Sid Meier's Colonization (1994) Viceroy speedrun (

Sorry for video's quality. KZbin converts from cute lossless to ugly pixelcrap... guess I'd have to artificially stretch the video for better results.
See complete details about the strategy and tricks used on Arqade : gaming.stackex...
Note that the tools abuse probably costs more (in game) time than it saves. Its real value is to make the strategy more reliable, since farming over12k for the army needs either some more time, a good luck (Cortes & some big loots in rumours), or using this trick.
---
Played & recorded with Dosbox 0.72 and Colonization latest version (3.0, feb-95, as seen on title screen).
I used 90000 cycles (to make map generation faster, but also in hope it improves the RNG... well, not sure about this, yet)
I used no tools or cheating, but put de Soto's weight at 999 in "NAMES.TXT" out of lazyness to avoid having to restart 81% of my games after landing.
(I think this run was done before this minor edit, but can't be 100% sure)

[@aboohoo]

merchantmen: multiple full loads of dragoons and artillery flood into port arawaks: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@darthveda]

THREE fountains in such a short stretch. Crazy. Well, really the whole thing is crazy including the tools. Such game mechanic abuse, I love it.

[@Panz82]

that looks more like cheating honestly.

[@alexeykuznetsov3097]

Its impossible, looks like someone edit game mechanics,

[@barok1383]

Looks like save/load and then cutting during video editing

[@lemonchicken41]

These speedruns are really impressive work. You have laid bare the flawed assumptions in the design. (I say this as someone who still plays this game out of nostalgia.) I hope you are healthy and prospering in your daily life! :)

[@ryanrussell8262]

That tools trick is genius.

[@Lovuschka]

Oh yea, I vividly remember my history lessons on how the One Colony signed the Declaration of Independence in Spring 1531, establishing the United State of America. The Thirteen Years War still is regarded one of the biggest battles in history. Many attribute the failure of Europe to defeat the revolutionaries to their inability to just send their ships into Fort Orange. Would they have directly attacked the city from sea instead of landing with all troops and fighting a battle on hostile territory, history might have taken a different turn.

[@GuyIncognito-pm4cp]

The Arawaks watching 35 units of Dragoons stampeding toward their village:😐

[@ryanforgo3500]

But but i only play it to maximixe 10 cities and the fun of it"although yhr maximum units limit per game ruins the fun" Also the fact that you can't destroy a city that's got a stockade. I really always hoped someone would make a better version of this game. I still enjoy it until this day!

[@martinxvidxb]

Freecol Enjoy :)

[@danielsimon933]

Wow, so much experience, wp!

[@mikem2253]

Jesus my childhood right here.

[@philipphamann8450]

The thing of this game is if you wait to long for independence and discover too much the other european would always harras you and put units circling your colonies but at this point the Ki does not even recognize that a new game was just started xD

[@AwesomeAxolotlt]

nice, you showed that red chair lounger

[@comments261]

So great! How do you do the tools thing to make all the money? I have tried this and it does not seem to work.

[@balmipour]

IIRC, It doesn't work (or not well) with the lesser difficulties, because prices don't rise as easily. Also, to be Dutch or not to be Dutch matters, for the same reason. If you aim to use this exploit at a low difficulty, you'd probably better play any other country, because Dutch prices don't go down fast enough to repeat the operation, and will quickly get to their cap value of 8/9

[@jcfight30]

It is how the game works, but your ranking is by %, and not by high-score. I think that’s important to remember. I don’t think I’m capable of a speed run under 2 hours, but I have won on this level.

[@balmipour]

If you think you're not capable of it, just try it :) You might have missed it, but Olexandr suggested me to try a no-Europe run, and in the end, it only took 3 hours (without much optimisations) If winning can be that fast without using fountains, trade abuses or even the natural immigration, I guess winning in 2 hours shouldn't be that hard ;) (link here) : kzbin.info/www/bejne/hXuXgYqwhJ1ji5I

[@ryanrussell8262]

Really well done. I’ve won a few times on viceroy but I always take the route of one coastal NA colony and several feeders going in, exploring, and getting Aztec and Inca gold.

[@yacah]

That is exactly my strategy :D plus I do what OP did - leaving one unaltered mountain/wood tile for them to land and get massacred :D

[@ryanforgo3500]

Can someone ecplain to me what is "viceroy" in this case? I played this game as a kid and i only know it as colonization and when people say "i played viceroy" i get confused as it makes me wonder if there is more than one version of the game

[@balmipour]

@@ryanforgo3500 It(s the difficulty level. 1 = Discoverer (easiest) 2 = Explorer 3 = Conquistador 4 = Governor 5 = Viceroy Basically, higher means the king will send you more troops when you declare independance, the opposing europeans get more and more extra bonuses (which doesn't matter much here :p), trade's worth goes down, and everyone probably gets more aggressive towards you, too.

[@peters972]

Lol

[@yacah]

Hernando de Soto and then 3 (out of 4 tries) times you getting Fountain of Youth is so improbable, seems like cheating to be honest. I played hundreds of games and I remember maybe 1 or 2 times having 2 back to back.

[@balmipour]

...or you could read the video description.

[@yacah]

I did, but there is nothing there. Just some mention about strategy and tricks, but no link or anything. I also tried going there and browsing, but found nothing on what you mentioned. Next time maybe attach a link or just put the short description here?

[@balmipour]

@@yacah You just did it wrong then. The link in description contains extreme details about the strategy, including how to chain fountains (even in several sections). And I also wrote I ended-up changing De Soto's weight in names.txt so it appears first (which you may call cheating if you like). EDIT : in fact, I had some run with slightly faster times, so I guess I prefered to upload pre-edit versions, to keep "100% legit" Anyway, the only impact on game is it reduces the number of restarts after building the 1st colony (which initially must be 22/27). Most my runs where recorded before using this, but yeah, I finally got bored of it, which is... in the description. Could have used the same trick so Cortes always appears as 2nd (this makes things faster and, IMO, more elegant than using the tools abuse), but I wanted a strategy easy and reliable to reproduce. I'm not in TAS or this kind of things.

[@yacah]

Wow, I am so sorry. I seriously didn't see the link - since I was looking under the video description and - as it turns out - there is one more in upper-right corner - but for not only it is somewhat hidden, but also I failed to notice it till now. As for the way to obtain it and handling of the file - making chances of appearing specific FF - I do treat it as kind of cheat - I did the same when loading many times, just to get de Soto "normal" way - by chance. I didn't mean to offend you in any way, I hope you get it and thanks for explaining it in the end!

[@balmipour]

@@yacah I'm quite hard to offend. I assume trying to help is worth making some efforts, which is why I tried to make my answers relevant. Anyway, I'd myself call that cheating if it had any more effect than what it does, and must agree 100% that technically... it is. But after a few hundred restarts, yeah, I decided to give efficiency a try :p -- And I hate the way KZbin makes video descriptions so hard to find. I always check them, but... who else does with such a terrible interface ?

[@JN-hs5xl]

Wow, nice one. I played in similar ways sometimes, using a single city only and abusing the ambush bonus for defense but I played on lowest difficulty setting XD

[@jakobjakob769]

Independence at 1543!?

[@madzen112]

In all my plays, I've never seen three Fountains of Youth events fire

[@LumpyJumbo00]

Would it take too long to exploit the generosity indians usually have for tobacco and tools instead of relying on de Soto?

[@balmipour]

I think the main reasons why I gave up the trade approach were : • You have to scout anyway, for the fountains (which kinda needs De Soto), so why not grab the money at the same time ? • Trade turns money into more. The first few bucks I have are already needed to buy my scouts. • Haggling may grant you great profits, but also often ends-up failing. Looks very unreliable to me. • You need one turn per trade. Looks slooooooooow to me • I assume the most profitable goods are tools/"trade goods", but not all sedentary indians do accept them, and civilized ones are rare. About last point, I must say I usually used Tobacco only for one-unit-gifts between other trades, and might underrate possible benefits on it. But each of the other points looks like a no-no to me, so I wouldn't bother trying.

[@samisainio7468]

Best price for Tobacco from Arawaks was over 3000 even in Viceroy, but I do tend to reload on trades :D

[@laurencederooij9730]

Really enjoyed trying this for myself. It works!

[@balmipour]

Glad you did ! Any plan to improve it ? :)

[@Madeline_Stratford]

This might be a dumb question, as someone who has played this game since its release (yep I started young) how do you buy less than 100 tonnes of tools in Europe? Is this some game mechanic I have just totally overlooked???? I still play this game on steam.

[@balmipour]

Why dumb ? Discovering ignored mechanics after one or more dozen years is always fun ^^ Use shift-click (or shift-+ if buying with keyboard). Btw, I might have read this somewhere, but I might as well have found these kind of things by experimenting myself. One should always check what does pressing alt/ctrl/shift do in some situations. At least once :p

[@oldmangranny5oldmangranny56]

Why make some of the Dragoons have the "S" tag instead of "F."

[@balmipour]

(F)ortifying consumes the unit's action, it can be a good habit to avoid using it too fast. (Costly mistakes happen:) OTOH, fortifying prevents units from awakening when indians run around, which saves the bits of time wasted with needlessly activated units Btw, it didn't matter much here, since I ruthlessly disposed of them :| Here, it's more a matter of habit, and is probably the results of random details like my hands repositioning between moves.

[@oldmangranny5oldmangranny56]

@@balmipour Also why did you put those artillery in the upper left corner when the war started? Love these colonization playthroughs.

[@balmipour]

@@oldmangranny5oldmangranny56 I need the defense in the city to be between 2 and 4 artilleries. With less, the king doesn't land enough regulars every turn, and with more, I don't remember what he does wrong, but it's unoptimal. This lets me skip an important part of the royal cavalries and artilleries (The king surrenders once you get rid of all regulars) While I love looking for strategies and tricks to get good times, I'm not fond of the execution part (and am far from perfect at it), and make a lot of tiny mistakes. Putting the artilleries on the top left wasn't the best place. I should probably just have put them on the right of the mountain (the king always lands next to your colonies, and never captures your troops as long as you leave him one free square (be sure to find a mountain for that ^^) Deploying troops was one of the importants aspects I had to optimize, since a lot of time is lost moving, mismoving, or even just skipping unit turns. For example, I typically used to land my specialists in the colony and the unskilled ones (from criminals to free colonists) outside, so that I could just remove all specialities in a batch (to enables veteran/continental XP status). If you have spare time, you can read my (very detailed) notes on Arqade, (link in vid description) : gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/173915/how-to-revolt-and-win-quickly-in-sid-meiers-colonization/341003#341003 I wrote this mainly because I'm pretty sure I'll forget a lot of it ^^ (and to help people who'd like to try improving something... if anyone actually does ;)

[@oldmangranny5oldmangranny56]

@@balmipour Started reading it now. Must have taken ages to find these ways to play the game for max points.

[@balmipour]

@@oldmangranny5oldmangranny56 Actually, not that much, only a few, sometimes intensive, weeks (or call them monthes). It just started out of nostalgia, and I quickly realized the way I used to play, when young, wasn't optimal. So I tried playing some more games, with different approaches, like rushing europeans. But when I read the FAQs I could find on the web, I was frustrated by their low quality, and really wanted to give better alternatives. At that time, I was just trying to get rid of inefficiency, and had no Idea I'd speedrun the game or look for exploits yet. The biggest breakthrough was probably realizing that exploration is insanely overpowered. Once you get De Soto, big treasures and fountains of youth flow in bundles. In comparison, crafting goods is utterly inneficient : profits are low, and by the time you get a significant cargo, you'll have to throw it for a party anyway. My first speedrun attempt (as discoverer) was fun : I landed, farmed one or two european(s), built maybe 6/8/10 colonies, and... aborted my game to start a new one, when I realized the 2 cibolas I just found gave me more money than I'd need to revolt. This next game was probably finished in less than 30 minutes... and I understood I had found the way to go. Then, came the question of Viceroy difficulty. I had to experiment other strategies in order to farm the 40/50K I thought were necessary. (𝘔𝘺 𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘨𝘰𝘢𝘭 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 2 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 ^^) Farming indians wasn't satisfying, and seeking loads of treasures was hardy better, so I looked for trade abuses instead. But while I did meticulous research on some aspects, like trade, things like the opportunity to skip half of the king's army were completely unexpected, and had to be deciphered, by comparing the outcomes of several games. After enough analysis, the problem was trimmed enough to get back to fundamentals : get some gold, buy an army before prices rise, and ambush the REF :p

[@playkoi69]

Where can you download the game?

[@saneman7177]

The game was broken for me when I learnt the algorithm that you win any battle your unit fights if they do it after you move a scout...

[@balmipour]

The RNG has some big flaws, for sure, but would you mind giving more precise details ?

[@saneman7177]

@@balmipour yeah literally if you do an action with a scout unit either moving it, entering a village or whatever, you will win any battle you fight if the unit attacks straight after that... so if I recall you can just ‘wait for next unit’ with your scout until your ready to attack with whatever other unit, move your scout, then attack with the other unit & you win 100% of the time.... so obviously if you’ve got a lot of scouts dotted around the map you can do this multiple times per turn & decimate your opponent. Obviously has no affect if the enemy attacks you but still it makes it hard to lose, especially after you get the Congress guy who upgrades your unit after every victory, just arm & saddle a few dozen petty criminals & within a few turns you’ve got an army of veteran dragoons. There’s probably loads of hacks like that I’d imagine the programming is pretty basic by today’s standards.

[@balmipour]

@@saneman7177 Thanks for the details. Seems pretty extreme (and probably biased) to me, but I gotta give it a check, it would be fun. I didn't really launch the game since my speedruns, but assuming your martingale works, revolt should be possible with 6 simple soldiers (no, wait.. *2 artilleries and 4 soldiers*) I'm pretty sure it is'nt as easy as that, but if it is, it could make things even more ridiculous. "Why revolt in 15 minutes if you can revolt in 10 ?" :p

[@saneman7177]

@@balmipour yeah give it a go, I downloaded the game & played through it a few years ago for nostalgia reasons... & it was on the website that I read about the scout thing.

[@balmipour]

@@saneman7177 After some tests, I confirm it doesn't seem to work, at least in the way you described. I played a test game around a week ago, and without much surprise, managed to lose several attacks done (just) after moving scouts, and probably also after visiting villages. I don't see much reason for the RNG to reset on a scout move. It doesn't even reset when visiting fountains :p Anyway, was worth trying... could have been fun,somehow.

[@jcfight30]

I was wondering, do you need some luck on your side to do this?

[@jcfight30]

I think you said in one comment, you would need luck for a better time, but just to do it in under 45 minutes, would you need luck?

[@balmipour]

@@jcfight30 You don't need much luck to make it under 30 minutes. IIRC, the 2 only important thing are getting De Soto and finding a "happy mountain" spot for your ambushes. Fountains are really easy to get, and making a bit of money is easy too (you can trade with indians, bully europeans, explore NON-ARAWAK villages, etc.) From my pov, extra luck would mainly be important to skip this (imo so uuuugly) tools-abuse phase. Getting Cortes and some big treasures is faster, and more elegant.

[@OzanErenBilgen]

If this is how this game should be played, I have played it very wrong…

[@balmipour]

Looks like it is, yeah. When I went back into the game a few years ago, I compared the costs and benefits of producing goods or broaden my "empire". Fact is, it costs much more than it yields... so why do it ? Of course, this drained the magic from the game for me. Always wanting to analyze&optimize has its downsides... but thats my thing. The experience was as great as it was brief :)

[@Jaguar1910]

Aucun plaisir de jeu. Joue à Super Mario kart. La gestion c'est pas pour toi

[@balmipour]

Avec tout l'amour que j'ai pour Colonization, je dois malheureusement te révéler un "scoop" : c'est un très mauvais jeu de gestion. Les concepts étaient super, le rendu et l'ambiance excellents, etc... mais l'équilibrage est terriblement mauvais, et produire des ressources coûte bien plus cher que le peu que ça rapporte. Dès que tu cherches un peu à optimiser ta façon de jouer, tu te rends compte qu'il faut juste balancer des scouts et chopper des villes perdues, ce qui est beaucoup moins glamour que la brochure initiale... mais qui marche. Et comme le RNG est terrible aussi, selon les runs, tu tombes soit sur une quantité absurdement élevée d'or (genre 50K en 10 minutes), soit sur pas grand chose. D'où ma recherche d'un bug pour plutôt avoir de la thune illimitée en abusant du commerce, qui pour le coup, devient au moins utile :) Je trouve ça très moche, mais ça a l'avantage d'être un moyen fiable d'arriver aux ~15K nécessaire pour poutrer le vieux. J'ai bien essayé un peu de rejouer en mode naïf, en faisant des colonies partout & cie... mais franchement, quand tu sais que c'est juste de la déco et que ça ne fait que te coûter sans rien rapporter... ça perd en charme, vraiment :) -- Et optimiser ça était un plaisir, je te promets. Mario Kart par contre... je suis vraiment pas fan de la loterie aux éclairs ou bonnes carapaces, donc c'est NON !

[@Jaguar1910]

@@balmipour il y a de quoi passer un bon moment. Les mécanismes de jeu permettent de faire des villes productives et rentables, rendre caduque l'émigration, et de gagner de l'argent, pas mal même. Bref de devenir indépendant. C'est une tournure d'esprit.

[@jnssmnsn]

What the hell is this recording quality >_

[@balmipour]

Quoting the video description (which you could actually have read) : uploaded quality is lossless. KZbin destroys it. I might consider re-encodinging it to some artificial HD format so that YT "compresses" it, keeping decent quality, but I'm not sure its worth the hassle. The proof of concept matters more than the vid quality to me, so sorry... but complain @Alphabet :)

[@balmipour]

Also, completely forgot about it, but I did upload one video of another Viceroy run on my ftp, here : evilpotatoe.free.fr/%5bCol%5d%20Viceroy%20Speedrun%20---%2014.18%20--%2013FAILED!%2012T-(1532-1544)%206m15%20%2008.03-14.18%20A@4.28%20-%20RT=14.09.avi The goal was to fall under 13 minutes, and I "failed" here, with 14:09. The "optimal run" (from my pov) more or less requires luck (getting Cortes AND 10-12k of treasures, so as to skip the horrible tools exploit, then, not failing the war). Since stacking needs-for-luck ends-up requiring either external tools or an unreasonable number of retries, I finally forgot about this objective :) Another approach, yet, might be to decipher how the (completely f***** up) RNG works. If one knows how to get fountains & treasures at will, all this could be (even) faster xD

[@SashkoBljad]

Why did the King surrender while still having troops? When does it happen? Amazing seedrun!

[@SashkoBljad]

nevermind I found this part in your stackoverflow manual (maybe you should include it into your description) gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/173915/how-to-revolt-and-win-quickly-in-sid-meiers-colonization/341003#341003

[@balmipour]

Actually, I still don't know why he sometimes does it with one regular remaining, and sometimes not. (Still so much room for improvement... xD) I initially hoped for a speedrun in 2 or 3 hours, and found out that it could be way faster... like less than 1h30, or even less than 1h, or 50 minutes, or... wait ?! 40 ? 35 ? 25 ? Now 15 minutes ?! WHEN WILL IT STOP ? !!! xD So I prefer waiting a bit and doing some more tries before I consider it my final result, since I was happy to have one run done under 45 minutes... less than one month ago. (the kzbin.info/www/bejne/n3e5mmd7iKeVo68 I posted in Arqade's discussion) I doubt I'll be able to improve it much more now, since both my exploration and war of independance are pretty optimized, but I'll keep doing some more tries just to be sure. Also, I could probably lose less time deploying my guys. Maybe I should stop clearing specialities ? I might try this... or not. (I think the isolated island helped here, since it reduces the number of indians pop-up, and let me clear by burning a simple village) Thats why the video is still not published yet (just posted links to it on Arqade and Civfanatics/[Col].) Honestly, the Arqade post is more here for the sake of sharing the researches I've done (what works, what doesn't , why, and how to get to the same results). While I chose Arqade for its simple yet efficient format, I think it remains a terribly boring wall of text to read. I shall put it in the description anyway, you're right... but I did things in the reverse order : I posted the videos here so they could be referred in the Arquade post. Speaking of "room for improvement", I bet someone going for a TAS could fall beyond 12 minutes (probably less than 10, in fact, since he'd just have to land, get one fountain and maybe 2 Cibolas, and revolt.), but I won't be that guy : I don't want to mess with tools, and prefer "honest exploits".

[@SashkoBljad]

I agree, that there is no point of superoptimizing the existing strategy just to peel those 2-3 minutes. Unless there is a huge public attention to the speedrun that is. Like they do with Super Mario or something. Might I suggest another challenge for you? Speedrun without sailing to Europe. This way you could utilize strategies that failed for usual speedrun, like looting europeans or trading with indians. Btw, what if you declare independance without sea colonies?

[@balmipour]

Hmm... without sailing to Europe ? You mean... without fountains ? !!! (and with the need to actually *build* your muskets, and... oh, man, NO horses !). I'm afraid it would pretty slow, and probably either too hard (since europeans will soon get a horde of unstoppable draggons), or too boring. ...well, in fact, you may actually buy army units at ridiculously high prices, so horses are somehow "available" Well, the challenge itself might be a cool idea after all... but I doubt this would actually be very "speedrunable", if ever doable. Getting horses seems a pretty hard task here : looting them on some europeans with only one starting soldier seems quite unlike to happen, exploring rumours without scouts... well, I might take another glance at it again, but I'm afraid its just suicidal waste, De Soto or not, and the third way of getting easy money would be to visit indian villages... with scouts ^^. So, in other words, one would need to build his muskets, sell stuff to indians only until a potential custom house is built, and all this without any specialist (save planters and miners) unless looted on europeans ? Well... might be a cool challenge after all, but shouldn't be tried as Viceroy immediately xD @Independance without sea colonies : I tried it, of course, and the games immediately concludes : "All your ports are controlled by the king, you're a sucker, lol". This isn't cool. Also, I don't know what are the conditions for this, but "Tories uprising" tend to appear near your inland colonies if you kept some for the war of independance. I'm not even sure having 100% rebels in said colonies helps against it happening. Those uprising are no less than free Tories dragoons popping next to your naively defenseless cottages (not Cavalries, regular dragoons). And IIRC, they pop and attack in the same turn... in one word : U N F A I R !. Oh, and btw, did some runs a few hours ago. Got one win in 14:09, which would have been about 13:00 if I didn't suck :p I'll consider your challenge. It looks stupidly hard and senseless, so I kinda love it. Especially for the need to think alternatively, since many thing wouldn't work the same. Also, it looks like one reasonably easy to apply "rule", compared to things like "do not abuse exploration/europeans/indians/whatever", which I somehow tried, but is a bit too much nebulous, for determining what is "fair" and what isn't.

[@balmipour]

A light version of this "No Europe challenge" could also be "Never sail *back* to Europe". i.e. buy new ships for anything you wanna send, and think twice before filling it. ... but after some first tests, "No Europe at all" is pretty easy as Discoverer. I assume the main strategy will still rely on exploration. This does not only gives huge ammounts of money for mercs, but also some extra settlers, which will probably be something more critic on higher difficulties. (Also, FF choice will be much more important than in easy, where I end-up with something like 15 of them, and Jefferson might be useful, in this scenario) Breeding horses, once you got some, should not be too hard, but muskets... thats a real pain to craft. I'm already considering an early migration on the Incas side for expert farmers/miners and getting far from europeans... well, gotta try rather than speculate about it :p EDIT : also works as Conquistador. Guess Viceroy will work the same way. But this is uncomfortable, since you have to spend a loooooot of time for crafting anything. Also, I guess I shouldn't have skipped sending some guys to the incas/aztec for getting farmers. I got a miner, but didn't even use it in the end. Colonies on hills seem to be a better option.