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Originally posted by Kehfee
With just infantry? Oh man the horror. How many people must have died to make Sweden ruler of the galaxy. I can't even fathom the amount of attrition on that 1,400,000 man army you had attack Corsica.


In the game I listed somewhere above I have about 5,000,000 infantry 1,000,000 calvalry and 100,000 artillery
 
Originally posted by adamxxx1


This would possibly be possible with Spain. None else gets enough settlers. Another beautiful hard-coded setting to cripple EU as a strategic game, alas.

Cheers to you, Kalle Dussin.

I suspect it might be possible with any country though I would go for either Spain or France as the best bets

Anyway, the challenge is out there now. Who's going to try it and don't forget to bring along the proof - which I think can only be from the Archive. Screenshots should be included.

Just in case it is rather more difficult that it might first appear, let's have a few interim targets for people to aim for:

Every province at least colony level x.
 
Building cities in every province:
Just perform the calculations : at 5 colonists at year (even Spain don't get that many), you'd still only be able to get 1500 colonists in total. Assume an average of 8 colonists required to build cities (note - assuming that the easy provinces in america only using 4-6 colonists is balanced by the difficult provinces in Asia - quite optimistic estimate), and you'd still only be able to create cities in 200 or so provinces.

In other words, can't be done.

Tsk, tsk; adamxxx1 - why does it take you so long time to conquor the world? With the Swedes, you should be able to do it by 1600. ;) :p :D
 
Originally posted by Coeur de Lion


Then you don't need to try. For others, the challenge is still out there.

Well, Strategys numbers are basically sound, aren't they? If you don't get enough settlers there's just no way to build cities everywhere. If you could let the AI do the building with their settlers and go on conquer sprees, of course, but I tried that here to conserve Swedens precious few settlers and found that the AI really loves sending all their settlers to a few provinces. The Dutch had 36000 people in a province in Indonesia! So I don't think it's possible. Anyone who can prove me wrong is welcome to do so, of course.
 
Originally posted by Coeur de Lion
Then you don't need to try. For others, the challenge is still out there.

Doh! I think you miss the point - this can not be done without massive cheating (as in - adding extra colonists). There are way over 400 uncolonized provinces, which would require minimum 2000 colonists even if all colonizations had 100% chance of success. A more realistic (still optimistic) estimate is 5-6000 colonists; even if all the major colonization nations go rabidly building cities they wouldn't be able to carry out such a colonization programme.
 
It may be true that one nation alone can't colonize the world. The trick is to let other nations found the colonies, and then you take the colonies (or colonial cities) away from them. So if you're playing a "conquer the world" strategy, leave Spain, Portugal and England alone until late in the game, so they place colonies for you.

Say, start as France. Expand east, into Italy/Germany/Middle East.
 
Originally posted by crooktooth
It may be true that one nation alone can't colonize the world. The trick is to let other nations found the colonies, and then you take the colonies (or colonial cities) away from them. So if you're playing a "conquer the world" strategy, leave Spain, Portugal and England alone until late in the game, so they place colonies for you.

Say, start as France. Expand east, into Italy/Germany/Middle East.

The Ai does not spread it's colonizing wealth around. It mostly tries to establish tp:s in the mostly hard-coded "historical" areas of that country's "real" expansion and then builds up a few really huge cities.

So I really don't think it's possible. But I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.
 
Well I'm pretty sure that it is feasible but it is also very difficult. Let's face it, taking every province is not all that simple and this example showed that even using trading posts can still be a close-run thing.

Here are some tips:

1) Sometimes keeping natives will make the task easier
2) Take colonies in peace deals to force powers like Turkey and France to build others.
3) Playing Spain or Portugal allows you to take colonies from the ToT
4) Don't send colonists one after the other. in North America, 2 successful attempts before 1692 will be enough. Use naturaly population growth.

Don't underestimate the last point. In my current game as Portugal I have 59 growing (well some) colonies with an average population of just over 200. With 120 years to run, I would estimate that I need only 105 colonists to take them all up to city status (i.e. less than 2 per colony).

As it happens I think I have next to no chance of even achieving the "colony in every province" goal since Africa is still pretty bare. But I could always give England my maps (there's a thought :D).
Possibly even more difficult will be some of those inland South America provinces which need development of cities to the sea before you can build.
 
Originally posted by Coeur de Lion
Well I'm pretty sure that it is feasible but it is also very difficult. Let's face it, taking every province is not all that simple and this example showed that even using trading posts can still be a close-run thing.

On the contrary. Check the Empire of the North AAR in which the world is conquered by 1620 and every province colonized/TP'ed by the 1750s. With a colony nation, this would have been even simpler.

1) Sometimes keeping natives will make the task easier

Not in terms of building them up to cities.

2) Take colonies in peace deals to force powers like Turkey and France to build others.

In general, as Adamx states, states colonize their "scripted" regions. I've yet to experience that a state colonizes beyond its scripting once its core colony areas have been conquored. Secondly, once a nation is into the badboy cyclus against you, it rarely colonizes seriously.

3) Playing Spain or Portugal allows you to take colonies from the ToT


My experience is that the ToT is rarely invoked (except against me). :D

4) Don't send colonists one after the other. in North America, 2 successful attempts before 1692 will be enough. Use naturaly population growth.

This is not my experience (incidentally, the population growth percentage is another place where the numbers displayed by EU are often inaccurate). 400 colonists before 1692 would be my minimum estimate + you need to have established a trading post first before you can colonize in the inland provinces. And for most of the world (Asia) + this only applies to the coastal provinces. And for most of the rest of the world, you require the full monty.

So if you're playing a "conquer the world" strategy, leave Spain, Portugal and England alone until late in the game, so they place colonies for you.

The problem is - will they leave you alone? :D

The other problem is that, if you yourself don't have a lot of colonists, then you can't colonize those places that the others won't colonize (S. American interior, Siberia, Asia).

/Strategy
 
I've checked the mathematics behind the figures and am still pretty certain of the first point depending upon native aggression and the number of colonists you need to send for city status.

As for the population growth figure I've found this to be pretty accurate with a few small exceptions. However, I do also know that the growth rates are the nearest whole percentage. When a growth rate says 9% and the location effect is -2, you can be pretty certain that the growth rate is actually 9.5%.

One example I can give of the native thing could be Tindore where I think I sent 3 colonists. They grew to 601 and the natives joined. Perhaps I was a little lucky that there was no native uprising (or maybe the one) but the cost of three successful expeditions as opposed to four without natives was certainly lower. And this does take into account the lower success probability of former.

As for whether it's possible, let's see. It may take a while before it can be done but just because it hasn't been done should make it impossible.
 
Originally posted by strategy


Tsk, tsk; adamxxx1 - why does it take you so long time to conquor the world? With the Swedes, you should be able to do it by 1600. ;) :p :D

Hey, I know. But playing ICG with "chaos hurts" and categorically refusing to play the diplomatic and trade game costs a hundred or so years in slow start-up. Not for me the kind of trickery you did at the start of Empire of the North, if I can't crush then I'm not interested ;-)

Also, I was really hoping that Spain, Portugal, France and England would go on a colonizing spree, seeing how few settlers Sweden got, but that didn't really pay off for reasons stated elsewere in the thread.
 
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Originally posted by Coeur de Lion

As for whether it's possible, let's see. It may take a while before it can be done but just because it hasn't been done should make it impossible.

I think it might be borderline possible if you play Spain and happen to have a really good night with the dice. For all the reasons Strategy's stated I don't really think I'll see anybody doing it - but it might be possible. I kept the "big powers" in the game for a long time in this very AAR - and it didn't really pay off any.

Still, as a challenge I'm not overly bothered by the fact that it hard, but by the fact that it would need so much luck to happen. I mostly prefer challenges I can overcome by strategy rather than by ingratiating myself with Lady Fortuna.
 
I was getting 7 colonists per year for the last half of the game as Protestant England with a shipyard.

But still colonizing Africa and the far east is a huge difficulty. In many places it would take 10-12 colonists to get a city, so I think unless you play multiplayer and make it a cooperative effort, getting a city in every province is not going to happen...

ANd rightly so, because even today in 2001 there isn't a city in every single one of those spaces, I'd bet.
 
Originally posted by Coeur de Lion
One example I can give of the native thing could be Tindore where I think I sent 3 colonists. They grew to 601 and the natives joined. Perhaps I was a little lucky that there was no native uprising (or maybe the one) but the cost of three successful expeditions as opposed to four without natives was certainly lower. And this does take into account the lower success probability of former.

AFAIK, a colony has to reach city level (700) before the natives will join. Or is this some undocumented feature? (I rarely experience this myself, since non-colony nations generally can't afford letting natives survive).

As for whether it's possible, let's see. It may take a while before it can be done but just because it hasn't been done should make it impossible.

As adamxx says; perhaps on a good night, with extremely good luck it might happen. Heck - if one gets enough colonial dynamism, perhaps... :p
 
Originally posted by Soapy Frog
I was getting 7 colonists per year for the last half of the game as Protestant England with a shipyard.

But still colonizing Africa and the far east is a huge difficulty. In many places it would take 10-12 colonists to get a city, so I think unless you play multiplayer and make it a cooperative effort, getting a city in every province is not going to happen...

ANd rightly so, because even today in 2001 there isn't a city in every single one of those spaces, I'd bet.

As opposed to the Global Swedish Empire that has been ruling the world for, oh, 200 years or so, which is clearly possible with this game? :)
 
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