What do you do with all the gold, or: Is the cross system broken?

[morchuflex]

Hello.

I think there is a major balance problem in COL: crosses only seem to matter in the very early game.

In all my Col games (be it the old or the new one), comes a time that I would call "inflationary expansion": it occurs when I can eventually afford a galleon, bring back all the treasures my scouts gathered through exploration, and suddenly watch my treasure skyrocket from the low hundreds to something like 15,000 gold in a matter of turns.

The question is, what do you do with all that gold? I could purchase guns, but I think it's better to use it to buy a lot of colonists and greatly increase your manpower.
However, a side effect of this strategy is that after you've bought 10 or 20 colonists in quick succession, it takes forever for new ones to spontaneously come to do the docks, even with a hoard of preachers. At this point, the whole cross system therefore becomes irrelevant.

It really is a strange feeling: you struggle with only a few colonists until you reach the "magical" 3,000 gold, then your empire suddenly goes supernova.

The only way I have found to alleviate this is to disable goody huts. Isn't it a shame?

 

[Andvare]

Buy cannons and specialist, instead of hurrying immigration. Buying the specific specialists is quite a bit more expensive at first, but doesn't change the crosses needed.

 

[Polobo]

As Andvare said: if you plan to make use of crosses to entice people to the new world then you want to severely limit your dock hurry. It is OK to hurry the last turn so you can pick which of the three you get as opposed to it being random but otherwise spend your money on goods and professionals/permanents and leave the docks alone.

 

[Gliese 581]

But why would you do that when you can fill up your ships as quickly as it takes it to travel back and forth between your capital and europe?
Rushbuying the early pops are by far the fastest method of increasing population early. Even if you don't it seems to me the increase in crosses is almost exponential and sooner rather than later your preachers become quite useless compared to your farmers and fishermen for generating new citizens or compared to just buying lots of specialists by extensive trading for gold for that matter.

Edit: The way I'm playing it right now is that if I get a firebrand preacher in the queue then fine I build a church and get a small boost in extra pop but I wont go out of my way to try to set it up.

 

[Andvare]

Yes, the way crosses work, means that they are only worth anything *after* you declare independence. Hurry the immigration until it's cheaper to buy specialists, and ignore it after that.

 

[Polobo]

Cross increase is set at 25% in global defines - would be nice if there was some kind of deflation mechanism whereby this percentage decreased overtime, while still allowing the absolute change rate to continually increase.

Anyway: I am probably a little extreme on the avoid dock rushing. That said, the biggest concern is that all crosses generated are LOST as soon as you rush buy (they do decrease the amount of gold required but still). Thus if you have extra gold lying around rushing causes you to waste crosses in return for some saved gold and a few saved turns.

 

[morchuflex]

But why would you do that when you can fill up your ships as quickly as it takes it to travel back and forth between your capital and europe?
Rushbuying the early pops are by far the fastest method of increasing population early.

Exactly. And it makes the cross system seem irrelevant, which was already the case in Col1.
Such balance problems are common in Sid's (and Brian's) games. Very often, there are two ways to get things done: the hard, slow one; and the easy, cheesy, quick one, the latter generally depending on pure luck. As a comparison, consider wonder completion in Civ, for instance (build the Pyramids at a huge cost and the risk of losing lots of time and resources, or be lucky enough to get a great engineer).

In fact, it strikes me that developpers always seem to implement a method to make your way around gameplay constraints (such as the magical growth you could obtain in Civ 1/2 thanks to the infamous WLTPD).

But I'm slowly getting off (my own) topic!

 

[Simn]

I think the cross problem in the endgame is tied to the REF balancing and time limit problems. Crosses could actually be pretty useful after independence, being converted into bells or hammers. With the current Zergrush WoI, it's hard to run any preachers after declaring though, because you need everyone and their fathers to fight, and with the short time limit the hammers produced (i.e. for cannons) don't have much overall influence.

If they fixed balancing problems and made the WoI longer, crosses might still lose effect midgame, but could become powerful again during WoI. I think that would be okay and actually justify hiring a firebrand preacher.