Congo UHV is ridiculous!!!

[G.Rulez]

UHV1: Acquire 15% of the votes in the Apostolic Palace by 1650AD

Solution - Get LUCKY and hope to enslave at least one of the first 2 Impis and then send that slave along the coast via Mali and the Moors to get in touch with Portugal, Spain and Italy. Mali and Moors also have to be BOTH alive for this to work. - Oh also you're most likely going to lose that slave when it comes back, due to barbs....

You then have to wait until Catholicism spreads to you. Oh, by the way, this never happened to me, by 1625, I was still not Catholic yet I had been in contact with Portugal and Spain since ~1480. There needs to be a fix for that!!! Like come on, how long do you have to be in contact with the Catholic civs until the religion comes to you, just like in real life when it happened...

UHV2: Gain 1000 gold through the slave trade by 1800AD

Solution - Sell ~15 slaves at 75 gold from around 1500-1800.

This is much harder than it looks, there are only 5 nations that want slaves (England, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain) and GUESS WHAT! Not even all 5 even want slaves. This is contrary to ACTUAL HISTORY where the slave trade was actually most active in the middle east and east africa, yet no other african nation, nor middle eastern nation wants to buy slaves, makes no sense???

Okay let's just pretend that the UHV is just about the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, which I can understand... IF THOSE EUROPEAN NATIONS WERE ALL ACTIVELY WANTING TO BUY SLAVES!!!!

You see, if a western euro nation doesnt have the colonisation civic, then it wont buy slaves. And when it does have it on then its rare for one of those nations to actually want to buy slaves... for more than 30 gold... They never have more than 30 gold on offer its so rare. Like why? If I sell slaves at 30 gold each... I'd need to sell 34 slaves to make over 1000 profit. Its about a 50% chance to enslave a unit, so i'd need to kill 68 Native units.... yeah not possible... unless you expand the possible enslaved units to include any unit on African soil (this would actually make MORE sense).

So in my game this is what the euro nations were in the slave trade:

Portugal - #1 Buyer of slaves, even before adopting Colonialism, then warred me because i wouldnt give mbazna away.
France - Did not want slaves at all, yet founded colonies in America, didnt have the Colonialism Civic running.
England - Wanted to buy slaves, but then a stupid Catholic Congress decided to stop trading with England... So yeah England was mad at me for over 100 years which is beyond ridiculous - I should of just declared war on England and made peace and I bet it would of been less than 100 years...
Spain - Liked to buy slaves but then after a while, just stopped. Its like Phillip II got bored after running them about in his farm.
Netherlands - They bought one slave....

UHV3: Enter the Industrial Era before anyone enters the Global Era

Solution - At the start of your game put your spy slider to 100% and then later on gift crappy cities to netherlands and germany and then spam your spies in those cities to do tech stealing missions.

Yeah thats just impossible... Firstly its just abusing game mechanics...

Secondly... It doesnt even work anymore! Netherlands and Germany dont want crappy cities in Africa and only Portugal will take them. And with the new tech layout its impossible to get your spy points up that high...

Other ridiculous stuff happened during that UHV... such as Portugal wanting Durban.... okay???? I dont believe Durban is next to one of these cities - (Sao Salvador, Quelimane, Muscat, Goa, Cochin, Malacca, Canton). Thats another thing that needs to be fixed - Tell us where trading companies are going to go. Dont say "France will get one city in South India" and then suddenly theres 15 units in IndoChina, like come on...

By the way, before you all ask. I played this in Heir mode. Normal Speed. 600AD Start.

Either way, its IMPOSSIBLE to do the Congo UHV

I get it - Who wants to play as the Congo in DoC. But come on.... at least make it doable. Whats the point in playing DoC if you cant even do a UHV in HEIR MODE...

 

[JHLee]

I get it - Who wants to play as the Congo in DoC.

Must confess, I actually have never played as Congo...

 

[star15389]

UHV1 is trivial if Catholic spreads early; UHV3 quite easy if you expand in Eastern and Southern Africa. Only UHV2 is hard and not because you can't get enough slaves but because the AI won't bother buying them, which is a bit of a problem

 

[Enyavar]

This could be merged into the existing Congo thread in the gameplay section, started by Fresol.

I also tried Congo and share the OPs opinion though I was less aggressive with it in my writeup.
Many civs have ridiculous UHVs in the current stable release 1.15, due to the tech tree mostly, but I guess these problems will be adressed and rebalanced in future releases. Anyway, I don't think we need new threads for every problematic civ.

 

[TJDowling]

I also agree. I've never managed to even become Catholic before UHV1 is up. The only thing I could think is IF Mali becomes Catholic (though it's usually Muslim)... maybe you could conquer one of their Catholic cities to jump-start the process but that seems like enough of a challenge in itself. The slave trade one is a definite problem with AI reluctance to buy slaves. I think I agree that the civs interested in buying slaves should be expanded to include the Islamic world though the Congo wouldn't have been involved in the East African slave trade. Barring addition of a Swahili civ this seems fine though.

I have to disagree about UHV 3 however, it seems pretty trivial to me if you have a few productive cities in East and South Africa.

I will add one criticism, I don't think the Portuguese trading company should get stacks against Congo... I mean, maybe just settlers in the region?

 

[JHLee]

I've always thought that there should be a pilgrim unit so you could send one to a city with religion and there the pilgrimcoukd transform into a missionary unit of one of the religions in that city.
If course the AI wont be able to utilize them (as they cant handle the persecutor) it would help the human player to achieve his/her goal.

 

[TJDowling]

I just went through (on settler) again and managed UHV1, it isn't that hard if you can make contact fairly early. I haven't finished UHV2 yet but I don't see how I could... partially because I made the critical mistake of joining the counter-Reformation ending trade ties with England, Netherlands and Italy, then Portugal declared war on me. But none of them seem to have more than 50 gold at a time which would require 20 slaves. Portugal offered a maximum of 75 gold twice. It's pretty unlikely that the 5 or so civs that want slaves would repeatedly have enough gold/interest to fill that quota.

 

[TJDowling]

Maybe there should be an Angolan independent city that Portugal could claim and if Congo conquers it then Portugal can attack Congo instead. But historically speaking did Portugal ever control the Kongo? Not really. Areas of present-day Kongo but not the river and the major part of the Kongo River basin. Portugal conquered Angola. So I guess we're just saying that Kongo and Angola are the same which is inaccurate. I think the Portuguese Trading Company should go after other targets. Independents in Africa or settling Brazil or South/Southeast Asia.

But I guess Angola was a vassal of Kongo, and so it represents taking a piece of the greater Kongo Kingdom.

 

[hnrysml]

The capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, and pretty much all the territory of Kongo, is in modern day Angola. The Portuguese introduced Catholicism to the region, and from the 1490s had a trading enclave at the capital, M'banza-Kongo. The Portuguese founded Luanda, the modern day capital of Angola and several other trading posts, but the former is only 500km from M'banza-Kongo, and with the way Africa is represented on this map, and even perhaps the new map, they could only be 1 (or possibly 2 in the case of the new map) tile apart.

Portugal didn't really have any actual sovereignty over these regions until the end of the 19th century during the partition of Africa by European powers, and shouldn't gain large armies to conquer the area, when historically, they weren't particularly successful in wars against the Kingdom of Kongo. However, the Portuguese gained the full benefit of trade and exploitation of these regions for many centuries, so it is important that their presence is represented in-game.

Despite this, the Kingdom of Kongo continued in some form or another until the 1960s.

 

[Orbii]

... However, the Portuguese gained the full benefit of trade and exploitation of these regions for many centuries, so it is important that their presence is represented in-game ...

These kinds of European colonial relationships have always been difficult to model in Civ4. Stuff like EU can get away with having super puny provinces which represent the European trading enclaves, but Civ4 uses the city as the smallest representation of influence and the current system needs to work with that. The current system is adequate but not perfect in modelling this, but you always get weird cases like the Congo and Southern China where this approach overrepresents European successes.

To add my suggestion towards the many before on how to better mirror this, perhaps an event chain is triggered like "Trade Concessions" which is similar to the current chain but instead of automatically taking over the city it would put a dummy building in the target city which funnels all trade routes in the city to the colonizing civilization? Perhaps also making all resources funneled to that city also go to the colonizing civilization? Not at all sure either thing is possible.

 

[TJDowling]

These kinds of European colonial relationships have always been difficult to model in Civ4. Stuff like EU can get away with having super puny provinces which represent the European trading enclaves, but Civ4 uses the city as the smallest representation of influence and the current system needs to work with that. The current system is adequate but not perfect in modelling this, but you always get weird cases like the Congo and Southern China where this approach overrepresents European successes.

To add my suggestion towards the many before on how to better mirror this, perhaps an event chain is triggered like "Trade Concessions" which is similar to the current chain but instead of automatically taking over the city it would put a dummy building in the target city which funnels all trade routes in the city to the colonizing civilization? Perhaps also making all resources funneled to that city also go to the colonizing civilization? Not at all sure either thing is possible.

Which could trigger a war on the colonized civilizations prerogative.

Also, back to the matter of this thread. In a few turns I've managed to get almost halfway to the slave trade goal by lumping my map in with slave trades. Turns out if you can trade techs and maps at the same time as slaves you still get the points. If I had been doing this all along it may have been more manageable.

 

[Enyavar]

You mean, you can (hypothetically) sell a slave and a tech together for 200 gold instead of the normal 50 gold, and then 200 gold are credited to the UHV2 ? Neat.

However, it would be even more neat if you could trade slaves for techs and get the gold equivalent of the tech. That way, you could sell 8 slaves for a tech and leap forward to UHV3 as well.

 

[TJDowling]

You mean, you can (hypothetically) sell a slave and a tech together for 200 gold instead of the normal 50 gold, and then 200 gold are credited to the UHV2 ? Neat.

However, it would be even more neat if you could trade slaves for techs and get the gold equivalent of the tech. That way, you could sell 8 slaves for a tech and leap forward to UHV3 as well.

Yeah it seems that you get the total gold credited even if you include more than just slaves on your end of the trade. But yeah if you could trade for techs and get the gold value of the tech that would be a less cheat-y way of achieving the goal if it were implemented.