BtS Archepelago = dead map?

[popejubal]

Looking at the Colonial expenses made me think of a potential problem. You get enormous additional expenses for having cities on another continent. In an Archipelago map, you can often fit only 2 or maybe 3 cities on your continent.

That means the game is essentially going to be decided by who has the most land mass and not by who plays the best game. Is Archepelago a dead map now (aside from One City Challenge) or can the Colonial expenses be turned off somehow?

I don't relish the idea of trying to take over the world without founding more than 1 city off of my home continent. Especially if I don't start with fat juicy resources. Versailles and Forbidden City don't help with this either.

 

[InvisibleStalke]

Unless I am playing tiny islands I can usually get 6-7 cities which is enough. Even with tiny islands I doubt that the maintenance costs would stop you getting to at least that many cities before they become crippling.

But I think an archipelago map could be tremendous fun - what if you played it as a leader of a vast coalition of colonies? By directing their research and trading efficiently you could probably keep a reasonable tech rate (the AI suffers from the same problems).

Settling your great people and making a super city would probably be very important and useful if you are only going to have a small number of cities. Letting your colonies defend you and help out with research etc should make most victory conditions still viable.

 

[Random Oracle]

The colonial expenses only start to go up when you have several cities on the same land mass (where your capital is not located). As an example, I have colonized several islands with only 1 or 2 cities and the colonial expenses are miniscule, something like -0.30. I haven't done further testing to discover at what point the costs start to really ramp up.

 

[scooter]

Actually, a Terra map would be much much worse (I would think), since the costs go up based on how many cities are on the new landmass.