Game too shallow to even bother with strategy

[Kiershar]

I really tried to like this game but it just seem to me, there's no use trying to develop strategy for it. Whatever you do will net you with a win unless you gives chances to the computer. It is so easy to abuse the native and european AI that i feel to play fairly i need to put no one else than me on the map. And even if you do leave them to thrive alone, they eventually suicide by DoI, with nearly nothing to defend. Its actually an advantage to have rivals; Can it get any more badly designed?

So i put myself alone on the map with no tribal villages and play the game. Quickly I realize it all goes down to a single thing you must do : Build a city with an arsenal and a university then pump out Elderstatemens.

All you need is 4 fish, 3 hills and 4 forests. Nothing else. The only strategic depth is how you will be making money to buy specialists and you'll be fine with just a 2-4 unspecialized workers.


No thinking, no strategy, no variations. No fun.

 

[Smak]

Multiplayer is a completely different game, you should try it.

Most noobs play vanilla single player marathon when they first buy the game thinking it will be like civ4 and its just not. Quick games are the best way to play. The only thing resembling research in this game is founding fathers. Things cost more in marathon but since you are dealing with larger numbers of goods per transaction the only difference is that you need more turns to mine/smith, build, or travel to europe and back. But gold gained selling to indians and gotten from treasures you scouted or conquered are worth 3x as much as normal. So if you just get the founding father that cuts trips to europe in half and peter who makes units in europe cost 25% less you are able to min max by trading with and scouting indians. I have actually met players who call this thier economy. Its not an economy its just free gold and market speculation. An economy involves generating goods or services in exchange for value.

And of the noobs that try multiplayer they find life rough when i set game to quick and turn off ruins. They not only get a fraction of the gold when meeting indians they also can only transport 1/3 of the goods at a time to trade with indians. Making scouting a purely exploration thing to generate experience and find enemies and not so much a cash cow.

Anyway i dont see why they call single player games strategy games. Since altho you may have to develop a strategy to defeat your enemies its actually more like finding the weakness in that the ai's inability to change its strategy opens loopholes that you can exploit to your advantage. If the game reacted and learned from what you did in previous games then i would call it a strategy game.

So try multiplayer and you will find its much more fun when a thinking opponent suprizes you with an attack you never considered.

 

[Kiershar]

I tried playing multiplayer, but the couple times i went to check, there was no game hosted at all and barely a page of games being played. Considering that was on a Saturday afternoon, it is pretty disapointing. Actually the only reason i played single-player was to learn the game so i could move to multiplayer.

I used to play a lot of Civ4 online (you can probably see my Multiplayer Warmongering Guide in the War academy) and I was hoping to have fun with this new game. I never even played one game of CivColonization multiplayer but i have a very good idea of what its gonna be like: All luck and abuses.


Things like people using their first 500g to make a cannon and go raze someone with an uncounterable amphibious assault.

People are probably not even caring about independance. Just city razing until everyone quit or dies.

The starting location flaws from Civ4 multiplayer are even more deep : way too luck-dependant. Often you can't have a second city without having to take the chance of war with natives. Sometimes there's barely fish while other spot has 3. Not enough forest/no enough hills. Even worse you could be 6-7 square from Europe tile. Middle of map (often jungle) very poor compared to the top and bottom.

Rushing a privateer and losing it to a merchantman or caravel. So much ressources and time invested in pumping out the privateer and you have to be lucky not to lose it in the first attack...

I don't think anyone can justify this gigantic flaw. All your initial gameplay (maybe an hour online) can be wasted just because of the random factor of a SINGLE battle. ~Kudos to anyone justifying this without wrecking their own intellectual honesty.

 

[Kiershar]

Oh and don't even get me started on the founding fathers -_-

Only 2 are actually worth something and i bet people rush them in the first 40-50 turns. You sell for 1000 gold of cargo and you have enough trade points. You explore 2 turns with your starting ship and you won't need exploration points ever again.

Then you just pop your citizen to make bells wich gives 15 points per turn. Do until you get Peter Minuit and that exploration founding father that reduce by 1 turn the europe trips. That's it. Rest are nearly useless for their cost.

And I'm sure that as soon as someone gets Peter Minuit, the other guys that were rushing him just quits. That is, if the guys rushing peter Minuit did not get rushed by canons! Then the guy that got Peter Minuit buy cannons and rape those that haven't quit yet. Awesome!

Founding fathers are just like civ4 wonders. Most are worthless; Only a few early wonders are worth it and most often becomes pretext for people quitting if they don't get it first.

 

[Smak]

First of all you missed my point completely, i was saying that single player sucked so bad that most noobs dont even graduate to multiplayer games. And yes 99.99% of players will play single player before multiplayer to get a fell for the game mechanics. When they find they cannot win without adhering to convoluted tactics in single player to reach independance (since there is no conquest option in single player) they just give up and never try to win that style of game in multiplayer.

But if you play multiplayer you will find out that not only is independance a goal most never try to reach, but there is also a settlement elimination limit value that can be set to change the game into a conquest/domination victory.

And as to all your whiny complaints about potential exploits, which arent exploits but game mechanics designed as intended, most multiplayer games that arent full of noobs will set parameters to each game and agree on them at the start. Such as an intial peace treaty, or banning amphibious attacks alltogether, or making it off limits to pick peter minuiet for a founding father.

As to the founding father that lowers time to europe by 50% hes pretty much useless unless you are playing dutch since almost every multiplayer game is set to quick speed. So it takes one less turn to travel? big deal, you still need to generate goods to sell and that takes alot longer than 1 or 2 turns.

You say most founding fathers are useless but thats very wrong. I can think of a few that are useless but most of them have some role to play in a specific strategy or to min max benifits with a specific leader. I will say that the father that shows you where ruins are is a pile of . .. .. .. . since every multiplayer game i host has ruins turned off, unless someone specifically requests ruins to be on and then i let the players vote on it to decide.

So your only valid argument is that no one was in the lobby when you wanted to play multiplayer. And thats pretty standard, there is usually at least 1-3 games running at any time and on heavy days there are about 10 games running and about a dozen in the lobby. But you will rarely find that many in the lobby since most people are playing the game not sitting around. I will try to wait until 4 people show up to play but if i can only find 1 or 2 others we start without them. And if no one is in lobby i just do something else and check back in a few hours.

I suppose you just wanted to join on the hate band as there are already several dozen threads like this one with new players who arent skilled enough to beat the single player or new players not courageous enough to try multiplayer who just want to poke fun at the vanilla game mechanics and troll on.

But i disagreed with the original posters statement of: "No thinking, no strategy, no variations. No fun."

If you judge the game from a multiplayer perspective its a very well made game. Sure there are some things i would change if i could but im not a modder.

 

[Kiershar]

If you judge the game from a multiplayer perspective its a very well made game.

I beg to differ, Civ4 did NOT need artificial rules to make the game viable.



Obviously from all the post you made about multiplayer you really play it alot. I particulary like the parts where you say to just head to europe right at start and change your colonist in dragoon and just go attack people.

Personnaly, i think this is very close to griefing. You're not even trying to play the game, just crushing helpless people.



I don't even want to start to argue with your flawed view-point. You are raving about how some founding fathers are useless and some are very good while just before you are talking about how you put artificial limits on getting Peter Minuit...

As for my one and only "valid argument" you are very quick to dismiss my personal experience with your OWN much more valuable experience?

Don't even bother replying, just go on with your "noob" bashing schedule.

 

[Kiershar]

Oh im not done, im particularly puzzled by this post of yours :

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=306024



What do you do if your first dragoon die? Suicide all your stuff and keep making a single dragoon to grief people? Rage quit?

And then you say the best counter against your "Turn 4 here come my dragoon HAHA!!" strategy is to be the dutch and get a frigate or privateer?!

HOW DID I NOT THINK OF THIS BEFORE? What a clever counter.

 

[Smak]

The post you linked is a follow up to this post:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=302418

And to answer your question "what if your initial dragoon dies"

The answer is he NEVER WILL, EVER on the first attack or any attack.

And that answer just generates the new question "Why will your dragoon be invincible?"

And i am forced to respond with the following:

As i detailed in those threads the tactic involves using jose of spain. Some basic education for those who dont know what that means; Jose is a leader that makes promotions cost 50% less. And spain is a country that has 2 distinctions, #1 they get a 25% combat bonus when fighting indians and #2 they get get a veteran soldier at the start of the game.

Now lets play with some math shall we?

Dragoons base str is 4, veteran dragoons start with veteran 1 and leadership, veteran 1 gives 10% str bonus, leadership gives 100% more exp per kill, and when you attack from a caravel to land you take a 20% negative modifier to str.

Indians have a base str of 2 and all thier standard innate abilities give them bonuses when ATTACKING not defending and only when attacking marsh, jungle, forest, and light forest. Each indian tribe also gets 2 random promotions that depend on their leaders traits. Some of the promotions are mountaineer, minuteman, formation, ranger, grenadier ect. So unless the tribe has formation or minuteman they really wont have any surefire bonuses when defending. I typically make my games in multiplayer with montezuma and mangas coloradas as the only two indian tribes. They are the two that have formation and minuteman and i do this because it will make it even harder for those not playing spain to deal with the indians militarily. But assuming you are comming up against the toughest unit they have and that is a 2 str indian with formation and hes fortified, thats a total of 150% str or in other words 3 str vs your dragoon.

And the dragoon will have a total of 115% str out of 4 str that is 4.6 str.

Conclusion: 4.6 str will beat 3 str defender 99.9% of the time.

There is a chance he could lose but its very small, and if he does lose then there is a chance he will withdraw with low hp and not die since he is a dragoon and they have innate withdraw bonus.

Now we are past math and going to enter hypothetical situation realm...

Assuming you lose the fight with that 0.1% chance to lose you will be able to disband all units and instantly a fresh veteran soldier and pioneer will spawn in a new caravel, while your tax rate goes up one notch.

So you get delayed by about 3 turns or so when/if you ever happen to lose that initial fight.

OK now for part two, the amount of exp you gain from that kill.

Assuming you get 1 exp per kill normally you would be getting 2 exp because you are using a veteran unit that has the leadership skill, and since your promotions cost 50% less to buy you are in effect getting the same as 4 kills worth of promotions from that single kill. After the first turn the math changes because of the fact that promotions cost more after each one so its a mathmaticly plottable curve with dimishing returns in the future.

But here is what you tangibly get from that first kill, you get 2 or 3 promotions since the amount of exp you get per kill has some randomness to it. That value of one exp i quoted before was an assumption since i dont know the real value. I do know that you get 2 or 3 promotions from your first kill and the next turn you can use them to heal up your unit and give him grenadier 2. That gives him an additional 45% bonus when attacking cities, and he will seem even more invincible as you keep getting more promotions.

And to your last statement about me offering competing strategies to my own idea, well i only did that because i am not getting alot of replys to my guides. Im also not afraid of any noob reading my guide and then owning me in gamespy. Since it takes some skill to execute complicated strategies and counterstrategies without leaving yourself exposed in another area.

And no you do not even need to play dutch to get a frigate fast, you can get a warship with any leader to destroy the caravel that is holding the indian slaughtering dragoon before it becomes a serious threat. And then even if the dragoon takes out your city you still have all the gold you traded for along the way and a ship to get more gold with. You will get a navy to sink that dragoon and then you will not only have a ship to blockade/lockdown his trading but you will likely have left over gold and colonists out scouting and in europe from immigration.

Now could you tell me what is so puzzling about these threads to you?

quote: "im particularly puzzled by this post of yours"

I know its hard for you but with my guidance maybe you can learn something new instead of just bashing me calling me a griefer and quitter when i am not either. I play my games to the finish and i dont consider any type of warfare to be griefing if you are playing a game without an initial peace treaty agreed upon at the start.

 

[Kiershar]

I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. But thanks for proving my point anyway.

 

[WumpusCivName]

yo, Kiershar! seems to me the game's still very new for others that you find a hard time getting opponents at this time. maybe if you give it a little while, the others could pick up their interest in their own time, and you'll get some lively games going by then. but no--sorry--I don't play multiplayer myself; I prefer to play alone with the difficulty level raised a bit. take care o'yourself, hear?

 

[Wheldrake]

First of all you missed my point completely, i was saying that single player sucked so bad that most noobs dont even graduate to multiplayer games.

I very much disagree, the single player game doesn't suck. But it is greatly improved with mods like Dale's AoD2 mod. There is a real race between garrisonning your cities quickly enough and the danger of a native power declaring war. The enemy European powers build up much more effectively and are not easy to eliminate. Taking an enemy city defended by soldiers almost inevitably requires sacrificing one or two dragoons, and canons' attack bonus has been eliminated, reducing their usefulness to bombarding in order to reduce the defense bonus so your dragoons have an easier time of it.

While some of the founding fathers in the basic game are overpowered, and others are underpowered, AoD (which now integrates the Land of Our Fathers mod changes to FFs) re-juggles the founding father situation, making for a lot more varied game results.

Try it. It ain't a cakewalk. It's what Civ4Col *should* have been like out of the box. You can criticize the game designers for delivering a sub-standard product, but with this mod, most of the shortcomings are brought up to speed.

Cheers, --- Wheldrake

 

[Tijgersag]

I agree. The AoD mod fixes a lot in terms of getting the feel of the old game, blending it with modern ideas from Civilization and I find playing 3 times more enjoyable then I did before I installed it. There's more happening.

I just started playing this game and, after initially hating it, I LOVE the game. I think it's silly to compare Colonization directly to Civilization coz so much of the mechanics and feel of the game is different. It's much more about economics then empire building and I love that. It's also the reason I prefer slower games myself. I am one of those 'noobs that plays marathon' (with the AoD mod) and there IS a strategy in that. You have to think both longterm and short term at the same time like when reacting to an unexpected attack. For instance: A ship of the line is an expensive investment that takes years to build and the war might be over by then.

I think playing different nations offers a challlenge too and not killing the indians maybe and living one with nature. it's a shame you can't build bows and arrow really.. ;-)

Achieving goals are nice but journey is always far more interesting!