About founding fathers points, remember that political points are also required for all founding fathers. So the fact you get exploration points fast in normal speed doesn't mean you get exploration FF as fast.
You mean gathering exploration points in gigantic amounts doesn´t mean I get political points just as fast?
Well, the whole point of the fatherpercent setting seems to be to raise the cost of Founding Fathers to scale with the size of the map as larger maps mean more space for colonies which can produce political points by building e.g. villagehalls for 30 political points. So it does make sense to demand a higher cost in all points the larger the map is. Raising fatherpercent by 10 for gigantic maps seems to me to only correct an oversight as it is raised by 10 for all other mapsizes before gigantic.
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Nightingale is right though that it's on other speeds that flaws happen. Indeed, points of all categories are simply multiplied according to the speed. This system work well for religious, trade and political points, it doesn't for exploration and military points.
Considering exploration points, multiplying them by 3 means that on a gigantic marathon game, there's simply not enough tiles. So you end up having discovered the full map, but missing exploration founding fathers because you've ran out of all your points.
I don´t think that is correct.
I just started a testgame:
RAR Americas Gigantic map, Explorer difficulty, Marathon speed, fatherpercent 160 (instead of the 150 in the R&R file, modified by me for my game)
The exploration founding fathers shown cost 2000, 2720, 3600 and 4800 exploration points so 13120 for all of the four.
The map has 136X256 plots according to it´s description, so 34816 tiles to explore. 9 are already known at the start (the visibility range of the starting ship).
Even if it would be all water and each would gain only 1 exploration point there would be enough EP to gather and EP are not only earned from exploring tiles but for meeting natives too. Larger map = more natives = more EP.
Edit: I just started a testgame using the highest difficulty setting too as I think that Nightingales post meant that not only mapsize and speed, but difficulty raises founding father cost too:
RAR Americas Gigantic map, Revolutionary difficulty, Marathon speed, (fatherpercent 160 instead of 150, modified by me for my game)
Exploration Founding Fathers change their exploration point cost to 2500, 3400, 4500 and 6000 to a sum of 16400 for all 4.
So even on the highest difficulty and the lowest speed setting and with the cost increased by 10 to 160 there are still more EP to be gathered than needed...
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However, as Ray told wisely, Marathon speed offers no benefits in Civ4Col in general. In Civ4, I enjoy playing Marathon because of technological research, so that I can enjoy fully an era before reaching another one. This isn't true in Civ4Col because "eras" are determined by your own trade and expansion growth. So playing in normal speed is really strongly advised.
I am playing on normal speed in my normal game.
What is more serious is that in my normal game and in my testgame I don´t get any trade points for trading with natives. In the file it reads that nativetrade has a value of 15 and I thought that meant I would get 15 trade points for 100 gold traded with natives.
Are only full loads of 100 of a good counted when selling and buying?
Or is that a problem only in my game and anyone else gets trading points from selling to natives on gigantic maps?
Or are only trade with waggons counted and my ships sales and purchases don´t count as nativetrade for trade points?