Education and Converted Natives

[Malvastor]

Just a couple things I noticed and had questions about.

First, I've noticed that when I put a colonist in a school to learn a new trade, his time to graduation seems to vary, and I'm not sure what's affecting it. A colonist in one city with a school takes several turns longer than a colonist in another city with a school; exactly what goes into the calculations for this?

Second, I noticed (while looking up my first question) that the wiki[civilization.wikia.com] says Converted Natives in Civ4Col can't be assigned to be soldiers or dragoons, but I've trained quite a few natives as soldiers. Is this a wiki error, is my game somehow different from the base game (I haven't added any kind of mods), or do natives just somehow not count as natives once you've trained them into another profession?

[Gentoo]

THey should take the same amount of time to train up, assuming they are all free colonists. Identured servants take much longer (not a good idea to educate them; better to have natives train them up, and then you can even clear speciality and have a free colonist to educate)

If you've got free colonists all taking diff amounts of time... I don't know what's up with that. Never seen that.

[Malvastor]

Originally posted by Gentoo:

THey should take the same amount of time to train up, assuming they are all free colonists. Identured servants take much longer (not a good idea to educate them; better to have natives train them up, and then you can even clear speciality and have a free colonist to educate)

If you've got free colonists all taking diff amounts of time... I don't know what's up with that. Never seen that.

Yeah, one city will take 10 turns to graduate a free colonist and another will take 15 or 20. What's also strange is that the time for one city will change as I play (but without me upgrading the schoolhouse to a college). When I first get started, it may take 10 turns in my capital. 100 turns later, it takes 15-20. In the same city, with the same building.

[Jethro]

It depends on how long the Specialist was in THAT city I believe. And yes, every time you train a citizen to the same profession it takes longer the next time... I think haha. As I remember.
Or it may be training to ANY profession takes longer each subsequent time.
So I always sent my dudes to Indians for basic professions and saved that "time" in school
for Pale Face professions :)
I love the Indian aspects of this game, Very well done.

[Malvastor]

Ah, okay. Thank you.

[Dray Prescot]

The higher the type of education being done, the longer it takes. My real complaint about this game is that the more you educate your people, the longer it takes to educate additional people. This increase occurrs rather rapidly, so I tended to save my education for skills you can not buy in Europe:i.e. the skills taught in the native tribal ciities, or on the really expensive European ones, particulary Statesman. Also the cost of hiring people on European dock goes up so fast, that you might as well hire the skilled trades such as Ore Miner or Carpenter, rather Colonists on the dock.

I think that any training/schooling makes all types of training after that increase in time needed.

I played a lot of it's earlier version: Sid Mier's Colonization. The later version adds Civlization IV to the title.. The original version was so old I got it on 3.5 inch floppy disks, i.e.pre Windows 95, so it would have been around 1992 or 1993.

My other complaint is the delibrately limited one tile range of the colonies to keep the colonies from getting so large that they can not conquered.

Also the taxe rates being imposed by Europe go up very rapidly, the size of their potential military expedionary forces goes up very quickly also. The tax rate increases seem to be tied to how much you sell in Europe, while the home military unit increases seem to be tied to many liberty bells you have generated.