[Col] I accidentally the Amazon Basin

[Tristan_C]

Well there goes 20 percent of the world's oxygen production. Used the tool-and-musket arbitrage scheme to initiate the madness


GIF is 1 turn per frame, 1492-1584. I'm so glad I managed to complete this game, I've always wanted to make a gif like this for Colonization!

 

[dalgo]

Very nice - the graphics that is, not the deforestation!

 

[Jarms48]

Lol. That's amazing.

 

[Blake00]

this is amazing haha.. your games definitely 'out ocd' my games haha

 

[Tristan_C]

Btw, what did you mean by "Used the tool-and-musket arbitrage scheme" when you got rid of that poor forest ? I don't know any game element such as a "scheme", and have no idea what else it could refer to. Did you just mean you went for the essentials ?
It puzzled me, since the GIF looks like you played the game without debug mode. Did you really buy THAT many pioneers ? Sugar really yields that much money ?!

Some selfish impulse prompts me to respond to that message here.



What I described as the "tool-and-musket arbitrage scheme" is an exploit based on equipping colonists at the docks in Europe. The price will react to equipping colonists, but only after you either let turns pass or you buy or sell quantities of the item directly. So you can equip a huge stack of colonists using a locked-in low price, let the market react to that by filling the hold (pic related), unequip them using the locked-in high price, back-and-forth. Between Tools, Muskets, and Horses, it seemed Tools needed the least startup capital... maybe 2500g to recruit some guys and equip them.

So in this session (rather than cheat openly, which would be reflected in the score) I managed to scrape the startup funds at about 1500 AD, and I wrote a bot that did the strategy repetitively to max the gold out. That's what caused the sudden delayed blast of conquistadors in the GIF

 

[Pifou42]

Oh, I see... I didn't know about this until I looked for some trade exploit and noticed this a few days ago. Funny thing that this abuse was already known somewhere. Guess I don't know the right places to look for this kind of tricks
Tools are not only a cheaper start base, they also fluctuate more efficiently, and let you equip 100 units at once, which seems to be a clear easier&better profit to me. The only sad thing is their cap at 8/9.

Also, I was initially filling whole holds, and buying a galleon asap to get a higher rise, but buying *or selling* one unit per needed fluctuation is enough. So, a caravel easily rises the price from 2 to 9, as long as you bought ~200 * 7 tools. You may be aware of it, but it wasn't obvious for me in the first place.

While I'm still considering trying a "more fair play" speedrun for the Viceroy difficulty, this, and fountains of youth for the bunch of colonists, gave me a solid base for wins under 40 minutes.
I also tried writing a small autohotkey file for that, but honestly, I'm not very confortable with the use of such tools, and using them in an optimized way would probably not be worth the effort anyway... as is their non-optimized use.
Plus, I realized it would make my speedrun a TAS, which is kinda sad for such a low benefit.

Damn, and I thought I found something new
Well, thats not much surprising, btw. Is there a place here with a list of known exploits ? I'd be glad to learn I missed some other cool abuses !