Trying to build lots of colonies

[SuperJew]

I like a round where I have enough colonies that I can constantly produce shipments of all the resources, furs, coats, tobacco, cigars, sugar, rum, cotton, cloth and silver. So I can set up my own trade organization amongst the indians in the new world thats free of the taxxes of Europe. Call me ambitious, but Ive recently ran into problems accomplishing this goal.

For one thing, your colonists require more and more training with each graduating class. Im not sure why the creators of the game included this, it makes it a whole lot harder for my colonies to be independent of Europe when it takes me 60 turns just to train one colonist in a University. All I can say is train wisely, get colonists that are either really expensive to purchase in Europe or the Indians can not possibly train, like Lumberjacks, Carpenters, FireBrand Preachers, Statesmen, etc etc. Because eventually you get to the point that it takes so many turns to train a colonist that having a University is no longer useful.

Have the Indians do all of your training for future colonies. Everything, turn over to the Indians, atleast they take the same amount of turns to train an individual and it doesnt use up valuble food resources.

Make sure you have a constant supply of firebrand preachers to keep a continuous flow of colonists from Europe. Eventually it starts taking FOREVER to get another colonist from europe without expanding your firebrand preachers.

Im playing a Marathon round as Peter Stuyvesant and Large land, wish me luck.

How many colonies do you prefer to have in a game?

[Etherdeath]

I believe this is a bug, it doesn't make any sense for a unit to take 60 years to learn to be a farm just because 10 other colonists were taught farming before.

[Habadacus]

Yeah SJ, I noticed this and made a post about it myself, cause it seems like a bug. I scoured the manual and the civilopedia, and I didn't see anything that would indicate training times are supposed to get longer, and it doesn't make any sense when you think about it. I mean given these rules it would take 100 years to graduate from Yale today, just because so many people graduated from there before.

I'm curious to see what will happen if we try building just one education building in one city and not building schools all over, and wonder if that triggers the bug or not. Given the bonuses you get from Founding Fathers and Schoolhouses, it would suck to be able to only build one, but if it's a bug it might help them track it down easier.

[savagehenry]

According to the XML and the folks at the civfanatics forums, the cost to educate a colonist increases by thirty percent(!) for each colonist you train.

[Etherdeath]

Thanks, savagehenry. Here's a way to "fix" this :

Open this file in a text editor :

\Sid Meier's Civilization IV Colonization\Assets\XML\GlobalDefines.xml

Search for EDUCATION_THRESHOLD_INCREASE
And you'll see it says 20. You can change this to whatever you like.

The EDUCATION_THRESHOLD is 30.

I haven't spent a lot of time with it, but I'm probably going to keep the threshold increase at 0.

I think they should redesign the education system in the game. The increase does not seem resemble reality nor facilitate some game play mechanism. It makes it harder to revolt. Because it is not mentioned in the civilopedia, it does seem like this is a bug, though obviously they built in a mechanism to have education cost more over time.

[IceCube]

why you need so many colonies ? for me 4 is perfect 3 is ok and with 2 would be hard to win.

[ArmySyko]

I guess the increase similar to what you get by recruiting from Europe, the numbers start to go up a little bit at a time.

It would seem that a community where a Carpenter was working his craft and then teaching later in the day, he would refine his method over time. That doesn't mean that a Carpenter could train Free Colonist in a turn but incrementally dropping the length of education seems better. Children (where free colonists come from?) would have a better idea how the colonies worked and what would be required of them when they entered school.

Thanks for the mod. I made that almost instantly.

A-S

[Couderes]

Etherdeath...I tried editing GlobalDefines.xml and all it did was crash. Even when I restored the original GlobalDefines.xml ..it crashed. I had to reinstall the game.

Am I missing something here (apart from brains)?