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Colonisation Thoughts

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unmerged(18180)

unmerged(18180)

Lord of the Lurk
Jul 11, 2003
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Greetings all,

Well colonisation as it stands is just waaaaaay too easy. Putting the brakes on it would improve things (no more Macedonian Poland)...

Had some thoughts on this but I don't know whats doable within the modding framework but here goes:

1. Colonisation should be slow : On initial colonisation penalties should be placed on the new colony. Civ value, Pop growth, RP and Tax all need big penalties. These would decrease over time (say a string of events reducing the penalties each year). This would represent the gradual improvement of infrastructure. I am thinking 10 years but they may slow things too much.

2. It should be expensive : Events to take money and manpower for the fledgling colony could make for some painful choices. It could also be used to accelerate growth or merely to stop a decline.

3. It should be able to fail : Barbarian raids, plague, ruler neglect and just sheer bad luck are all good reasons for a colony to fail.

4. There should be different types of colonies : Military, Economic and Expansionist. Military is resettlement of veterans or border defence. Lower income but higher defence and costs more manpower. Economic would be more expensive but yield better income. Expanionist would be somewhere in between.

As I said I have no idea how doable any of this is but it would certainly make the game more challenging.
 
Comrade Alex said:
Greetings all,
3. It should be able to fail : Barbarian raids, plague, ruler neglect and just sheer bad luck are all good reasons for a colony to fail.
Click to expand...

This especially. the current model of pissing off barbarians, luring them away and then colonizing the empty lands is sort of ridiculous and as you said too easy. The AI is especially silly about it, stirring up barbs, getting their ass kicked and sneaking colonists around them to start one up, usually while that same horde is off rampaging their settled provinces. Then those colonies, no matter how poorly defended or often sacked are there in perpetuity.

I like your ideas, though I'm not sure how they could be implemented (though I'm not much of a modder :p). It shouldn't be too hard though to make a province modifier for new colonies that sets them apart and makes events resulting in their growth or destruction possible.

However, as usual when modding my question is can the AI handle it? I'm all for making this aspect more challenging and in depth, but if it means a crippled AI or being forced to cheat for them, I question the worth of it.
 
Wouldn't it be possible to make an event where a province with...

Code: 
tag = BAR # Owned by barbarians
NOT = { barbarian_power = 2 } # Barbarian population is 1, the prerequisite for colonising

and so on, so that it fires immediately(title-hack?) when the barbarian power is 1 raising the barbarian power slightly(but not always as some colonisation is always good, giving it some sort of requirement, so that it doesn't fire all the time.) It is however important that it fires directly, else the AI (or a quick player for that matter) might colonise it anyway.

Or, you could make sure that barbarian provinces always stay at atleast 2 power, so that they are uncolonisable. Then after a small event chain (depending on a nearb governor's skills perhaps?) will give this province a flag and another event will lower the barbarian power to 1, allowing colonisation.

Seriously though, it's a sticky question and hard to balance, but it ought to be better than what we have now.
 
"tag = BAR" is wrong. You do not want any provinces owned by barbarians. But we can write country events, which fire for BAR or REB, that increases the barbarian_power in not colonized provinces regulary. Something on the basis of
Code: 
country_event = {
  trigger = {
    tag = BAR
    42 = { NOT = { barbarian_power = 2 } }
  }
  id = 23
  option = {
    42 = {
      barbarian_power = 1
    }
  }
}
should do the trick.

btw, there is a nice discussion on the Magna Mundi part of the forum about cheating and counter-cheating with the AI (in the tech-race for EU3): http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=403871
 
Last edited:
Comrade Alex said:
1. Colonisation should be slow : On initial colonisation penalties should be placed on the new colony. Civ value, Pop growth, RP and Tax all need big penalties. These would decrease over time (say a string of events reducing the penalties each year). This would represent the gradual improvement of infrastructure. I am thinking 10 years but they may slow things too much.
Click to expand...
It's not as though new colonies have very high pop, civ or tax values right now, but I see what you mean. I don't think colonisation should always be slower, though, only more challenging.

2. It should be expensive : Events to take money and manpower for the fledgling colony could make for some painful choices. It could also be used to accelerate growth or merely to stop a decline.
Click to expand...
Again, I don't think colonisation should always be more expensive. That depends on how you want to treat your colonies. I'm thinking of something more like the colonial maintenance slider in EU3.

3. It should be able to fail : Barbarian raids, plague, ruler neglect and just sheer bad luck are all good reasons for a colony to fail.
Click to expand...
Agreed. If a province is neglected enough, it should eventually get an event that seceded it back to the barbarians again.

4. There should be different types of colonies : Military, Economic and Expansionist. Military is resettlement of veterans or border defence. Lower income but higher defence and costs more manpower. Economic would be more expensive but yield better income. Expanionist would be somewhere in between.
Click to expand...
I agree that there should be different kinds of colonisation, but I'm not too sure about the military/economic division. I'd prefer if a separate event took care of each question. One might ask the player how to distribute the land (where giving it to veterans is an option) and another how to treat the natives.
 
Phi said:
"tag = BAR" is wrong. You do not want any provinces owned by barbarians. But we can write country events, which fire for BAR or REB, that increases the barbarian_power in not colonized provinces regulary. Something on the basis of
Code: 
country_event = {
  trigger = {
    tag = BAR
  }
  id = 42
  option = {
    42 = {
      barbarian_power = 1
    }
  }
}
should do the trick.
Click to expand...
That doesn't make any sense to me, I'm afraid. As I'm reading it, the ID of the event is 42, and it repeatedly adds one point of barbarian power to province number 42. Huh?
 
I always thought that colonisation is slow :) Maybe it's too easy, yes.

One could implement that colonies have to be pacified over some years, which means that barbarian hordes spawn to reconquer the lands. Don't know what the AI would make of it though.
 
Descartes said:
That doesn't make any sense to me, I'm afraid. As I'm reading it, the ID of the event is 42, and it repeatedly adds one point of barbarian power to province number 42. Huh?
Click to expand...

I shortened my example to much. And my habit to use 42 as place-holder for everything is perhaps confusing. I fixed it a little bit.
 
What about making it so that if any province is occupied by a Barbarian horde that is larger than the actual population of the province, said Barbs plop their butts down and take over? Or is this impossible to code? It would make defending your borders way more important.
 
Pellucid said:
What about making it so that if any province is occupied by a Barbarian horde that is larger than the actual population of the province, said Barbs plop their butts down and take over? Or is this impossible to code? It would make defending your borders way more important.
Click to expand...
That would kill of Rome. Those hordes wandering all the way from the north is huge. Dealing with them before they occupy a province can be very hard. Especially for the AI.
 
Sute]{h;9632452 said:
That would kill of Rome. Those hordes wandering all the way from the north is huge. Dealing with them before they occupy a province can be very hard. Especially for the AI.
Click to expand...

Were talking about taking over specific provinces, if a barbarian horde walking on it is bigger than the population of the province? Can't one just activate this for human players? Is there any province flag which gives the information "owned by human player" = true or false?
 
I've got another idea to make colonising harder: When provoking the barbarians of an unoccupied province to rise by sending some troops, all but one "barbarian strength" is converted into marching barbarian troops.
My suggestion: When they rise, the group of barbarian spawning in the province should be as big as the total "barbarian strength", but the barbarian strength of that province is only reduced by one. So if there is a province with a barb strength of 5 one needs to provoke the barbarians at least 4 times to reduce the strength to 1 and colonise the province. Thus each time the barbarians would be weaker, but it would need some more time to defeat them.

Would this be too tedious?
 
Before Vae Victis, i discovered that ceding ownership of a province to the "REB" faction made it "empty" again. So I wrote 3-4 events (more precisely, i added these events to the "looter" events someone had already created) that fired about 1 month after a province fell to barbarians.

To cut a long story short, leaving a province with low population under barbarian control for more than a month would result in seeing it return to "empty" status.

Needless to say, colonisation was slowed down drastically...
 
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