Incubuspawn: There is a limit to the total amount of colonies allowed on the map. So the fasteer you put them out, the less your ai opponents can make, This sucks for the native american player!
If anyone find sout how to edit thios to alow for more AI colonies let me know!
As far I can know...
...there indeed is a clear limit of 5 colonies per AI player they will try to build. They can own more by capture.
But the
AI player will never attempt to build more colonies if he already control five or more.
(On hardest difficulty, may probably be less in lesser.)
They still will try to rebuild if have some colonies destroyed or lost and so have less than five total, if given enough time for (AI may need over 10 turns to decide to build a new colony, sometimes even more over to found it where he wants).
If there is any limit on total number of colonies per map it is a pretty high one and I never reached that for real... it should be no less than 32 for sure, my lowest possible guess would perhaps be 36 then... what would mean you should put up 12 colonies to notice one of your enemies is unable to (re-)build his fifth.
Given, almost always there is at least one AI who get so unfortunate start it won't expand likely forever and/or get wiped out by an AI neighbor... so, it is not easy at all to spot and test.
Sure, High Native player under AI control is not a serious contestant even against other AI player, and undoubtedly suffer from the five-colony limit the most, but he grow so slowly overall that I think absence of such a limit won't help them much if anything... at least unless the human player supports them a lot.
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For a little game story... :)
Just now watched Spanish vs Portugal war over some 80 turns, despite Spanish were rebuilding frantically they were finally wiped out, with Portugal ending up with 9 colonies.
I was constantly shipping supplies to Spanish (like barter 200 goods for 1 gold), and was planning on sending "peace keeping" forces to give them some hope, but whole thing was way too far over the continent and I was determined to get most out of war with neighboring Britain first... also was involved in low intensity conflict with the french in my north... so when I finally build a base of operations over there, and my armies arrived, it was little bit too late for the Spanish... But I retaliated on Portugal, now mostly to keep them from killing High Native they had come in contact with, so I taken the best of their colonies and wiped out all but two, and they sailed out and started two fresh colonies in a lovely bay between far-south mountains (would be ideal refuge for Spanish, but they likely never explored so far). Meanwhile the Brits, whose last (and quite useless) colony I saved for gigs, expanded to midland forests, not too far from French, who constantly have five colonies despite my raiders accidentally destroy some once now and then (I tried my best to not to, even reloaded some battles just for that, but if there four or more large fights per turn you have to accept results no matter how hardened cheater you are). For myself, I now cover most of east coast with 10 colonies, plus two inland bases and the recently captured Portuguese port in south, so 13 in total. High Native only recently founded their fifth colony, several of their upstarts get destroyed by native raids and marauding Portuguese generals my hunters missed somehow.
So, the turn is 131, there is 29 colonies on the map right now (13 of them mine), 4 are fresh starts in recent turns, and from them, none build by me. I am not sure but there might have already be up to 31 colony on map at the same time (while Portugal was already huge, there was Spanish refuge camp around and I not finished with Britain).
I plan to keep this up for some time still, I want High Native to federate or at least turn Enormous most native tribes before I start to wipe them out (none killed by me so far, the whole conflict with French started when I tried to guard two villages (one of them friendly to me)); I have plans for at least 3 more colonies myself, also there is still up to 4 more for enemies to build... if they not capture any from each other, in what case the number can grow. Too bad I not saved the Spaniards, they would bring 5 more... Or maybe I should have kept around that oversized Portugal, might be a lot of fun to try and contain them if I think back.
