Not Receiving Colonies and Slow Merchant Build

[thufir]

In version 1.2.14 I'm seeing two behaviors that seem wrong:

1) I've had two cases where I included a clause in a surrender treaty demanding transfer of colonies, and I never saw those extra colonies reflected in the Economic report. I did move ahead a couple of extra turns, still no colonies (and the provinces that were ceded did show up on schedule). I'm also quite sure that the score of the surrender treaty was below the required level.

2) In building a merchant ship, it seems to take 8 turns, no matter the number of docks in the province where the merchant is produced. Is this WAD? If so, are the military ships reduced in construction time as per the manual (1 turn reduction for every 2 docks, iirc).

In both cases I have save game files that show these behaviors repeatably.

[Naomi]

Your worry is not that much of a concern. First, the number of colonies can be examined in the "country details" of the diplomat advisor screen. So you can know if the AI has played grubby tricks in handing over its colonies. The transfer is as absent from the economic report as a nation's surrender is sometimes from the political section of a beginning-of-turn events report (but instead it is present in the trade section).

Second, the construction of merchants is finished invariably in 8 months (in at least level 1 docks) but the other sorts of vessels differ - the advanced the dock where they are built, the sooner those vessels will come of age. For example, privateers can be completed in Brest or Plymouth in not more than 6 month, while the schedule easily extends to 7 or 8 months if Dublin or Marseilles are chosen for the task.

[ericbabe]

Colonial transfers seem to work in our general testing. Can you provide more details about your particular situation? (How many colonies did you ask for? How many did you have before/after? How many did they have before/after? etc.)

[Hard Sarge]

for the colonies

are you sure the other guy still had any ?

the treaty will let you trade for as many as you want, it don't mean that the other Nation has that many

[Hard Sarge]

looks like he got a point

it takes 8 turns for them to build, I got a level 10 Dock here ?

[Naomi]

Didn't know why merchants were singled out for such a fixed schedule. My thinking is: unlike other kinds of vessels, merchants might require commercial arrangements (including searching for and making contacts - and deals - with possible trade partners about the pending product or service offerings) and licence-granting procedures (or red tape, which easily died hard), both of which would, as taken together, tend to take a more-or-less fixed time.

Why are the other kinds of vessels different? Because, perhaps, they were categorised as being on military purposes which took precedence over civic or commercial ones. They were thus subject to another, closely supervised, sort of vetting and command regime which then made shorter building times possible.

Seems I'll have to thumb through pages of books on military facts for justifications, if not alternative explanations. [:'(]

[thufir]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe

Colonial transfers seem to work in our general testing. Can you provide more details about your particular situation? (How many colonies did you ask for? How many did you have before/after? How many did they have before/after? etc.)

My Bad - no bug here!

It is as Hard Sarge suggests - the other parties had no colonies, or less than I asked for (Austria and Russia). In the case of Russia which had 10 colonies at the time (and I asked for 20) the code did the correct thing and gave me the 10 colonies that Russia had.

I suppose it would be nice if the UI told you that your diplomatic partner did not have what you were asking for, but I would have to rate such a feature as low priority.

While I'm on the topic - I'll mention that the diplomatic UI in CoG is quite impressive! Your design is quite ambitious, and has a very realistic feel to it. As I am working out Austria's terms of surrender, I really have the sense that I am designing terms for a surrender agreement such as an imperial power like France would deserve!.

Kudos!

Thufir

[Naomi]

I suppose it would be nice if the UI told you that your diplomatic partner did not have what you were asking for, but I would have to rate such a feature as low priority.

Not even the AI would bother to care and check if its defeated nation still has enough colonies to ask for in surrender treaties, though less often seen after the latest patch. Btw, I found the AI tended to make less harsh demands in such treaties, say just a low sum of ducats with debt-service strings attached (even though the coffers were healthily filled if not overflowing), instead of which it could have had reparations or territorial gains.

[ericbabe]

We could make merchant ships developed in faster time via docks... haven't given it much thought.

[Naomi]

I see. I thought merchants with an invariable building time were out of your developers' intelligent design. [:'(]