Conquering civs on other continents with Colonial expenses

[MrFrodo]

How do people deal with this?

In my current game there are three big continents. I'm alone on one after destroying the other inhabitant early on, the largest has 3 civs and the other 2 civs. I went to the 3 civ continent and started conqeuring it. Took out the first civs in a few turns, the second was spread out and took longer. I needed to take a break after the second to regroup and I was thinking go back to researching a while to get to the next big upgrade (Modern Armor), but it turns out the colonial maintenance on the cities I captured have left me pretty much bankrupt. For instance, I captured Madrid early in my conquest and it alone has 100g of colonial expenses. There is no way I can do any research. I set all my non-production cities to Wealth and Research, but that wont keep me going long.

I could have gone for Spaceship and won this game. But I wanted to try for a conquest/domination win. Will I need to use a Pangea map if I want to do this, or is there other strategies for dealing with colonial expenses? I was thinking:

1) Maybe you are supposed to have all research stop when you go to war. So you need a big enough head start in research to be able to just produce the units to conquer all your rivals?

2) Maybe it is possible to raze most of the cities in your path, maybe just keeping a few strategic ones for air strike access or other stuff?

3) Maybe you just form colonies knowing they will be easy fodder later? seems painful.

What am I missing?

 

[Alsn]

Some solutions:

A) Play the HRE or Zulu(for the 75% and 70% maintenance discount respectively) and build a forbidden palace or versailles central on a conquered continent.

B) Make said continents into colonies(colonies are your vassals, meaning they add to your domination "stats").

C) Just make enough gold that it doesnt matter.

Im sure there are other ways, but those were the ones i could think of. But yea, as you say you could just raze them all and go for conquest instead of domination(although that could be some major pain on the bigger maps).

Edit: Also, vassals arent included in the civs you need to conquer, as soon as every other known civ is your vassal then you will win(either by domination from sheer land mass/pop or by conquest since there are no rivals left in the game).

As long as your "home" turf is big enough that people will never outgrow vassalization then just force them to capitulate instead of conquering them entirely.

 

[MrFrodo]

Some solutions:

B) Make said continents into colonies(colonies are your vassals, meaning they add to your domination "stats").

Edit: Also, vassals arent included in the civs you need to conquer, as soon as every other known civ is your vassal then you will win(either by domination from sheer land mass/pop or by conquest since there are no rivals left in the game).

As long as your "home" turf is big enough that people will never outgrow vassalization then just force them to capitulate instead of conquering them entirely.

Really? I thought you had to conquer them and that their land didn't count into domination. I was exerimenting with this last night after trying to turn the cities I conquered in the big continent into a vassal colony and the page that keeps track of the possible winning conditions counted my vassals as rivals and my dominated land mass went down after granting granting the new colony my conquuered cities.

 

[facistal]

50% of their land and pop count towards your totals - its in as effecient as keeping it all, but you will get there eventually.

I actually like the new system. In my recent games I have been seeing a lot more tangled diplomatic webs late and even AI colony vassals breaking free and then declaring on their former masters. The Agg AI helps with this too.

The other good thing about colonies as opposed to regular vassals is you can demand ALL of their resources, instead of just one.

 

[Tennyson]

1) Take 3 cities on their continent. Make Colony.
2) Take another city on their continent. Liberate to add to Colony.
3) Repeat 2) until enemy is gone.
3a) Repeat 2) until enemy capitulates.
4) Repeat 2) against new enemy.


edit: As for space victory, I think that's usually the most sure route unless you can conquer everybody before the modern age already.

 

[NaZdReG]

Mr Frodo,

for me it depends on the circumstances. if you are playing continents or hemispheres where you are only looking at 2 landmasses than it is fairly straightforward:

step 1, conquer your entire continent
step 2, increase production (I use creative constructions personally to hurry production of forge, factory, etc) prepare for war while you tech to:

FLIGHT.

step 3. build airports in all of your cities, while doing this prepare a naval invasion force (12 tanks or so)

step 4. find a weak city on the other continent to sneak attack, creating a heavily defended beachhead. make sure you airlift 1 unit per turn while the city is coming out of revolt

step 5. use an great engineer or rush buy an airport in your beachhead city.

from here you should switch most of your production over to tanks, modern armor, mechanized infantry etc. begin arilifting 10+ units per turn into your beachhead.. with the goal of 50+ units there.

attack, taking 4 cities within 2 turns. continue to mass airlift into your beachhead city. modern armor is best for multiple attacks and strength.

do not let up on your assault. when the targeted civ runs out of cities immediately DOW on their neighbor. keep rush buying airports at the fringes of your conquest and continue to produce piles and piles of modern armor.

I put up a chart of corporation costs, and a discussion thread where I disclosed using this strat to end the game.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=238093

hope it helps

NaZ

if you are in continents you should hit the domination cap well before your econ crashes. if you run into trouble begin building wealth in some mid level production cities at home.

 

[MrCynical]

I have to say that colonial expenses are such a tiny drop in the bucket compared to corporation costs (and profits) that it's something of a mystery to me why anyone founds colonies, unless its boredom with managing large numbers of cities. The maintenance saving never counterbalances the loss of resources and control.

 

[LlamaCat]

colonial expenses can be huge - they have eaten up about 80% of my total budget in some games, if you have several cities on one separate landmass. corporations are complicated and come so late in the game that they are not relevant in many games. they can be great, but not in every game because they rely on very specific conditions to be beneficial enough to compensate.

MrFrodo if you want a conquest victory on this map type I would just raze most of the cities, but you have to make sure the remaining civs don't sneak a settler or two back into those lands. and build courthouses first and foremost in the few cities you do keep - 50% reduction in maintenance is even more valuable if the colonial costs for a city are very high.

I would also suggest using slavery for a few turns to whip down the population on those captured cities to quickly build the courthouses and at the same time this reduces maintenance.

 

[MrFrodo]

colonial expenses can be huge - they have eaten up about 80% of my total budget in some games, if you have several cities on one separate landmass. corporations are complicated and come so late in the game that they are not relevant in many games. they can be great, but not in every game because they rely on very specific conditions to be beneficial enough to compensate.

MrFrodo if you want a conquest victory on this map type I would just raze most of the cities, but you have to make sure the remaining civs don't sneak a settler or two back into those lands. and build courthouses first and foremost in the few cities you do keep - 50% reduction in maintenance is even more valuable if the colonial costs for a city are very high.

I would also suggest using slavery for a few turns to whip down the population on those captured cities to quickly build the courthouses and at the same time this reduces maintenance.

Thanks for the replies. I'm seeing how this all fits together now. I was not aware how vassals/colonies work (RTFM I know). I had not built up a corporation yet. I had meant to get Sid'd Sushi going per MrCynical but poor planning, an unwillingness for a Great Merchant to spawn, and only one civ (my Vassal) not having Mercantilism or State Property delayed that beyond when I wanted to start conquering, i.e. when I was about to get tank and had a buildup of attacking units a lot more advanced than my first target. After conquering two civs and wiping them off the map colonial expenses were 90%+ of my expenses. My expenses were something like 940g, 880 was colonial expenses. 100g alone from Madrid, the capital of the first extra-continental civ I conquered. I have not mastered the Economic aspects of the game yet But I am now spreading Sids to foreigners via espionage infuencing civics and quickly inserting my executives, and trying to figure out how to make the extra food work for me at home.

Anyway, I started a colony on the largest continent, they are also Persian, Cyrus is the leader (I guess that would be the son letting his Dad take over a colony ). Now I'm warring with the Indians on that continent. Once I have decimated their civilization enough so they can't grown back to independent levels I will have them capitulate and those two vassals will share the large continent. Meanwhile I'll try to conquer the final continen'ts two denizens with Modern Armor and start a vassal colony or two over there to get a conquest win. I'll whip out courthouses on whatever beacheheads I do keep. At least that is the plan ...

Then I'll up the difficulty and start trying to win at harder levels with all the knowledge I got on these boards

 

[mike p]

State Property won't eliminate the colony penalty, but it will eliminate the distance from a palace penalty, which will help some as well.