Sid Meier's Colonization
peyre.42web.io
peyre.42web.io
The original domain has been suspended, but the article was insightful and of geek/hacker interest. The link can be replaced by the web archive, as has been done by someone else in the comments.
https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-par...
(I liked Colonization back then, but I now acknowledge the issues. Even back then I thought it was bizarre that the French, Spanish and Dutch were expected to echo the experience of the US!).
- Play as the Dutch to get their four-item capacity ship
- settle near Ore
- build only one or two cities, and make them as populated as you can. Wagon train food and raw materials in if you have to.
- produce Tools and Guns, nothing else.
- Early on, sell shiploads of basically anything from Europe to the tribes to jumpstart your economy. You don't need any other dealings with the tribes or other Europeans.
- Put your carpenters to work building fortresses, universities, and cannons.
- Once you have a university, start training up soldiers. Clear all special skills not involved in growing food or producing guns so you have an large number of civilians to train up.
- Put a tall stack of professional soldiers and cannons in your fortresses.
- declare independence and win.
- build your cities only two squares apart
- research only until you can build chariots, then set Science to 0%. (This takes all the fun out of the game for me, but winning on Deity mode is nice too)
- alternate between building colonists and chariots only. I think you build barracks as well
- build cities until you have a dense network of ~50 closely packed cities, each very small. Then churn out chariots.
- swarm everyone else with chariots ASAP. Hope that every enemy is reachable through dry land, or you're cooked.
You can beat the game with the max number of computer players on the highest difficulty this way... if your chariot swarm doesn't cause a buffer overflow.
- Research only towards monotheism and swarm with crusaders
- More interesting variation to break the game: go for republic as soon as possible, only build cities near water and other high trade squares. Put luxury to 80% and max out trade in cities by putting production to water/max trade squares. Build temples, market places and aqueducts and reach 1M population well before 0AD. Once population is maxed, put tax to 80% and instead of building, just buy what you need including enemy cities and barbarians. This leaves you a bit vulnerable, but when it works out it's a lot of fun. You can have massive cities built on isolated island etc.
E: Also, if you manage, build colossus, observatory and Newton's college in the same city. By the end you'll churn out new advances every 2 turns.
I vaguely recall the embedded Python being accused of poor performance. I wonder if that's why they switched to Lua in later engines.
This was possible in the Civ IV: Colonization version! However, it appears that the more productive you are, the bigger the Royal army is. I wish I understood the precise mechanism of that.