Understanding Colonial Manitenance

[facistal]

I wanted to start this thread because I seems like a lot of the community here, including myself, are not fully understanding the new colonial system, and its uses.

So I will start off with what I have discovered so far without going into the XML, and then hopefully some other people can chime and we can refine our understanding of this new feature.

I think the misconception is that cities off of your main continent cost more money than they did in warlords and so you have to make them into colonies. This is only partly true. A more appropriate statement would be multiple cities on a single landmass that is not your main landmass cost more (in some cases A LOT more) than they did in warlords.

This new cost is called colonial maintenance and it is not included in city maintenance. It can however be seen by hovering over the city maintenance in you city screen. It is not reduced by Ikhandas, Courthouses, Ziggurat or any building, nor does State property have an effect.

It only applies when more than one city is present on the same landmass and that land mass does not contain your capital. The numbers are adjusted for map size and I do not know about difficulty level. I did some test in WB on a standard size map at emperor difficulty. I have attached a chart that shows the huge escalation in colonial expenses as you increase the number of cities on a given landmass.

As you can see the population of the city also has a large effect and these effect seem to be multiplicative. If you notice, the ten city 20 pop entry is exactly 100 Gpt so I wonder if this is the cap, not that anyone could ever practically find out.

Hopefully some modders will come forward with the mathematics in the XML behind this, and hopefully we all have a better understanding of the strategy decisions behind colonies.

 

[facistal]

I guess that chart is not very precise so here are the numbers

 

[snapple232]

Interesting, so is it worth making colonies or not?

 

[facistal]

Well I think it shows that unless you have four or more cities on one landmass it is not worth it. You may as well just keep the cities. If however you find or conquer another continent you are going to have a lot of trouble holding on to the cities. Eg. you have 3 of Saladins cities that you conquered on his continent.

If they are all size 5 you are paying 1.96 gpt each in colonial maintenance, (+ the regular maintenance) So thats 6 GPT for this colony.

Now say you take another city size 5 you are up to 4.41 EACH or almost 18GPT (assuming standard map and all cities size 5) Now you take another and you are up to 7.84 each more than 39 total - the sixth city will cost you 12.25 or 72 total.

So the first 3 are costing you six - double it to six cities and the maintenance goes to 72.

Now say some of those are big cities - say two are size 10 instead they are now 18.92 each so thats another 13 gpt in maintenance.

So I think the conclusion is you can maintain an achipelago state but you cannot keep a large well developed continental empire under your control without incurring impossible costs.

In this way oddly, Archipelago maps might be easier to do a domination win than continents maps now. You will have to vassalize or colonize.

 

[Haika]

Excellent analysis, and a bit scary. How does State Property/Forbidden Palace affect these costs?

 

[BARBEERIAN]

ALso, what about Versaille? Does it count as a capital when it comes to making another continent not suffer colonial expenses or just for distance maintenance?

 

[facistal]

ALso, what about Versaille? Does it count as a capital when it comes to making another continent not suffer colonial expenses or just for distance maintenance?

No - FP and Versaille have no effect. This cost seems to be a seperate calculation from base city maintenance. COurthouse, FP, Versaille neither cut this cost nor act as a second capitla in this way. They will still cut the Distance and regular city maintenance cost, but those are on top of what we are talking about here.

The same goes for State Property. It eliminates distance maintenance but has no effect on the colonial expenses.

 

[r_rolo1]

I'm checking the CIV4HandicapInfo.xml and colonial maintenace somehow is level dependant ( has a number from 60 in Settler to 150 in Deity in the <iColonyMaintenancePercent> tag and a level of 100 in the <iMaxColonyMaintenance> tag for every level). Will search for formulas...

 

[Chrono285]

If 'X' is the number of your cities on a continent away from your capital,

Colony Maintenance = [(X - 1) * (Pop + 17)/18 * WorldSize * Handicap]^2

Worldsize: Duel=.67, Tiny=.60, Small=.52, Standard=.45, Large=.37, Huge=.30
Handicap: Settler=.60, Chieftain=.80, Warlord=.90, Noble=1.00, Prince=1.10, Monarch=1.20, Emperor=1.30, Immortal=1.40, Diety=1.50

Rounding down, as always, after every operation.

The Colony Maintenance cost is capped at twice the Distance Maintenance. So while a Forbidden Palace or Versailles on your new continent won't eliminate colony maintenance costs, it will make them more reasonable. It is also affected by courthouses.

State Property completely eliminates colony costs.

 

[CivMcNut]

It interested me to see this old post, I'm currently playing a game where I took over a huge continent owned by Montezuma that was a pretty good distance away. I was running free market with tons of extra cash when I started, but my colony maintance was crippling my mighty economy once most of these cities came on. I was running 80% gold on the science slider and still loosing money. I'm waiting for Christno Retndor to complete so I can switch over to State Property and see if that causes the colony maintence to go away as some suggest, or if it just takes out the distance portion. I'd burning to find out if I'm gonna be able to win by Domination like I want to, or liberate the conquered land and settle for another Space Win.

 

[noto]

State property eliminates colony costs. Yeah...it makes a weird trade off in the game. You can run state property and just own the cities, benefitting from more cities in your empire, or you can turn them into a colony and run mercantilism and trade with the cities and drop your corporations in them. While it is true that both strategies are fun, I'm not sure if they are balanced. Having an exclusive trading partner who is also a corporation target is still probably not as good as just simply having a bigger empire. I started a thread a long time ago about this. It seems Firaxis did not do enough work to make colonies really worth it. Usually state property comes out ahead.

 

[CivMcNut]

I just got done playing that game, and it looks like state property doesn't knock out colony costs. If you take over a big continent and keep a lot of cities you wind up drowning in city maintence, even when running State Property.

I had every city on that continent paying 50 gpt in maintenance even after courthouses. I was lucky I had a strong economy that could support such a hit, but it caused me to be running 30% on the science slider the rest of the game. ( I do a CE) Next time I go for Domination, I'm only gonna keep the big cities on the another continent.

 

[Tatran]

it looks like state property doesn't knock out colony costs.

It does.
City maintenace has 3 numbers when you have 2 or more cities on a different landmass.
1) Total number of cities
2) Distance to palace
3) Colonial costs

When running State Property the factors 2 + 3 are gone.

 

[CivMcNut]

Maybe it's something they fixed with the patch for BTS. When I played the version straight out of the box, it eliminated the distance but not the colony component.

I just got the patch last night, and I'll have to see the next time I go for a domination win if they improved on that.

 

[Refar]

Yes this came with the patch.

Colonial costs are caped at 2 x Distance to palace now. 2 x 0 = 0.

So as it is now, SP eliminates Colonial Tax, while Versailes/FP help reduce those a bit.

 

[Winston Hughes]

Having an exclusive trading partner who is also a corporation target is still probably not as good as just simply having a bigger empire.

...except for Diplomatic victories.

 

[Alsn]

...except for Diplomatic victories.

Uh, what? I was under the impression that your total number of votes was based on your population which means that it makes no difference whatsoever if its a colony or your own empire as youll have the same number of votes to vote for you either way(although I'd argue that having a colony is worse since the AI usually isn't very good at making cities bigger).

 

[InFlux5]

When deciding whether to create a colony, there are factors other than cost which come into it. For example, if the young cities are looking at 20 turns to build a Monument, it can sometimes be better to grant them independence. If you're lucky, the new civ will be Creative, which means a quick doubling of that colony's territory.

Obviously there are other ways to approach such a situation. Sending over enough Workers with the initial Settlers is one. But I've also had success ferrying 5 or more Settlers at once, founding all the cities on the same turn, then granting independence. Maybe I could develop that land quicker and better than the new AI civ, but this way I have a lot less to focus on.

My experiences and this thread lead me to believe there's not much difference between granting independence and not doing so. But holding onto the cities and developing them yourself is certainly more of a pain in the ass.

 

[noto]

Let me tell you - I played the Portugeuse on the terra map and I colonized the ENTIRE new world and I didn't even run state property!! I just used the forbidden palace. My economy was so frikkin huge I dominated the AI in the worst way. I won that game by a million miles, not even close. My empire was easily 4 times the size of the next biggest one. I have never had a colony be nearly as decisive for me in a game...in fact, I can't remember a single game where I created a colony and it made a significant difference.

 

[Winston Hughes]

Uh, what? I was under the impression that your total number of votes was based on your population which means that it makes no difference whatsoever if its a colony or your own empire as youll have the same number of votes to vote for you either way(although I'd argue that having a colony is worse since the AI usually isn't very good at making cities bigger).

With the 3.13 patch, you now can't even call a diplomatic victory vote if you have enough votes to win on your own. So colonies and vassals are the only way to guarantee yourself the win without having to rely on independent AI civs.

This can be a fairly cheesy shortcut to victory when pursuing domination - simply create a colony once you've got the necessary votes - but there are other ways to grab an early Diplomatic win using colonies/vassals (and, ideally, corps).

Massive empires are terribly expensive before State Property, and large overseas empires can be cripplingly so. (Thanks to civic costs, garrison upkeep and inflation, the cost-per-city is actually considerably higher than you'd think from looking at the maintenance popup in the city screen.) Hence, colonies/vassals are a cheaper way to absorb a larger chunk of the world in the early- to mid-game, whilst maintaining a fast tech rate on the road to Mass Media.

Also, since you know they're going to provide votes without hitting your maintenance (in any significant way, at least), you can leave all the crappy cities intact rather than razing them. And, as an extra bonus, each vassal/colony provides a happiness boost to every one of your cities, helping them to grow larger in anticipation of the election.

Later, with a decent food corp powered by all the resources you demand from your underlings, you can build a huge population even in a relatively modest empire (spreading the corp to your colonies/vassals to keep the gold flowing). Add this to the votes from your minions (and your friends, if you've managed to keep any), and go for the win.

I don't have time to go into any more detail right now, but suffice to say that I've racked up some of my highest scores using that kind of strategy.

With regards to noto's last comment - that's just an easy game, not a demonstration that maintenance costs are irrelevant, or that colonies are useless. It's my opinion, though, that Terra maps are far from the best place to use colonies - I'd only consider creating one if I was pursuing a warmongering strategy in the old world, and thus racking up enormous costs already.

These are the maps on which I see colonies as a viable strategic option, in ascending order: Continents, Terra, Hemispheres, Fractal, B&S, M&S, Islands, Archipelago (of course, this depends on map settings as well).