I think that if the Europeans can be made to actually colonize the Americas, piracy will follow. They are building pirate ships in Europe.

I simply took those out, with no problems for game play. I have privateers running all over the Atlantic, and I have yet to get a ship through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Med. I may change the setting of the Ship-of-the-Line to allow for some carrying of cargo so as to get treasure back to Europe as the Dutch. Running the gauntlet past England and France is a bit tough.

-The Medicine tech doesn't seem to do anything.

Make it the Tech Prerequisite for building the Battlefield Medicine Wonder if you wish it to do something, along with having the Wonder give a happiness boost to the building city and a smaller happiness boost to the rest of your cities.

-Most of the Great Wonders require a resource that England does not have access to. It's odd that England can't build Shakespeare's Theater or the Adam Smith wonder, especially since they were historically English.

I will have to look at the latest download to see why that is. I am not having that problem in the modified version of the first download that I have been playing. If you want to restrict who can build a Wonder, you can adjust the government type, or add a country-specific resource needed to build it. To limit the English Wonders to just the English, set the government type for building to Protestant Monarchy, and you would only be competing with the Dutch if you add the Colonial Nations resource as a building requirement. I did get tired of the Berbers building Luther's 95 Thesis so I took steps to limit who could build what.

-IIRC, the Great Wonders are all or mostly English ones. Perhaps you can find some appropriate wonders for the other civs.

There are 8 Great Wonders, only 3 of which are English: Shakespeare's Theater, Newton's University, and Smith's Trading Company. Three are Italian, the Sistine Chapel, Copernicus' Observatory, and Leonardo's Workshop, one is Spanish, Magellan's Voyage, and one is German, Luther's 95 Thesis. The Portuguese start the game with Dias' Voyage as a 9th Wonder.
 
If you want to engage in serious discover voyages, without having a lot of competition, as least in the game that I am playing, you want to establish one of your first colonies in the New World on the Isthmus of Panama, so as to have a Panama Canal. That is a much faster way to the Pacific than either going around Africa or South America, and you are also not taking steady damage from all of the Barbarian Pirate/Privateer Ships that you encounter. That also positions you well to attack the Aztec, Maya, and Inca.

I would recommend putting the Colonial Capital in Panama or in the Caribbean area, as that rapidly turns into a major competition area. I am playing the Dutch, and presently, I have the Spanish, French, and Portuguese with competing colonies there, with the English in North America. On the island of Newfoundland, I have two colonies, the French have on and the English have one. I am trying to figure out who to go to war with first, but France is on my southern border, plus the English Channel, and the English basically sit astride all of my sea routes back to the Netherlands. So, presently, we are staring at each other, waiting for someone to make the first move.
 
Nexxo, this is a great start! I've enjoyed it very much. Played England & had a game crashing error in 1585: file not found Units\DutchFluyt\FluytRun.wav.

By 1585, I had founded Cape Town, Bermuda & Savannah & was about to found Charleston. Was really enjoying exploring, fighting & colonizing until the game crasher occurred. Please keep up the great work!:goodjob:

If you can download the missing file and place it in the correct folder, you should be able to resume
your game from an auto-save.
 
timerover51, thanks for all the hints & advice. Very useful, but not in a scenario that crashes the game when the Dutch build a fluyt. It also sounds like you're playing a version that's very different from what's posted in the OP.

If you can download the missing file and place it in the correct folder, you should be able to resume your game from an auto-save.

Thanks. Does Nexxo intend to upload the missing file? Is the scenario dead? Am I missing something? This can't be played past about 1585 as is.
 
timerover51, thanks for all the hints & advice. Very useful, but not in a scenario that crashes the game when the Dutch build a fluyt. It also sounds like you're playing a version that's very different from what's posted in the OP.



Thanks. Does Nexxo intend to upload the missing file? Is the scenario dead? Am I missing something? This can't be played past about 1585 as is.

Sorry for waiting for answer and yes I will upload new version soon but now I'm very busy for next few days. You can fix the error by finding Dutch Fluyt in unit folder and go to INI file and delete sound for run which is reason why game crashed.
 
timerover51, thanks for all the hints & advice. Very useful, but not in a scenario that crashes the game when the Dutch build a fluyt. It also sounds like you're playing a version that's very different from what's posted in the OP.

I made some modifications to the game so as to get it to run satisfactorily on my older laptop. Major change was reducing the number of civilizations in the game, along with taking out their cities and road network, and reducing the number of cities of some of the civilizations. I did add one resource, Monument Stone, to limit who could build the Wonders to the European civilizations. I had to reduce the number of cities in order to allow for overseas trade, otherwise, the CPU overloaded trying to load the original version of the game. Right now, you need an Commercial Dock for overseas trade.

What I do not understand is why you are not seeing colonists in the New World. I have been running the game with several starts after making changes, and all of the Colonial Powers have been putting in colonies, some right next to mine. Have you done any exploration in South America or Africa to see if they are heading there?
 
After DLing this on May 21, I'm now going to re-DL to see the new version, but I highly recommend that you maintain a change log to let people know if you were having problems solved or not. I had to read through the whole thread carefully to see if the issues I noticed were already handled or not.

Other than the obvious ones like Persia zooming ahead and screwing with the VP, or inability to build a colonial capital in an actual colony.

I noticed there's still one massive issue that is unresolved right now: the length of the scenario and techs. No offense but slapping together a scenario from the pieces of another and then to set it onto a much bigger map without regard to balance isn't a good plan.

Corruption is extremely horrible even though you may have tweaked it. I do have one suggestion... either add a corruption improvement (aka courthouse) that is at something low like 15 shields or even add the reduce corruption flag to some that are already in the game. I for one would think Harbor deserves this flag even if it isn't the one that allows water trade. It plays well into the colonization theme, imho. I noticed the cathoic monarchy has a bad corruption rating (it even has a poorer rating than the islamic monarchy!), perhaps that govt's unique building - Jesuit college - should also reduce corruption (but increase the turns it takes for a new missionary to come out, no real need to have hordes of them out and around).

I feel that if since you had put up a scenario with a much expanded geography with nice complex interactions here and there: you really should have gone with a better tech tree and a solid turn limit. I mean, nice touch with the ottomans, the rest of the old world, seriously, I liked that. What I didn't like is that you didn't adjust the turn limit or the tech tree to compensate for the larger world. For me, there wasn't much of a point playing beyond turn 200 since there was so few more turns to go. The tech tree was pretty much well covered. Mind you, there was some techs still left, but once I got to commercial docks, mills, the like, etc.. there wasn't much of a point in putting the science slider above 0%. Especially since the AIs somehow had jumped from an average of being 3 to 6 techs behind me to a completely researched tree at the beginning of the final age. Before that, I was pulling in maybe 400gpt to 500gpt from outside by trading techs constantly. (I know, I know... way too easy when you drop down so low to a level like 'warlord', lol).

Anyway, one suggestion is marking a couple of key vital techs as untradable (maybe gunpowder/magnetism for ships or free-press for the colonist settlers?). That would create some bottlenecks for the AI-to-AI trading frenzy. Make sure those techs are properly marked though. My old biq promised water trade while the actual workings had it taken out.

As for geography vs turns, the world is way too big or the turns too few for my taste.
I don't know about you but reaching 25% (Although I was trying this with the old biq without an usable colonial capital) is rather a bit too far-fetched to get it done in just 260 turns. Granted, by now, the new biq is probably a lot easier to get it done with fewer barbarians and a colonial capital that can be used.

But still... the tech tree, the VP, turn limit, it was all based on a fairly limited map as Firaxis had intended it to be. I love your idea of expanding that conquest to the whole world, but those things needs to be adjusted to compensate.

One final suggestion: reduce the VPs given for a treasure down to 500 or even 300 per. It's too easy for an AI to hit the victory limit (I know you have Persia taken care of, but the colonists still could...). I know I would have felt cheated to be unable to reach 25% before somebody got 100k VPs. I haven't seen how the AI behave in the current version, mind you. So maybe 2/3 reduction is overkill. *shurgs* I'm only suggesting the VP reward reduction if you are upping the turn limit to something like 540 (you still can "cover" the general same era by changing the turns from yearly to 6-month per turn). Just an idea that depends on if you wanted a full fledged colonizing scenario that ends just about before the Age of Imperialism or more of a blitzkerg one.

I would like to still try to go for the 25% domination crown as a colonist-minded king. That's just my $.02 before jumping into the new biq now.
 
Thank you for your advices.
I thought to expand tech tree but there's no room for more then maybe few new techs which maybe could be in final era to improve tactics. Also I will reduce corruption and I did reduce world domination to 20%. Also I should reduce VP.

If you start play there is one error which I can't fix now about Dutch Fluyt sounds so go to the Dutch Fluyt folder and in INI file and delete run sound.

I will release new version in few days without errors.
 
Thanks Hmmm... Corruption can be reduced in different ways. I don't know which methods you would use.

There's one possiblity: Raise the optimal city number (I'm not certain which size would apply to custom maps, try setting them all to a higher number like 50 as so the numerous colonies won't bog down the whole empire).

I still recommend having some bulidings marked with Reduce Corruption flag. The harbor, if marked and reduced baseline cost to 30 down from 60, would serve a huge help for the new colonies dotting the coastline of the new world. It does make sense that coastal colonies were the easiest ones to maintain even well into the 1900s.

You don't have to tweak the cathoic monachy govt's corruption if you offer some goodies like exculsive mission stations that require the resource colonies (should be on the same tech with the missionaries and Jeusit Colleges). I recommend a maintence of 0 shields, 15 shields to construct, and possibly 1 culture. I think that would allow the prostant and cathoic govts to differnate between themselves more. Oh, one question, did you intend to turn off the missionary production in that JC city improvement? Because I noticed it's off right now in the new BIQ.
 
No offense but you sound like you are just taking my advice so freely like a robot. Advice is what it is. Not all advice fits your idea of how to establish a scenario. What I say does depends on if you agree that it helps your vision or it don't help as to what you think.

What I suggested, I do include a reasoning behind my ideas (perhaps just almost always, eek). I don't really mind if you reject my ideas, well with an explanation, preferably. :)
 
Sorry, I'm so busy that I don't have time to answer with explanation so I just say that I agree with corruption reducing with certain building and I did make mistake with Jesuit College in producing missionaries. Some stuff need to be fixed and I will be ready to upload new version.
And in this version VP goal is 500.000 so its hard for any civs to win on VP so I hope that civs will win mostly by domination which is 20% of world.
 
With respect to corruption, aside from juggling the government rating, I have a fair number of buildings set to reduce corruption in the standard building list. Generally, when I check on the AI, they have been building them as well. That, along with my boosted resources, makes the corruption bearable.

I tried setting the Colonial Capitol to function as the Forbidden Palace, but the problem there is the minimum number of cities requirement. As the Dutch player, that takes a while to meet. It is much easier for the English, French, or Spanish Player, and a little harder for the Portuguese. I think that the optimum spot for the Colonial Capitol is the Isthmus of Panama.

As for the Jesuit College auto-producing missionaries, that is pretty close to what happened. You had Jesuit missionaries in China and Japan, a lot contingent in Brazil, and then in the US Southwest. I simply set Luther's 95 Thesis to do the same thing.
 
Hang on, Nexxo, my question was: Did you wanted the Jeusit College to auto-prod missionaries, yes or no? I don't mind them doing that, as it's pretty good in historical sense.

I noticed you also restricted construction of JCs to the homelands. This holds some certain implications...

One: If you think about it, yeah the missionaries came from Europe to abroad, but would a player cart them? Space on those carvels are at a premium, so it's unlikely the missionaries would get to do much work in the colonies during the game. Besides, when producing units in the homeland, the players has access to superior units like the musketmen and cannons. As for the colonies, I already can use longbowmen to decimate the natives (while being escorted by some of the regular 3/3 pikes shipped from home).
Granted, the missionary unit would still be useful in the new world (including africa as well), but it would be a bother for me to ship missionaries overseas. In the old BIQ, while I was able to bulid those JCs anywhere, their cost were low enough for me to bulid in my colonies even without the help of the colonial captial. Since Jesuits were all over the world in history, perhaps the JC doesn't need to requre the ressiance resource in the first place. In any case, the missionaries were excellent free troops.

Two: Implication of being compared on the same footing with the other units. There's an issue of unit support though. I, for one, think the missionaries shouldn't require support because their role in the game according to their stats and the way they were auto-prod implies that they are secondary troops meant to be more of assists in finishing off weakened cities or fast raiders striking at lone targets. I wouldn't bother with JCs and missionaries on a large scale due to the limited unit support. The support would be better off given to prime troops instead. But if the missionaries don't need support, then they would be extremely dangerous in hordes, either for warring in Europe or overwhelming the natives.

Oh one interesting thing that has popped up in my games is that Portugal has been switching govts from Catholic Monarchy to whatever was available. In the old BIQ before you set the govts techs to era:none and untradable, it was normal to see half of Europe using Blood Cult (including Portugal ofc). In the current BIQ version that I have, Portugal switched to depotism. I can't think of any other reason why an AI would switch to the worst overall govt except for better unit support. Interestingly, the Dutch stays in their prostantism even though they have less cities. I believe the AI feels sated with the Prostantism while the AI would switch if they were in a small nation and starting in Catholism. HRE and Spain doesn't switch for now with my Ottoman game (but I did see Spain switching to Blood Cult twice in the older BIQ).

Possibly the other auto-prod in Portugal (explorer) could have further effect on its weakening unit support control. If I play Portugal, I can take care of it, but the AI isn't too bright on that end. In any case, while the missionary is venturing out for God, the explorer could be lusting for glory or gold, so it wouldn't be a far stretch to justify removing the support requirement for explorers as to say they were willing to go out into the dark on their own.

Besides in real life, exploration were either paid for by companies or by the king himself on a personal basis. That's one thing to consider for more techs. I would have to examine the history on colonizer enterprises a bit more deeply before suggesting specific techs, units, improvements, or wonders.

I suppose it would be interesting to play out partially what had happened in India but anywhere in the world.

Anyway, what do you think?

PS to TR51: Your idea is very unhistorical, just let you know. Martin Luther and many other important leaders in the reformation era didn't believe in the Great Commission applying to them, but rather to the early church. I don't remember exactly when but about 1700s sound right when the people (other than Catholic) finally started sending out missionaries. The 1800s was pretty much THE era of missionary work around the world. Maybe you could save the Prostantist missionary stuff until the companies come along in a late tech branch.
 
PS to TR51: Your idea is very unhistorical, just let you know. Martin Luther and many other important leaders in the reformation era didn't believe in the Great Commission applying to them, but rather to the early church. I don't remember exactly when but about 1700s sound right when the people (other than Catholic) finally started sending out missionaries. The 1800s was pretty much THE era of missionary work around the world. Maybe you could save the Prostantist missionary stuff until the companies come along in a late tech branch.

I am very well aware that it is unhistorical, having written a monograph for a church history professor friend of mine about the technology advances in the 1800s which greatly assisted the explosion of missionary activity during that period and since. I put it more in there as a "what if", although there was missionary work among the Atlantic Coast Indian tribes fairly early on.

As for the missionary unit, neither that nor the scout, or explorer, or the Conquistador, require support. As I see it, the Missionary would be sent out by the Church, and support comes from there, while typically the Conquistador paid the Spanish Crown for the right to govern any areas that he conquered or otherwise acquired.

I have not noticed the government switching that you mention, but then again, I have not been looking for it. I did notice that the English liked to try and build some of the New World Wonders until I required them to be built by a Blood Cult government, which for now, has eliminated that.
 
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