First of all, thank you for this amazing job. I'm a super fan of the 1994 game since a long long time and I've been following you since a few years, watching your work getting more and more serious and professional (way better than the official attempt with the Civ IV colonization which has no balance or deepth at all).
I would just like to give feedback on something I've noticed (maybe not completely understood) during the pre-ARW game for 0.11.6.
Taxe increase is quite hard and it is clearly not like the the original game, even in the harder difficulty.
It is not unusual to get a 40% or more by 1610.
Is it a form to balance another mechanism I'm not aware of ?
I know there is this important setting of customs houses respecting or not boycotts.
I'm talking to the situation when they are not respecting boycotts : even with this huge avdvantage, I've got the feeling that tax raise is still too important, making the economic strat annoying and limited.
Or if something is super fun in this game, it is clearly the economy buidling.
Like real life, taxes are just so much pain.... ;)
Don't you think ?
My best,
Baptiste
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Tax increase is quite hard and it is clearly not like the the original game, even in the harder difficulty.
This is a known issue. The problem (as correctly noted below by James Kuyper) is that we do not know what level is about right --- we need quantitative data. See the WWC1D wiki page at https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/wiki/What%20Would%20Col1%20Do%3F
if you can help.
That said, taxation was slightly reduced in recent releases. If you wish to reduce the influence of the monarch further, there is a "monarch meddling" game option that can be reduced. This is a fairly blunt setting though, what would be better are some options allowing users to control the likelihood and size of tax increases.
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Interesting thread. I never allow tax increases. All of my early game gold comes from searching, as well as selling trade goods, guns, and horses to the natives. I only produce finished goods once I get custom houses (with the exception of the first several turns to get money to equip my third immigrant as a scout).
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I've never played the original game - how do freecol tax increases differ from the way things were done in the original game. Be specific, and if possible, quantitative. The goal for version 1.0 is to duplicate Colonization's behavior as closely as possible, if the appropriate game options are selected.
The purpose of the tax increases is to motivate your decision to declare independence, and this is historically accurate (at least, for the US). Declaring indepence has a few nice benefits: Some of your existing Veterans become Regulars You can train Regulars, or get them as a result of combat promotions. You can build Men of War. Once your home country recognizes you as an indepent country, you can trade with Europe without having to pay taxes.
However, it also comes with a number of disadvantages: You can no longer found any new colonies. You can no longer visit any European port. In particular, this means you can longer buy trade goods, Artillery or Ships, cannot pick up immigrants (which renders your churches and Firebrand Preachers useless), and cannot pay for trained immigrants. You can only trade other goods with Europe through Customs Houses, and only with the right founding father. In my opinion, you should be free to try to visit the home port of any country you're not currently at war with (though subject to possible blockade by any country you are at war with), and do any of those things, but that's not how the game works.
* You have to fight and win your revolution. Of course, a hothead looking forward to the Revolution won't care about that, and since the AI isn't very good yet, this isn't a horribly difficult task.
Without rising taxes to provide an incentive, it might be a long time before a purely rational player bothered declaring independence.
Last edit: James Kuyper 2015-12-13
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I don't get to play frequently, so it's been a while since I've bothered upgrading freecol - I'm currently using 0.11.3. If this has been corrected in more recent versions, I wouldn't know about it. I've unfortunately never had the time to play a game through to the point where I could test the accuracy of this documentation.
Somebody wrote that documentation that way for a reason (not necessarily a good one). Possibly Colonization allowed the training of Regulars?
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Sorry, I misunderstood colopedia. It says "May teach in University", which is, IMO, a little ambiguous (are they the teacher or the student?).
This is not completely correct, however. A regular may teach one unit in a college if is promoted from a VS who is teaching at the college. You can't add regulars to a college, and you can't assign new units to them, but they can complete training initiated when they were a VS even if the training was at 0/4 at the time of promotion.
Personally, I think regulars should be able to teach in colleges, since they can only train units up to VS, and VS can train VS in a college. I think the building required should limit the skill that can be trained, not the unit who provides that training.
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Thank you for clarifying.
I would suggest that you should play the old game, not matter you role is this organisation. You can immediately notice after that the differences between both, and maybe work against it. On a old gamer perspective, this tax raise is ridiculously high, with the king asking the same ressource again and again to be boycotted, sometimes after 2 turns only.
I understand this willing to push the player to declare the war (and end the game, the post war era is not interesting, like finishing a Civ game and continuing turns forever) ok.
Then my point is : maybe there is other way to counter balance a deffect AI, or pushing players without killing economic plays ? Because for me it is clealry making a huge difference and then way of playing than with the old one.
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I'm not a member of this organization, just a player. Even calling me a "player" is going a bit too far. I've spent a LOT of time thinking about and planning for this game, but I've only had enough free time to play a few experimental games to learn about the game mechanics - I've never even completed a game, so what I've said about what happens when you declare independence is not based upon personal experience.
My computer is a Linux machine. Colonization was made for PCs and Macs, but not, I believe, for Linux machines. Wine is the name of a program that allows you to run Windows software on Linux machines, and the only version of Colonization that has been successfully tested using Wine was version 3.1415926, a version that many people claim doesn't exist, which implies it might be hard to find. The last time it was tested was 2008. Freecol, on the other hand, works just fine on Linux machines.
While I'm not a developer, the people who are would be very interested in a quantitative description of the differences. And, I gather that they don't have access to the original game, either. So if you do have access to it, I'm sure they would be very interested in any quantitative information you can give them about how it differs. If you could play an actual game and document the timing and sizes of tax increases along with the associated boycott good, they'd probably appreciate it. Make it clear for each increase whether or not you decided to boycott - I wouldn't be surprised if your decision to boycott or accept a tax increase has effects on later tax increases.
As far as I can remember, the king only chooses to tax goods that are not being boycotted, where you currently have at least 100 stockpiled (so that boycotting the tax will be costly). Therefore, if you are seeing multiple tax anouncements on the same good, you're not boycotting them often enough - at least, that's the impression I get from my limited amount of playing experience. The taxes don't have to get very high before it's far more profitable selling goods to natives than to Europe. Sales to natives aren't affected by taxes or boycotts - but there's a relatively low limit to how much you can sell without dropping the price. Trading with natives also reduces their unrest. Boycotting causes a large increase in your Bell production for quite a while after the boycott. I'm not sure how long they last, but when I first noticed that effect, I had six boycott bonuses active at the same time.
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No access to the old game ? That would be very surprising, it's free now and super easy to obtain on legal websites, and should be played on a windows system with the lastest version of DosBox (Dos emulator). The game runs flawlessly and is still very enjoyable.
You're right about the increase of bells, it was just an immediate % raise in the old game but here it seems more sophisticated. Hard to see if it is more or less powerfull than the old game.
I would be glad to submit some analysis of the old one. I'm still using it for fun (especially for long flight travels), one the best timekiller I know !
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For data from the original Colonization, we use Colonization for Dos v3 .
That version runs fine in dosbox on linux, windows, OS X, OS/2 , BSD and some more platforms.
The only thing I find very annoying about taxes is how the monarch will sometimes give you the ultimatum every single turn for several consecutives turns. Sometimes he remains quiet for long periods of time. So the solution cannot be to simply adjust the probability.
The problem in essence is that while the monarch is certainly intended to be a nuisance, inducing the player to declare independence, but since there is no grace period after a tax threat, he sometimes manages to completely obliterate an economy, even very early on in the game.
The solution could be to have a grace period between taxing threats. 10 turns after a grace period seems reasonable to me. This could then lower as the game develops, or in fact, simply remain the same.
Last edit: Teekin Red 2016-01-16
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Do you know whether Colonization itself did anything to avoid long strings of tax requests? If not, that idea belongs in the "Ideas for FreeCol 2" forum. When FreeCol 1.0 comes out, the plan is for it to behave pretty much the same way as Colonization itself, at least when you choose the "Classic Rules" option.
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The only thing I find very annoying about taxes is how the monarch will sometimes give you the ultimatum every single turn for several consecutives turns.
This is just the random number generator at work. The code that chooses the monarch action each turn finds out which events are valid, and takes a weighted random choice from among them. It is not at all uncommon to see long runs of the same action --- where that action is "no action", but sometimes you hit a rough patch of random numbers and there is a cluster of tax demands. If this did not happen, we would know there was a bug in the random number generator.
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Hey guys,
First of all, thank you for this amazing job. I'm a super fan of the 1994 game since a long long time and I've been following you since a few years, watching your work getting more and more serious and professional (way better than the official attempt with the Civ IV colonization which has no balance or deepth at all).
I would just like to give feedback on something I've noticed (maybe not completely understood) during the pre-ARW game for 0.11.6.
Taxe increase is quite hard and it is clearly not like the the original game, even in the harder difficulty.
It is not unusual to get a 40% or more by 1610.
Is it a form to balance another mechanism I'm not aware of ?
I know there is this important setting of customs houses respecting or not boycotts.
I'm talking to the situation when they are not respecting boycotts : even with this huge avdvantage, I've got the feeling that tax raise is still too important, making the economic strat annoying and limited.
Or if something is super fun in this game, it is clearly the economy buidling.
Like real life, taxes are just so much pain.... ;)
Don't you think ?
My best,
Baptiste
This is a known issue. The problem (as correctly noted below by James Kuyper) is that we do not know what level is about right --- we need quantitative data. See the WWC1D wiki page at https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/wiki/What%20Would%20Col1%20Do%3F
if you can help.
That said, taxation was slightly reduced in recent releases. If you wish to reduce the influence of the monarch further, there is a "monarch meddling" game option that can be reduced. This is a fairly blunt setting though, what would be better are some options allowing users to control the likelihood and size of tax increases.
Interesting thread. I never allow tax increases. All of my early game gold comes from searching, as well as selling trade goods, guns, and horses to the natives. I only produce finished goods once I get custom houses (with the exception of the first several turns to get money to equip my third immigrant as a scout).
I've never played the original game - how do freecol tax increases differ from the way things were done in the original game. Be specific, and if possible, quantitative. The goal for version 1.0 is to duplicate Colonization's behavior as closely as possible, if the appropriate game options are selected.
The purpose of the tax increases is to motivate your decision to declare independence, and this is historically accurate (at least, for the US). Declaring indepence has a few nice benefits:
Some of your existing Veterans become Regulars
You can train Regulars, or get them as a result of combat promotions.
You can build Men of War.
Once your home country recognizes you as an indepent country, you can trade with Europe without having to pay taxes.
However, it also comes with a number of disadvantages:
You can no longer found any new colonies.
You can no longer visit any European port. In particular, this means you can longer buy trade goods, Artillery or Ships, cannot pick up immigrants (which renders your churches and Firebrand Preachers useless), and cannot pay for trained immigrants. You can only trade other goods with Europe through Customs Houses, and only with the right founding father. In my opinion, you should be free to try to visit the home port of any country you're not currently at war with (though subject to possible blockade by any country you are at war with), and do any of those things, but that's not how the game works.
* You have to fight and win your revolution. Of course, a hothead looking forward to the Revolution won't care about that, and since the AI isn't very good yet, this isn't a horribly difficult task.
Without rising taxes to provide an incentive, it might be a long time before a purely rational player bothered declaring independence.
Last edit: James Kuyper 2015-12-13
Actually this is controlled by the "found colonies during rebellion" option, which is false in the classic rule set and true in the freecol rule set.
Indeed, with a large map and a decent trading fleet, you can make substantial profits from native trade and almost entirely ignore the monarch.
I ca't train regulars. I don't think you can either. But they can be promoted in combat.
Hmm, colopedia says you can teach them in a university, but it's never worked for me,.
Where? If so, it is a bug.
Units/Colonial Regular/School required to train: University
King's Regular/School required to train: University
Buildings/Universtity/Teaches: ... Colonial Regular, King's Regular
I don't get to play frequently, so it's been a while since I've bothered upgrading freecol - I'm currently using 0.11.3. If this has been corrected in more recent versions, I wouldn't know about it. I've unfortunately never had the time to play a game through to the point where I could test the accuracy of this documentation.
Somebody wrote that documentation that way for a reason (not necessarily a good one). Possibly Colonization allowed the training of Regulars?
OK, you have rediscovered BR#2881, which was fixed for 0.11.6. I recommend upgrading.
Sorry, I misunderstood colopedia. It says "May teach in University", which is, IMO, a little ambiguous (are they the teacher or the student?).
This is not completely correct, however. A regular may teach one unit in a college if is promoted from a VS who is teaching at the college. You can't add regulars to a college, and you can't assign new units to them, but they can complete training initiated when they were a VS even if the training was at 0/4 at the time of promotion.
Personally, I think regulars should be able to teach in colleges, since they can only train units up to VS, and VS can train VS in a college. I think the building required should limit the skill that can be trained, not the unit who provides that training.
Err, ambiguous in what way? They are the teacher. It says "may teach", not "may study".
That would be logical, but logic is not the determining factor. What did Col1 do? That is what we need to know.
Thank you for clarifying.
I would suggest that you should play the old game, not matter you role is this organisation. You can immediately notice after that the differences between both, and maybe work against it. On a old gamer perspective, this tax raise is ridiculously high, with the king asking the same ressource again and again to be boycotted, sometimes after 2 turns only.
I understand this willing to push the player to declare the war (and end the game, the post war era is not interesting, like finishing a Civ game and continuing turns forever) ok.
Then my point is : maybe there is other way to counter balance a deffect AI, or pushing players without killing economic plays ? Because for me it is clealry making a huge difference and then way of playing than with the old one.
I'm not a member of this organization, just a player. Even calling me a "player" is going a bit too far. I've spent a LOT of time thinking about and planning for this game, but I've only had enough free time to play a few experimental games to learn about the game mechanics - I've never even completed a game, so what I've said about what happens when you declare independence is not based upon personal experience.
My computer is a Linux machine. Colonization was made for PCs and Macs, but not, I believe, for Linux machines. Wine is the name of a program that allows you to run Windows software on Linux machines, and the only version of Colonization that has been successfully tested using Wine was version 3.1415926, a version that many people claim doesn't exist, which implies it might be hard to find. The last time it was tested was 2008. Freecol, on the other hand, works just fine on Linux machines.
While I'm not a developer, the people who are would be very interested in a quantitative description of the differences. And, I gather that they don't have access to the original game, either. So if you do have access to it, I'm sure they would be very interested in any quantitative information you can give them about how it differs. If you could play an actual game and document the timing and sizes of tax increases along with the associated boycott good, they'd probably appreciate it. Make it clear for each increase whether or not you decided to boycott - I wouldn't be surprised if your decision to boycott or accept a tax increase has effects on later tax increases.
As far as I can remember, the king only chooses to tax goods that are not being boycotted, where you currently have at least 100 stockpiled (so that boycotting the tax will be costly). Therefore, if you are seeing multiple tax anouncements on the same good, you're not boycotting them often enough - at least, that's the impression I get from my limited amount of playing experience. The taxes don't have to get very high before it's far more profitable selling goods to natives than to Europe. Sales to natives aren't affected by taxes or boycotts - but there's a relatively low limit to how much you can sell without dropping the price. Trading with natives also reduces their unrest. Boycotting causes a large increase in your Bell production for quite a while after the boycott. I'm not sure how long they last, but when I first noticed that effect, I had six boycott bonuses active at the same time.
No access to the old game ? That would be very surprising, it's free now and super easy to obtain on legal websites, and should be played on a windows system with the lastest version of DosBox (Dos emulator). The game runs flawlessly and is still very enjoyable.
You're right about the increase of bells, it was just an immediate % raise in the old game but here it seems more sophisticated. Hard to see if it is more or less powerfull than the old game.
I would be glad to submit some analysis of the old one. I'm still using it for fun (especially for long flight travels), one the best timekiller I know !
Well, a few years ago Mike Pope made the following comment in one of his bug report responses:
So the fact that it's free and easy to obtain doesn't do much good if it only runs on Windows.
For data from the original Colonization, we use Colonization for Dos v3 .
That version runs fine in dosbox on linux, windows, OS X, OS/2 , BSD and some more platforms.
https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/wiki/What%20Would%20Col1%20Do%3F/
The only thing I find very annoying about taxes is how the monarch will sometimes give you the ultimatum every single turn for several consecutives turns. Sometimes he remains quiet for long periods of time. So the solution cannot be to simply adjust the probability.
The problem in essence is that while the monarch is certainly intended to be a nuisance, inducing the player to declare independence, but since there is no grace period after a tax threat, he sometimes manages to completely obliterate an economy, even very early on in the game.
The solution could be to have a grace period between taxing threats. 10 turns after a grace period seems reasonable to me. This could then lower as the game develops, or in fact, simply remain the same.
Last edit: Teekin Red 2016-01-16
Do you know whether Colonization itself did anything to avoid long strings of tax requests? If not, that idea belongs in the "Ideas for FreeCol 2" forum. When FreeCol 1.0 comes out, the plan is for it to behave pretty much the same way as Colonization itself, at least when you choose the "Classic Rules" option.
This is just the random number generator at work. The code that chooses the monarch action each turn finds out which events are valid, and takes a weighted random choice from among them. It is not at all uncommon to see long runs of the same action --- where that action is "no action", but sometimes you hit a rough patch of random numbers and there is a cluster of tax demands. If this did not happen, we would know there was a bug in the random number generator.