Can you help with my questions, please?

[bluerunner6]

I am a happy to report... I have joined civilization! GOG was incredibly easy to download and find the files.


I have a question about colonies in civ 3... something I never even realized existed when I played this as a kid. If this isn't the right place to post my questions, let me know and I can repost them elsewhere but I was wondering 5 things about them:

1. When are you able to build them?

2. Can they be built side to side?

3. By connecting a road directly from a city to the colony, the city gains the ability to trade or use the resource they are built on only when that resource is outside of the city fatt cross, correct? (coal / rubber / iron / incense / game / gold / silk / etc?) -- also is there a distance limit for a colony from the city?

4. Do they only give the city access to the resource they are built on or do they give access to any resource directly around in an "X" shape, so 5 squares, or do they give the city access to any resource in all squares around the colony in a square shape, so 9 squares?

5. Is there any benefit if there are multiple of the same resource within the colony range (assuming it has more than a single square range)? And what happens if there's more than one city connected to a single colony by multiple roads?

Thanks again for all the help

 

[tjs282]

1. As far as I remember, you can build Colonies from the start of the game -- though at that point, your very limited numbers of Workers will likely have far more important jobs to do!

2. If you mean, can you build 2 Colonies on adjacent tiles, then yes. But only Luxury resources cluster like that; Strategic resources are (apparently?) never found next to other resource-tiles on randomly generated maps, and Bonus resources aren't Colonisable.

3. Yes, the whole point of a Colony is to allow you to access a resource which still lies outside your borders. Once your borders have expanded over a Colony (via Culture, or because you planted a town nearby), the Colony simply turns into a road. There is no distance-limit as such, but the longer the road from your border to your Colony, the less secure it is: more likely to get cut by a Barbarian, or occupied by an AI-Civ.

4. Only the Colonised resource(-tile) becomes usable. If there are other Lux-resources on adjacent tiles, they will also 'need' Colonising to become usable.

5. A single Strat/Lux resource(-tile) is sufficient to supply all towns which have a valid "trade-route" connection to it, across your entire empire. The value of having more than one instance of any given resource under your control is the utility of monopoly: having excess resources available to trade with/ pay off the AI Civs -- or to deprive them of access to those resources

 

[justanick]

Yes, the whole point of a Colony is to allow you to access a resource which still lies outside your borders.

If reasonably possible a resource should be within your borders. Thus under normal circumstances you will need no colonies. Simply connecting resources with your trade network does suffice. Build a road on the resource and connect it to a city that is preferably connected to other cities including your capital and cities that have ports to trade via water.

 

[kaskavel]

Keep in mind that colonies are a quite rare feature in practice. Most times, you are better off just settling the land. There are some cases you need the luxury/resource so much, that you are willing to sacrifice a worker in order to get it for some rounds until the settler comes in/the borders expand/the workers finish the roads. There is also a very rare case (has happened to me once, has seen the AI doing it one more) that the resourse is in multiple mountain tiles terrain and cannot be collected in a reasonable timeframe. Also, useful some rare times when you want to abandon/rebuild a city and do not want to break a trade agreement.

 

[tjs282]

If reasonably possible a resource should be within your borders. Thus under normal circumstances you will need no colonies.

While this may well be true for optimal, min-maxed play on unmodded, high-difficulty, fully-populated Standard-size maps, it doesn't actually answer any of the OP's basic questions about how Colonies work, i.e. what they're hardcoded to do.

Because, you know, not everyone has a burning ambition to win the game at DG/ Deity/ Sid...