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Colonies
and their Uses
By Cherub bobT
When designing
your adventure it is always nice to add a bit of challenge. One
of those challenges is of coarse the lack of a resource or two that
you may require, in order to achieve the final goals of you adventure.
A good way to provide this needed resource is through colonies.
However, colonies can be a very tricky aspect to your adventure,
if not set up properly.
Many adventure
creators like to design their missions based on a certain flow and
story line. This is great provided that the end user has the same
mindset as the designer. Remember that not everyone will play your
adventure the way you intended. As soon as you introduce multiple
colonies into an adventure you are also introducing multiple options
to the player, and if these options will only work in a specified
order, your adventure may die before its time.
So lets take
a look at the creation and addition of colonies to your adventure.
As with the parent map, one of the most important aspects of the
colony is the map layout. In most cases, colonies are smaller and
more unique than parent cities. Therefore a smaller tougher map
is needed to make the colony a good challenge. Try to set up the
colony in such a way that it can never be as powerful or glorious
as your parent. (Kind of defeats the purpose of calling it a colony).
Gifts are always a nice addition to a colony map. If your parent
city set aside wood for the colony, make sure the colony cannot
produce wood. And then add a reason for the wood in your goals (trimeme,
sanctuary, or maybe to trade away, or satisfy a rival). And if your
parent did set aside wood, make sure you gift it to the colony.
What I like to do is set up a gift as a recurring event, just small
amounts. The player, in most cases will not keep tabs of the size
you set aside, but will notice if the set aside resources never
get gifted later in your game. A good set aside is fleece, if produced
in the parent. Fleece is needed to evolve your housing, and with
small teaser gifts, you can control the player's city evolution
to the size you wish them to grow too. Remember that if the player
has access to olive oil and not fleece, but you gift small amounts
of it, they could evolve their housing to townhouse. But by keeping
the fleece gifts low, the houses could dissolve if fleece runs out
before year-end. This is a good tactic for setting a townhouse goal
in the colony. By forcing the player to stockpile fleece until they
have enough to achieve their end of year goal.
Setting up colonies
gets much trickier if you have more than one colony. Although I
have seen and played many adventures that have a preset direction,
which a player should choose, you must always remember that not
all players like to follow the rules. So try to set up your colonies
in such away that the game is still playable, no matter which way
a player chooses to go. You do not have to make it easy, if they
choose the wrong way, but do make it playable.
Another thing
to remember is that any sanctuaries that you have listed with your
Gods are available, regardless of whether or not they have been
built in your parent city.
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