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In 1746, three Spanish men-of-war are sighted off the coast on New Spain, bearing down on Southwatch, a fishing village built on a hill. Like all of my settlements, Southwatch is exceedingly well defended, with a fortress, at least three cannons, and a hefty defensive bonus for its 100% rebel sentiment. Furthermore, my Founding Fathers include plenty of military hard-hitters, such as Dom Pedro I, who gives all my defenders a minuteman bonus and veteran status. Two of the men-of-war unload troops adjacent to Southwatch, while the third attempts an amphibious invasion.
Read about the War of Independence after the jump.
I'm just going to go ahead and spoiler everything by telling you every single one of my settlements falls within a few turns of being attacked. It only takes 38 years from the appearance of the men-of-war off Southwatch to the fall of my last settlement. My defenses are little more than speed bumps for the attacking Spanish forces. What's the Spanish word for "steamroller"?
Sitting here in my Spanish prison, I have a lot of time to think about what went wrong.
1) Unlike Civilization IV, the defenses you build in Colonization get knocked down. In each of my settlements, I had built – and put great faith in – fortresses that give a 150% defensive bonus. If this was straight-up Civ IV, my defenders would always get that bonus, even if the enemy used ships or cannons to bombard the city. But that's not the case in Colonization, where bombardment whittles down the effectiveness of defensive structures. Since the king's forces showed up with plenty of artillery in tow, my fortresses were easily knocked over.
2) It's easy to get overconfident looking at the combat odds for a one-on-one engagement. Against any single Spanish attack, the odds heavily favored my defenders. At first. But whether I'm defending or attacking, I constantly fail to appreciate the efficacy of overwhelming numbers. A horde of less powerful attackers can easily damage a more powerful defender, making it less and less effective in successive fights and eventually killing it. The Spanish were able to knock down my fortresses and then repeatedly hit my defenders. They took plenty of losses, but they had plenty of units to lose. I didn't.
3) The really bone-headed move on my part was declaring independence too early. Furthermore, I'd suffered some serious setbacks to my economy, thanks to mismanaged wars with the Incas and the Tupi. I should have had more settlements making me more money for a longer period of time. I should have had a powerful enough military to be proactive as soon as Spanish troops landed, with a mobile force to weaken and harass them as they tried to get in position around my cities.
4) As the game progressed and I emphasized liberty bell production, I was easily able to buy Founding Fathers out from under the Dutch and French. By the game's end, I had a 20-member Continental Congress and 76,000 unused "liberty bell" points I would never be able to spend. My emphasis on producing liberty bells meant the king regularly increased the size of his army, since liberty bells represent "rebel sentiment". By the time I declared independence, there was no way I was going to hold out against a force that large. My only hope would have been to develop a massive navy to cut off the king's troops before they got to New Spain. But I didn't even bother with a navy. In fact, I didn't build a single ship, much less a drydock.
(As a corollary for #4, part of my emphasis on liberty bells was that I wanted to make sure each settlement had a 100% rebel sentiment. Simon Bolivar, my Spanish leader, gets a defensive bonus based on the town's rebel sentiment. Larger cities need more liberty bells to get the percentage up, so I went liberty bell crazy. What I failed to take into account is that by the time I'd armed colonists to serve as soldiers, the size of the settlement shrank dramatically, so that it easily had 100% rebel sentiment. I hugely botched this game with my gross overproduction of liberty bells.)
5) I actually didn't even have to declare independence. I was so far ahead of the Dutch and French that I could have won by riding the clock out and having the highest score at the time limit.
6) For the first time, I was playing a notch up from the middle difficulty level. Maybe I wasn't ready.
So there are my excuses. Basically, it comes down to this: I suck at Colonization. It's not an easy game. But I will say that it's a sure sign it's a great game when you suffer an utter and humiliating defeat ad immediately want to play again.
(Click here to read the previous Colonization game diary.)
Frakjack
Welcome to Eureka
Carter's Car Dodge
By Aeon221 at 11:35 AM ON 09/29/08
Holy crap, you lost? This is the third most shocking thing I've ever seen! I really expected a triumphant victory with some clever mocking of the King, especially after that last post.
Well, bummer. Better luck next game.
By hurrah! at 11:39 AM ON 09/29/08
i've been enjoying these stories, tom. thanks.
i tried to buy this the other day via steam but was thwarted by arbitrary region restrictions :/
By Troy Goodfellow at 11:40 AM ON 09/29/08
Nice diary. I am very familiar with the ending.
Indian and foreign wars can pop up at the most inconvenient time. The best time for an Indian war is early on, because a late one can eat up valuable turns. You could go the peace route, but a great general can make a huge difference so getting that combat experience matters.
Too few settlements seems to be my issue, so far. IIRC, you could do fine in the original Colonization with five secure cities. But you need to keep making money, which means more trade.
By tiffany ratilff at 11:47 AM ON 09/29/08
this is a stupid site if you can not play any games on the site so i would love to try them first
By Pod at 12:16 PM ON 09/29/08
As said on QT3, there appears to be a lot of resentment towards how Liberty Bells directly effects the size of REF. Especially consdiering the ingame tutorial actively tells you to start churning them out asap :/
By CROTEAR at 2:06 PM ON 09/29/08
Man this is like every Civ game I have ever lost. I rage-quit and tell myself "f it. This game is a waste of time". Then like the next morning you wake up thinking if you have just founded your second city by the gold instead of by the bananas I could have ramped up research alot faster, I would have gotten Gunpowder before the Germans. I'll play one more time.
By the server at 4:28 PM ON 09/29/08
"this is a stupid site if you can not play any games on the site so i would love to try them first"
Oh brother...! Anyway, really enjoyed this diary Tom! Please continue this feature!
PS: You know if Bruce were the King of Spain...
By malkav11 at 7:43 PM ON 09/29/08
Maybe I've been playing too much Fall From Heaven, (haven't played the base Civ IV in ages) but I thought bombardment *did* reduce static defenses in Civ IV. That that was in fact the main reason bombardment was now a critical element in one's military offensives. It would be a strange thing to add for the first time in the Colonization remake, as bombardment certainly didn't do anything of the sort in the original game.
By Tom Chick at 8:15 PM ON 09/29/08
I know that bombardment in Civ IV reduces a city's cultural defenses, but I wasn't aware it reduced defenses from city walls and castles, which are what I think of when I'm building stockades, forts, and fotresses in Colonization. If I'm wrong, my bad. I'll chalk it up as yet another instance of my mismanagement.
However, it's certainly intuitive to think that bombardment would affect city walls and castles, so maybe this indeed the situation in Civ IV.
Although, come to think of it, isn't there some caveat in Civ IV that those defenses aren't effective against gunpowder units?
By Alan Au at 9:56 PM ON 09/29/08
There's not much you can do to counter the effects of bombardment. Think of it as driving your garrison off the walls and into cover. Fortunately, ships don't bombard particularly well, so it's mainly the artillery pieces you have to worry about. Unfortunately, the King sure has a lot of them.
By Mike P at 1:29 AM ON 09/30/08
Tom: You're thinking of an earlier version of Civ, I think.
But yeah, in Civ 4, bombardment always reduces the city's defense % - otherwise turtling would be too effective a strategy.
By Benny at 9:48 AM ON 09/30/08
I really liked your writing style. It's a shame you lost. I actually managed to win my second game (first I ran out of time and some opponent went independent) as a Spanish Conquistador at Epic length.
I did declare Independence too early, when I suddenly noticed the amount of troops the King had gathered during my last few decades before (@POD, I agree, it seems a bit over the top).
But he 'only' had 4 Man-O-Wars, and only came with 3 and 1 at a time, so that's 12 troops at max, with several turns intervals. Luckily all focus was one one town. And even though my troops ran low at some times, I could keep up (while still upgrading the little towns to produce more horses, tools and guns).
I only had one ship of the line when I declared Independence. But I soon figured out that the only way to freedom would be sinking those 4 MoWs. At least it would reduce the amount of hammering I'd get. So the main port started building SoLs like crazy (yay for slavery!) at about one per 8 turns. So eventually for about every wave I'd have another one. I'd send the new ship to attack a single MoW and it would be damaged enough for the veteran SoL to take it down, barely.
In short. I was SO not prepared, except being able to hold out against the first two waves. Turns took ages the moment the first wave landed, and not because of all the fighting.
Btw, could you go trough all the articles and check whether they all having working 'up next' links? Just today I figured out that there were 5/6 more to read :).