Im doing a colonization 2

[suliman]

Or maybe not entirely...
The towns are the same, you drop guys off in buildings and you shop wood and get hammers and build stuff, mostly same terrain and goods, but:

- The game is in realtime (big freakin change i know) And isometric (same view as civ2,civ3 etc)
- There is more emphasis on combat, and more unit choices
- You can make chokolate from cacao, and luxuries and tradegoods. But not coats. Fur is still in the game.
- Large empires will be hard to maintain but crucial to beat the game on harder difficulty (in old col i never had more then 4 colonies, you win eventually anyway)
- There's slaves to buy in europe. Pick that cotton!
- Instead of tools there is metal. And no muskets. Units cost food/metal/horse/wood. For example militia, musketeer, pikemen, cannon, mortar, hussar, dragoon etc.
- Training military cost shields, in the same way building stuff cost hammers. Military is trained, not converted from colonists.
- No pioneers. Instead, forests are depleted by using lumberjacks on them, so new colonies must eventually be founded and wood shipped from them.
- Settlements come in four levels: outpost, colony, town, city. Towns and cities can impose tax on its citizens.
- Settlements have health, corruption and happiness ratings. Improving health gives boost to food production+more colonists spawn there. Large empires experience more corruption then small/tight ones.
- There is coal (used in late game buildings as factories)
- You can build granary, plantation network, wind mills.
- Non-player pirates emerges that make your life harder!
- Portugal will be playable, but not the indians.
- After revolution, you might be able to fight of the other europeans and claim the americas for yourself! Im not sure though if this is gonna work...
- Maybe no founding fathers. Messy to make and not enough fun. Bells will raise rebel sentiments, raise efficiency and maybe earn you shipments from europe (like in age of empires 3). Crosses work like in the old game.

The game will be freewere. I started it some weeks ago but due to the fact i can use an old engine i made for another game im pretty satisfied with how far ive come. You can save (harder to make than you might think) and there is an editor. Most fuctionality is faar from complete though. But its a fun project and on its way!

My homepage is down. More info will follow
Erik, Sweden

 

[suliman]

Battles take place army vs army, in the large map pretty much like in total war ( you have unit-cards in an army, when two armies meet they dish it out)

Actual battles will be fought in another view, something similar to warlords 2 where you see the unit-cards lined up against each other. But units will fight at the same time, picking their targets automatically to maximize damage.

Each army consist of three lines, and each line must be disposed to reach/ be able to damage the next line:

1. Melee (Pikemen and cold steel cavalry)
2. Ranged (all musketeers, dragoons etc, most of your army)
3. Artillery

Now, as rifles comes into the picture, cavalry and pikes are no longer very important, but they are in the beginning. Cannons will also be more common in late game.

Moral is important as shaken troops take double damage and it can be wise to flee instead of being masacred. Officers can be added to armies to boost morale. Low-tech units like braves and militias have worse moral then more advanced ones.

Stockades/Forts give bonuses to ranged units and forts also have cannons firing upon the attacking army.

Ships fight in a more abstract manner, pretty much as in original col.

MILITARY
pikes - good vs cavalry, bad vs everything else
cold steel cavalry - good vs ranged, at least in eary game. Fair vs other melee units
scouts - good at exploring ruins/goody huts, very weak in combat
swordbucklers - not very common (mercenaries mostly). Acceptable vs undefended ranged or indians
musketeers/dragoons - standard soldier, balanced (dragoons is stronger and faster then musketeers but cost horses)
riflemen - advanced musketeers, balanced
cannons - expensive but powerful, must be protected by other troops

SHIPS
trade - cog, caravel, merchantman, galleon (this is a trade galleon, there where actually a lot of warship galleons during this period)
war - sloop, corvette, frigate, ship of the line, (also ironclad during late game)

CIVILIAN
colonist - standard guy, spawns from europe or from food (no training or experts in this game, instead settlements can have production bonuses)
convict - from europe, somewhat crappier colonist. Can become normal colonist over time by working.
convert - from missionaries. extra good in the field, bad everywhere else (cannot make use of advanced plowed terrain so best eary on). large indian populations makes settlements unhappy.
slave - bought in europe. Bad indoors worker but ok in the fields. Slaves make settlements unhealthy.
settler - expensive. Can form new outposts (normal colonists can only join existing settlements)

 

[suliman]

new europe screen. The brig/brigantine will replace the "privateer" ship. Any small ship can buy the rights to privateering (mainly sloops and brigantines) making them "privateers". But these ships can also stay "official" to your nation.

 

[iron0037]

Looks interesting, suliman. Are you aware there's already an open-source Colonization clone out there? http://freecol.org/

If you're using a diamond tile system, perhaps you could borrow one of the user-created Civ3 terrain sets for your map art.

 

[suliman]

yes that sound like a good idea. Im a bit worried about the map-graphics in my project

i know of that (thats basically a clone with updated graphics as you say) and my game is more different. For example realtime.

 

[#1 Person]

Looks awesome, in my opinion.

 

[joelwest]

Colonization 2 will be freeware. I started it some weeks ago. I use an old engine I made for another game. I'm pretty satisfied with how far I've come.

You can save (harder to make than you might think) and there is an editor. Most functionality is far from complete though. But its a fun project and on its way!

My homepage is down. More info will follow.

Erik, Sweden

I have just recently started playing Col for Windows and FreeCol. The latter improves the user interface quite a bit, but unlike yourself desires merely to clone the original gameplay hence all gameplay problems still remain.

Checking out the Civ 4 mods someone posted a Col map, but no one has started to mod the game for Civ 4.

Hence it would seem your own project is the best chance currently to rescue this game from oblivion.

When will your website be up so we can test it???

 

[suliman]

plz post the gameplay issues you experienced with old col and ill see if i can avoid them

my provider is down, i hope to get it up sometime soon, cant tell you more...

Besides, this will not really be col, since its in realtime and all, but the town-system with dropping your workers in buildings and outdoor tasks will be the same.

 

[joelwest]

plz post the gameplay issues you experienced with old col and ill see if i can avoid them

my provider is down, i hope to get it up sometime soon, cant tell you more...

Besides, this will not really be col, since its in realtime and all, but the town-system with dropping your workers in buildings and outdoor tasks will be the same.

in my own experience the more real time a strategy game is the less strategy in fact prevails. this is based upon civ 3 and civ 4 played alone against AI and timed against other human players as well as pure RTS games such as Microsoft's Age of Empires.

the original Colonization (and its more uptodate clone FreeCol) does not seem to lend itself to multiplayer since the human player and the AI players have different victory conditions.

is your intent to change the gameplay so that all European powers have to fulfill the same victory condition, ie victory in an Independence War with its own mother country?

I assume all four or five of the European mother countries will have to be AI as well as all the Native civs since none currently have an actively defined victory condition.

regarding gameplay of the old Col, the user interface needs to be updated at least to the level of FreeCol, preferably much better. it does not need to be as detailed as Civ 4, but the ability to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel would make it alot easier to manage your empire.

the old Col had a very primitive combat system of soldier + horse + musket can lose either horse or musket, and after losing both is captured. there was no health level to the unit (except for damaged artillery units which never were allowed to heal).

I personally would prefer unit health levels ala Civ 3 or Civ 4 and a predefined combat system ala Civ 4 in which the exact chance of winning is always known beforehand. as it is the default Col game has a win or lose streak problem a modder later fixed using a batch file technique.

I personally would prefer units not lose their muskets or horses, but at the minimum soldiers, cavalry, and dragoons function as entirely separate types of units. it would be an improvement in gameplay if various Founding Fathers allowed either the cavalry unit or dragoon unit to advance to a higher level.

speaking of Founding Fathers, some in the original game were ridiculous (Henry Hudson improved fur production which drops its price unless you are the Dutch), unwanted (LaSalle gave a free stockade to pop 3 cities, but having a stockade by definition prevents a city from being razed), or irrelevant (Fukker restored trade goods from goods parties, but the U key did the same thing due to a program bug). some have suggested making the Founding Fathers into a tech tree, but this is not the only solution to fixing them.

some thought needs to be given towards whether the endgame should be duplicated. the old Col has the mother country invade the colonist mainland from Man-O-War naval units (which the colonists have littile hope of sinking due to lack of this technology) and then try to seize port cities since the colonists will lose if ANY city is permanently captured, or if all the port cities are captured. I have yet to finish a game but my gut instinct is that the endgame would be better if the mother country attacked ala Civ 3 or Civ 4 in a more balanced way and the colonists only had to defeat the fixed number of mother country troups to win, even if they end up losing some of their cities.

 

[suliman]

but in old col you didnt loose if the mothercountry took one of your cities. Once you had killed must of their soldiers (a fixed number) you win. Did i misunderstand you?

My plan is:
Once you are strong enough and have enough votes, you can declare independance. The mother country comes after you -> you kick their asses if your good enough (they land in different location, trying to seize settlements to reinforce their numbers)

Now you win.
OR maybe:
Once they are defeated you can continue trading with "europe" under some acceptable tax-rate. You must now kill all the other players and claim america for the reich! Or something...

Units will have health, so units (those who won but got damaged and those who fled but still survived) can return to a friendly settlement to heal. Healing might cost resources somehow but im not sure how... Or simply be kinda slow so its hard to exploit it.

Im not sure if there is a good way to make the AI have the same goal as the player. Problem is that if the AI suddenly becomes independant, should the player loose and be forced to quit playing?
Maybe its better if AI players tries to build a strong empire, conquering land and so to speak "block" the progress of the human player. This didnt work in the original col becouse you needed just a couple of colonies (thus you needed only little land) to eventually win. I will try to make the game so that expansion is vital to keep up with the game objective. Like:

you have 5 cities, the french have 20. Then the french will be able to muster enough soldier to easily take your 5 cities. That why you ALSO must have 20 cities. Like in civilization.

 

[suliman]

new site up

http://epagames.isgreat.org/

click "the new world" and download demo. Still very early. No indians or enemies but you can buy ships and stuff, develop your colonies and sell goods to europe.

All comments are welcomed
Erik

 

[joelwest]

In old Col you didn't loose if the mother country took one of your cities.
Once you had killed most of their soldiers/land units (a fixed percentage) you won.

You are correct and so I have fixed my previous post. I should have said "if ANY city is permanently captured."

Many Col strategy articles I have seen posted advise the human player to have only one or at most two ports before declaring Independence so the location of the mother country REF attack is well known and hence more easily defended.

If you have only one port (as many advise) and it is captured the game is over and the colonists lose. In that case this port city is the first and indeed only city the REF will ever attack.

My plan is:
Once you are strong enough and have enough votes, you can declare independence. The mother country comes after you -> you kick their asses if your good enough (they land in different locations, trying to seize settlements to reinforce their numbers) -> then you win.

The timing of Independence in old Col depended on knowing the fact the mother country will only send a fixed number of dragoons and artillery. Furthermore they will only try to capture port cities at first and ignore surrounding colonist units. Hence the usual approach was to lie in ambush outside the port cities in tiles with a defense bonus.

If Col 2 keeps this endgame similar but adjusted so that the REF will attack any city or any unit outside a city defending it (like Civ 3 or Civ 4), this will have the net effect of the colonists consolidating all their forces into but a few cities before starting the war so as not to be spread too thin.

OR maybe:

Once they are defeated you can continue trading with "Europe" (your now defeated mother country) under some acceptable tax-rate.

You must now kill all the other European players and claim America (the New World on a random map) for the Reich!

Or something...

What you propose would be quite a change from the old Col and not lend itself to multiplayer until the Independence War is won.

A common strategy in the old Col was to all but eliminate the other Europeans at the start of the game. This was not a victory condition, and only indirectly contributed to your final score by preventing them from becoming independent before you did.

The reason European founding colony cities were raided at the start of the game was to acquire "free" colonists for your own cities - allowing for a very rapid start. It was much more time consuming the nonmilitary way since this meant buying the units from Europe, the latter may be servants or criminals, and you had to wait for your ship to come back from Europe to deploy them.

The old Col AI notoriously did not defend its founding cities very well and certainly these new cities were no match for two dragoons landing from a caravel or merchantman.

========================================

There are many ways to proceed to try and fix the gameplay issues I address above. You could make the AI smarter in its original city placement, or less aggressive later in the game so your colonies can feel confident a peace treaty with a foreign power means something (ala Civ 4 which prevents war for at least ten turns after such a treaty).

These two steps would mitigate against the "conquer all the Europeans right away" strategy since the cities would be harder to take at first and later peaceful coexistence might be possible (which would be further enhanced with relationship scores between nations ala Civ 4).

========================================

It is an interesting scenario you propose that a nation could only win by first winning its Independence War then conquering everyone else. This raises the question of what other European powers who have yet to win or even declare their own Independence War will do in response. I suspect if the first player to break free from Europe will have an insurmountable advantage unless their opponents are given the option of also breaking free at once in order to defend themselves with a set percentage loss of units and or cities given away to their mother country.

========================================

I am still unable to envision a scenario in which multiplayer would function for the entire game short of making Col 2 a clone of Civ 3 or Civ 4 from the start of the game.

I am also at a loss of what adding a real time element would add to the game given the above observation.

Units will have health, so units (those who won but got damaged and those who fled but still survived) can return to a friendly settlement to heal. Healing might cost resources somehow but im not sure how... Or simply be kinda slow so its hard to exploit it.

The unit health system developed for Civ 4 works well for me. This approach would mean adding hospitals and medic units to Col 2 in order to implement a similar system.

Im not sure if there is a good way to make the AI have the same goal as the player. Problem is that if the AI suddenly becomes independent, should the player loose and be forced to quit playing?

The human player would have the same option as the AI - either give up some units and colonists to their mother country or face certain defeat.

Maybe it's better if AI players try to build a strong empire, conquering land and so to speak "block" the progress of the human player. This didn't work in the original col because you needed just a couple of colonies (thus you needed only little land) to eventually win. I will try to make the game so that expansion is vital to keep up with the game objective.

Like:

you have 5 cities, the french have 20. Then the french will be able to muster enough soldier to easily take your 5 cities. That why you ALSO must have 20 cities. Like in civilization.

It is simple to force conflict between powers, just make the map smaller or limit the distribution of bonus tiles.

FreeCol allows the player on a New World map to control the map size.

There is another version of Colonization 2 out there. It allows you to also control the map terrain, and the bonus tile distribution. (The reason I did not mention this version of the game before is that is so early in development the starting ship is unable to move!)

 

[joelwest]

new site up

http://epagames.isgreat.org/

click "the new world" and download demo. Still very early. No indians or enemies but you can buy ships and stuff, develop your colonies and sell goods to europe.

All comments are welcomed
Erik

I loaded up the game and was unable to constructively proceed.

The first image is of some land in the New World without a ship. This is highly confusing. There is a water tile with a circle inside it, but I have no idea what it means. Is this where a new ship will land?

The map has no zoom in and zoom out. I checked the readme.txt file and it does not mention zooming.

At the minimum I would suggest using the X and Z keys since these were the old Col zooming keys. Preferable would be mouse scroll key zooming ala Civ 4.

The ship descriptions on the Europe page do not list their cargo space or fighting power numerically. The fighting power instead had a series of circles, but this is quite unclear to me how much power they intend to represent.

Once a ship is bought and it appears in your dock in Europe, the ship's amount of cargo space still does not appear.

========================

I bought a sloop, colonist, settler, and governor. This brought my treasury to almost zero.

I dragged the presumably full ship to "leaving port", hit E to return to the New World. The ship did not appear.

I hit 5 for 40 x game speed and the ship still never appeared, at least by 1325.

I was looking for it appear near the only bit of land I saw.

========================

Regarding the Europe screen. As a user I expect the escape key to clear the text description of a unit, not to stop the game. I also expect that clicking outside the text box will close down the text box. Currently there is no way to get rid of a text box short of ending the game.

========================

The ship descriptions were interesting, but cargo space and relative power (numeric, not circles) are missing and are the most important info. I would suggest putting them at the start of the description.

Old Col had annoying text boxes for Founding Fathers. Instead of telling you their powers first, you first had read about their place in history. This may be entertaining in your first game, but subsequently plays may it a burden on the player.

Civ 3 and Civ 4 were good about putting all relevant unit info in a clearly visible position once a text box was opened. If the player wanted to read historical background of a unit or Wonder this was available, but personally speaking I rarely did this.

 

[suliman]

good points

- i doubt there will ever be multiplayer in my game
- realtime is not something i plan to "add". Its already in.
- yes, early harvesting of AI population must be much harder (instead harvest indian population, but you'll need soldiers for this)

I think a settlement will heal units standing there slowly. Building field hospital or omething can increase this rate. A settlement can only heal one unit at a time so coming back with a large army that is injured will take time to heal.

The circle is the ship (click it!), there is no graphics for units yet. I know this is a bit confusing...
There is no zoom yet (altough i NEVER used the zoom in col or any civ, there is a minimap...)
If you click a ship it comes up in the bottom view: there you can se each cargo hold (they will of course be added to the description)
There's a lot of UI work to be done
For now you must drag units to a ship in europe. I think i will add an auto-add like in orignal col.

I like the symbol-lines instead of numbers. But this will be made much more easy to understand. If you compare different ships you'll see that their fighting numbers differs, just like different cannons and soldiers.

 

[joelwest]

The circle is the ship (click it!), there is no graphics for units yet. I know this is a bit confusing...
There is no zoom yet (although i NEVER used the zoom in col or any civ, there is a minimap...)

If you click a ship it comes up in the bottom view: there you can see each cargo hold (they will of course be added to the description).

There's a lot of UI work to be done

I was able to make my "ship" land after knowing the circle was supposed to be my ship. However I did not see any units on the land so I am still stumped and unable to proceed.

===========================

Regarding movement and player interface, each player has their own way of playing. It has always amazed me a designer will write thousands of lines of code but skimp on the basic movement commands.

Personally speaking I have never been a fan of left mouse select, right mouse move. This does not allow you to predetermine your move.

In Civ 4 you can drag-click to see how many turns it wil take to reach your proposed destination and furthermore know in advance what the combat odds are. This is true even when playing multiplayer realtime. When I do not need as much info I use the numeric keypad to move in the direction of the compass points.

I would strongly suggest implementing one or both of these alternate forms of movement for your game.

===========================

I have similar feelings regarding zooming. If I cannot rapidly see my units a game becomes a pain to deal with. If mouse scrolling zoom takes too long to code, as least have close view = Z and longer view = X.

 

[suliman]

is your ship carrying units when you disbark? Those units should also become circles on the beach. Go up to the beach with your ship, then right click on the beach-tile you which to land on. You should see units on the ship in the lower left courner when you have a ship selected.

How can i move units with cursors in a realtime game? All units move at the same time so i must set a goal. If movement was done with the keys i can only move one ship at a time! The multipleyer version of civ is still not in realtime. You move on unit at a time and the game waits for you to do it, hence the moving with keys work in that situation. I dont see how movement can be done in another way on my game...

I will try to add some zoom. Maybe there will not be possible to give commands in zoomed out view but anyway.

 

[joelwest]

How can i move units with cursors in a realtime game? All units move at the same time so i must set a goal. If movement was done with the keys i can only move one ship at a time! The multiplayer version of civ is still not in realtime. You move on unit at a time and the game waits for you to do it, hence the moving with keys work in that situation. I don't see how movement can be done in another way on my game...

I will try to add some zoom. Maybe there will not be possible to give commands in zoomed out view but anyway.

the way multiplayer works in Civ 3 and Civ 4 is that each player has the same certain amount of time in which to makes their move(s). it all players complete their moves before this, the game will advance to the next turn. the time allocated grows as the game progresses since presumably each player's empire is getting bigger and bigger and more difficult to manage.

so you are right, this is not realtime, but outside of an aracade game where players are shooting at each other, who would want absolute realtime? both Col and the Civ series are strategy games first. if someone chooses to play them multiplayer this adjusts the strategy to cope with human rather AI opponents.

======================================

what this boils down to is I pesonally do not believe game that lacks predetermined moves is a strategy game. hence drag-clicking is a necessity not an option to write a strategy game.

 

[suliman]

ok, but its not like that in my game since its in realtime And there will be no multiplayer unless this project crew expands enourmously (im alone at this point) and i doubt it.

But is games like warcraft, company of heroes and age of empires not strategy just becouse you click and the unit goes there using pathfind just like in my game? I understand you prefer turnbased games but isnt it harsh to say they are the ONLY strategy games out there? Or did i missunderstand you?

A new version will be out in acouple of days, including for example some fixes suggested by you and some early demo on the ingame battles. The cicle for units is gone and replaced by another temporary fix where the first unit of the army/navy is shown instead. In the end i hope to have an animated army/navy marker much like in total war.
E

 

[vernier]

http://newcol.fr

also at early stage. development in C language with SDL (Mac, Windows and Unix). I took unit image from freecol and building image from swecol2 project.
I will add a link to your webpage next time I'll update it. Is there a way to link directly to "New World" ?

 

[suliman]

seems cool vernier.

i planned to make european cities part of the map but scrapped it. I didnt figure out how to make that in a good manner...

There's no way to directly link to the subpage im afraid...
E