TC01
Deity
There are no "techs" in Civ4Col. There has been some talk at various points about bringing a tech tree into Civ4Col, but AFAIK that never went anywhere.
IMO, Civ4 is a far better vehicle for making playable natives with their own cultural specificity than Civ4Col. In Civ4Col the whole game revolves around the idea of exporting goods back to Europe. Any game concept that doesn't involve exporting goods back over the ocean to a distant homeland is going to require profound and extensive modifications to the Civ4Col concept.
This topic has been discussed many times before, and I invariably find that the folks arguing for "playable natives" haven't really thought through the fundamental changes this would require. I agree that it would be a very cool project, and encourage anyone with the ambition and programming skills to undertake it, but I remain skeptical.
Take a look at what Dale did with playable pirates. Pirates require far fewer profound conceptual changes than making playable natives, but in the end Dale found that the systems he'd put in place to make them unique and interesting just weren't working enough to make playable pirates a viable option. IMHO, making playable natives will be ten times more difficult than making viable pirates.
YMMV, --- Wheldrake
Playable natives would require the following:
1. A replacement for War of Independence Victory
2. A replacement for the trading goods system
3. A replacement for Europe
The first option could be- you make it where your rebel sentiment rises as the European colonies threaten you, increase their presence in your land, overrun your settlements, declare war on you, etc. When you reach 50% "native anger" (?), you can choose to declare war on the colonies. (perhaps declaring war before then should be not allowed?)
The second option is much more difficult. Perhaps you could remove their ability to process some goods (like tobacco, sugar) until Europeans traded them such goods. Or, maybe, you could make their city have, instead of processing buildings, "trading posts", where you traded some of the non-processed good for the European processed good...
I have no clue what to replace Europe with.