Huge Western Hemisphere Scenario

Hrafnkell

Alheithinn
Joined
Oct 3, 2004
Messages
788
Location
The Beltway
I recently got this game as part of the Civ IV Complete package. It unfortunately came without documentation - not even a mention of it in the Quick Start Manual and no accompanying pdf file on the disk. So I tried playing a couple of games to get a feel for it. It was one of my favorites in its original incarnation but I'm entirely new to Civ IV.

I love huge maps, so I decided to try the Huge Western Hemisphere Scenario. I took a quick run-thru with each nation just to see what their attributes are and how they work, and discovered something a little off-putting: the English and French start their ships right off the South American coast along with everybody else. If you try to start a colony in North America, you doom yourself with 10-13 turn trips to the "Europe box" and then another 10-13 turns back. If you start a colony at the NE tip of South America, you can go back in forth in 1-3 turns. It seems a huge advantage to start your colony in South America, and I've noticed that most everybody does, so it gets kind of crowded.

Is there an easy fix for this, to change starting locations? Uff da!

Finally, I tried a strategy here as the Spaniards, on the Huge Western Hemisphere Scenario, and I found out the hard way that some of these Native tribes are huge. I got my butt handed to me in a basket. It was fun though. I got my first leader and he won some glory for Spain before dying in a jungle ambush. I admit I pursued the wrong strategy. I tried to capture and garrison the villages captured when I should have simply gone from one to the other and destroyed them all. I don't know what you have to do to make a tribe surrender since I don't have access to a rule book and haven't had time to adequately explore all the material here.

My next game (on the same map) I tried the French. Now I finally got enough liberty bells to rebel and finally got to witness the king's reaction. Terrifying the weight of material descending on my shores. I had thought I was well-prepared. I had developed a colony reaching from the NE tip of South America and had about 4 more cities strung out westward along the coast, and six other cities, giving me 10. I had forts in the three main cities and nearly had a fortress in one but ran out of time to complete it. I'm still having trouble juggling resources and manufacturing tools and weapons for myself. I also ran out of weapons during the rebellion.

Despite all that, I fought off the first wave with the loss of only one city, Montreal. I was frustrated by the inability of my cannons to do any damage to the besiegers. They seemed largely a waste of time if you're not mounting and offensive yourself. I did manage to kill some of theirs with attacks by my dragoons. Unfortunately, most of my army was composed of colonists rather than European regulars, which didn't help my cause. And a shortage of guns meant I couldn't arm more civilians to fight. Despite that, support for the revolt was at 79% even after the fall of Montreal.

I had a couple of turns of respite, during which I could not do much but redistribute the few soldiers I had remaining. Then the second wave hit and they rolled over Quebec and one of my smaller towns. At that point it was all over. I did not have enough firepower to kill anywhere near enough of them.

I could not find any allies...the Americans were being rolled over by the British. I had the Americans and Spanish book seek my help in their wars, which seemed a little silly under the circumstances! Nor could I find any Indian tribes to help me, despite having friendly relations with them. I don't know if this is unusual or not.

All in all it was an enjoyable campaign, mostly because I actually got to the point where I could rebel and fight the mother country. I have a better idea now of what I need to do next time, but I'll be doing some reading up meanwhile. There is a lot to manage in this game and it's fun and challenging and like Civ itself, very difficult to stop without succumbing to the "just one more turn" syndrome.
 
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