Spanish, French, and British. in the scenario should I use events to boost the three major powers or just leave all five equal.
It depends on who the protagonist (human player) is. Im assuming youve set it up to have the human is able to play either of the three.
Usually you want to make the task of maintaining the empire a little more costly for the human than for the AI, so I would first suggest that you create an events file for each of the three powers (i.e. Britishevents.txt, Frenchevents.txt and Spanishevents.txt loaded using a batch file to make it more fluid). If you dont want to make the scenario that complicated, then youre going to have to be quite creative in order to prevent the human player from overwhelming the AI when playing a certain civ without making the AI too weak when it is controlling that civ.
One way of doing this is to use the Negotiation trigger. By Setting the talkertype= and listenertype= parameters to computer or human (the humanorcomputervalue allowing either to communicate) you can prevent certain civs from communicating depending on who they are controlled by.
So if you want to prevent the British from talking to the French when controlled by the human you would do as follows:
@IF
Negotiation
talker=British
talkertype=human
listener=French
listenertype=humanorcomputer
@ENDIF
A more sophisticated application of this trigger is to actually use it in relation to an action. In you case, perhaps if two computer players talk (or rather try to talk), you could trigger certain actions. For example, you could have the French receive gold from the Spanish (however unlikely
) and vice versa each time they try to talk. This would have the effect of making both richer only when both are controlled by the computer. (Note that the computer may attempt to talk to other civs often so keep the gold number low and dont use text so as not to make them too rich and not to annoy the player with continuous text messages.)
Example:
@IF
Negotiation
talker=Spanish
talkertype=computer
listener=French
listenertype=computer
@THEN
Changemoney
receiver=French
amount=2
@ENDIF
@IF
Negotiation
talker=French
talkertype=computer
listener=Spanish
listenertype=computer
@THEN
Changemoney
receiver=Spanish
amount=2
@ENDIF
Of course, you could just set the difficulty level higher and the AI will get production advantages anyway but my way allows you to give advantages to only certain computer-controlled civs rather than all of them.
I realise your question wasnt really referring to whether the human player were to control either of the civs but rather if and is so how to make the Colonial Powers more powerful. I figured that was just too easy since you can do this in any number of ways by giving them gold as you said or free units and tech or just placing special high-production tiles near their home cities.
In direct response to you your question: I would keep them all similar to start and then gradually carve out their respective roles via events. So, I would give each certain advantages at different timesaccording to historical strengthsin order to gradually force push each to build a different type of empire. For example, create Settlers via events in areas that have been colonized by certain civs. So, have an immobile Native Tribe unit block the Settlers coordinates. If the civ has not destroyed the Tribe before a certain turn, the Settler will not appear, thus colonization will take longer. (If you dont want the Native civ to be at war with the colonial civs from the start, you may have to change this event to meet those requirements you could always bribe the Native unit.)
At the same time, I would keep all CPs at a similar tech level (i.e. all European civs are at a similar level of technological development but not necessarily equal in infrastructure) primarily in terms of domestic tech but also generic military techs.
Another thing I'm wondering is how are you going to represent the Dutch people. By 1492 the heir to the throne of Spain was married to the heir of the duqate of Flandes, and the Netherlands didn't become formally independent of Spain until the XVII century.
Unless Alsbron QB has already thought of a way, I would suggest keeping a Dutch Settler unit trapped in some remote region of the map so that the Dutch civ can survive without cities and then create Dutch Rebel units at the appropriate time to rid themselves of the Spanish.
Or, if you dont want the two civs to declare war you can do the following:
a) design a powerful Barbarian air unit with the Destroyed after attacking flag set and give it only one movement so that it will run out of fuel if there is nothing left to attack;
b) create multiple such units next to the Spanish-owned Dutch cities as well as one weak ground unit;
c) once the cities are cleared, the Barbarian ground units will take the cities;
d) this will trigger the creation of Dutch units adjacent to the now Barbarian-owned Dutch cities;
e) the Dutch units will destroy the weak Barbarian defenders and take the city without having to declare war on the Spanish;
(I was experimenting with something like that in a Cold War scenario a while ago to simulate proxy wars without the superpower having to declare war, but I think it could work for the purposes of this scenario as well.)
Well, at the start of the modern age (1492) Portugal and Spain, for differents reason, were better suited than other countries to make an American/Asian empire. However, the initative moved North as the years passed.
If all the CP civs are playable, I would be careful with this because although it follows history, it can also result in the human player exploiting the Spanish/Portugueses initial advantage to the point where the scenario would deviate from history too much. With that in mind, I personally would only give the civs a bit of an advantage initially.
BTW Alsbron, how are you going to entice the player to achieve dominion? What are the incentives? Expansion alone just wont do it IMO; there should be additional challenges other than just unscripted combat, city building, scientific advancement and trade. This is where events really come into it. Frequent uprisings in the colonies, Barbarian piracy, trigger units (resources?)/techs, natural disasters (terrain changes, ships lost to storm units), etc. are a good way to get the player thinking about how to keep his empire functional though the use of strategies other than those used in the vanilla game. Its also a way of preventing players from getting bored.
P.S. Sorry for the long post.
).
): TURNINTERVAL and CREATEUNIT. And if you REALLY want to be nasty to the player, just have a new tribesman appear each time you destroy a tribesman! If you want them to stop 're-spawning,' just block their appearance square with an immobile foreign unit or change the terrain to Ocean (latter does not apply to air units). Simple but effective.
