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Conquest of the New World Game Walkthrough

Conquest of the New World

FAQ. v1.2
Compiled by Stephen McInerney

alias: CNW, CotNW

Any additions/corrections can be suggested to the author (who may
ignore them at his discretion), who can currently be contacted at
stevemci@dsb.mil.adfa.oz.au. Please put a CNWFAQ: in the start of any
subject line as it makes it easier to partition work email from private.
Spelling is from an Australian dictionary, my apologies to those
for whom this will surely annoy.
The more technical discussions in this FAQ assume that you have
read the manual that comes with CNW. If you have not already done so -
then do so, the manual contains a lot of very valuable information about
the game and it's mechanics.

Acknowledgments:
This FAQ owes a lot of its content to the many discussions in the
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic newsgroup. Also a big thanks to Michael
Gerard from Quicksilver who has helped provide a lot of the detail about
the game mechanics and provided heaps of very good advice on playing
CNW.
Thanks also to Andrew McKegg and Michael Aikey for showing me how
_not_ to win in a PBEM game! ;-)

Contents
1 About CNW
1.1 So what is CNW?
1.2 Is it a turn based game or real-time?
1.3 Is there a demo available?
1.4 What's the current patch version?
1.5 How long does an average length game run for?
1.6 What's the AI like?

2 Starting a game of CNW
2.1 Should I play as the Natives or Europeans?
2.2 Starting options
2.3 What's the deal with the two ship startup?
2.4 Where should I start my first colony?

3 Colony Building
3.1 Where should I start my first colony?
3.2 How do I get points for building colonies?
3.3 What's specialisation, and how does it work
3.4 Hints for the beginning CNW player
3.5 Fast ways to build up Colonies
3.6 Colony building strategies
3.7 War College Research

4 Exploring
4.1 Any hints for exploring?
4.2 How does the points for exploring work?
4.3 Strategic Exploring
4.4 Ambushing explorers

5 Combat
5.1 Which of the opposing countries should I attack first?
5.2 I keep getting beaten in the Combat mini game - any clues?
5.3 Combat Detail
5.4 Attacking Native Villages

6 Diplomacy
6.1 Peace?
6.2 Sabotage Missions
6.3 Spy Missions
6.4 Country feelings


7 Trade


8 Independence
8.1 When should I declare independence?
8.2 Bidding for peace
8.3 Independence Details

9 Other Stuff
9.1 My units take forever to get anywhere - how can I improve on
this?
9.2 Alternate ways to play CNW

10 Native Player Tips

11 Multiplayer

12 Tuning CNW

13 Differences between CNW and CNW Deluxe

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About CNW
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1.1 So what is CNW?
CNW is a game of exploration, colonisation and the fight for
freedom from the oppressive and every greedy Mother Country (MC), and in
fact, any other country that gets in your way of domination of the
riches of the new world.
This game is a yet another with a very fine balance between
expansion and hunkering down and building strength - expand too fast
and you will get walked over - too slow and all the prime spots will be
settled before you get too them.
The big difference between this game and others of this genre, is
that in CNW you tend to only startup a few cities and build multiple
objects each turn in each city. This is opposite to other games which
have lots of cites and can only build one object per turn in each.
CNW was written by Quicksilver (www.quicksilver.com) and published
by Interplay (www.interplay.com).

1.2 Is it a turn based game or real-time?
CNW is a turn based game with a sub-game (also turn based) based
around the combat sequences.

1.3 Is there a demo available?
Yes there is a demo. It follows the tutorial in the full game. The
demo can be retrieved from Interplays web/ftp site at ftp1.interplay.com
or www.interplay.com and search from there.

1.4 What's the current patch version?
The latest patch is v1.12. 1.12 is a progressive patch to v1.10 so
you'll need both 1.10 and 1.12 patches, which can be retrieved from
Interplays web and ftp site.

1.5 How long does an average length game run for?
Ages... This is not a quick and dirty game like some others -
especially on the harder levels. It has been mentioned that there have
been games where players were still fighting with muskets in the latter
part of the 20th century... This game rewards those who prefer the more
drawn out style of long term strategy gaming. An average time would be a
couple of hours a day over several days to a week. I tend to take 2-3
weeks to play a full game at the hard and very hard levels.

1.6 What's the AI like?
Hmmmm, loaded question. Personally I feel that the AI in CNW is
one of the better ones produced to date. This is (perhaps unfortunately)
reflected in the time taken between turns in the later stages of a game,
a wait of several minutes on a P133 is not unheard of. The price paid
for a more intelligent opponent. Compared to a human player who can take
around 1/2 an hour or more, it's not quite so bad.
The AI in the combat sequence is positively nasty and too clever
by half - strategies on how to beat it (or at least come out without too
poor a showing) come later.
If you display a weakness in your defences the computer players
_will_ exploit it. They don't blindly attack your strongest points - but
have been known to bypass relatively defenceless colonies to attack
others. The computer has presumably not spied out that particular colony
to find how vulnerable it is. Basically the computer does not "cheat" to
discover your weaknesses - It is using the same methods and procedures
that you have to discover information.
The designers of CNW are quite proud of the fact that CNW is based
more on a human player and uses the same limitations that a human player
has.
{mig@quicksilver.com} "We wrote the AI to be as "human" as
possible: ie: a bunch of backstabbing opportunists. If the AI sees a
weak target really close to his powerbase, he'll often just go "oh,
thank you!" and take it for himself."


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2 Starting a game of CNW
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2.1 Should I play as the Natives or Europeans?
A beginning player should steer clear of playing as the natives -
there is a quantum leap in difficulty between European and Native
players. Also the playing style between the two is quite different. The
natives also have restrictions placed upon them, typically seen with the
highest level of structure that can be built.
Also have a look at the section for beginning players - this
provides some good advice for beginning players.

2.2 What use are the various custom options and skills at game
creation?
RTFM is a good start :-) - but additional notes shown below.
Most skills vary from the 10 point cost shown in the manual the
true cost is shown in brackets after each name.

Miser(5): Useful in a points game - useless elsewhere. This is not a
cumulative bonus either. The bonus is ?%.

Colonist(10): Useful in a points game - useless elsewhere. Again is not
a cumulative bonus. The bonus is ?%.

Discoverer(5): Useful in a points game - useless elsewhere. Doubles the
value of each find. Eg A 10,000ft Mountain is worth 10 points, with
discoverer, however, it is worth 20 points. The overall addition is not
that great, you'd be lucky to break 1000 bonus points with this skill.

The above three are all very valuable in a points game but I'd give
preference to the Colonist skill - mainly as you tend to get bigger
bonuses from it - It's not unheard of to get a 3000+ bonus from
colonist.

Pacifist(5): The pacifist skill is a must take in a non-points dependant
game. It reduces the cost of research for defence by half. It provides a
bonus of 75% to your colony points too. Or a loss of ?% if you go on the
attack. It's low cost and huge benefit to unit defence makes this skill
exceptionally useful.

Cartography(15): This can be very useful to have in any game - as it
allows _all_ of your land units to move further. Hence explorers,
explore a bit more each turn. Military units move a bit further, thus
they get to a target faster. The increase in movement is fairly small.
This is a skill that is probably of lesser value compared to some of the
others.

Navigator(10): Similar to cartography but for ships only. This is of
even less use than cartography - better to get another skill.

Conqueror(15): This can be very valuable for a native player, but is not
so useful for the European player. Mainly as it's generally only when
you have one or two colonies that you run out of unit "slots". Typically
you'll have more slots than you can fill - even when you go on a major
military adventure.

Craftsman(10): Very valuable skill. Pretty much a must have. It
increases the value of commodities sold to Europe as shown in the table
below:
Wood,
Metal Goods
or Crops
Buy from Europe 10 30

Before Independence
Buy from Native ? ?
With Craftsman
Sell to Europe 6 18
Sell to Native ? ?
Without Craftsman
Sell to Europe 5 15
Sell to Native ? ?

After Independence
With Craftsman
Sell to Europe 10 18
Sell to Native ? ?
Without Craftsman
Sell to Europe 8? 15
Sell to Native ? ?

Admiral(10): Another not so useful skill. Can be valuable to the native
player though, as it will make it easier for the native player to sink
European ships before they disgorge an army on top of one of your
colonies.

Missionary(15): Missionary is very valuable to the Native player as it
gradually reduces the Hostility of natives towards you. This effect is
increased by the number and level of churches.

2.3 What's the deal with the two ship startup?
The first ship is Capt. James Cook, Christopher Columbus - whoever
first discovers the New World. They send out a small wave of explorers
who can rapidly discover the riches evident in this new land. The second
ship carries your initial wave of settlers, come to make a fresh start
in the new world.
Both ships carry a small contingent of soldiers as well - however
this is where the game departs from reality, in that these troops are
not enough strength to start wiping out the locals. They are barely
capable of withstanding native attacks on your colony so use them
principally as a defensive measure.
On easier levels if you come across a CP near you, it can be
worthwhile launching an all out attack on his leaders before they start
building and defending a colony - if you're lucky, that'll be one less
CP to have to fight later. This is not recommended on harder levels -
you'll find the locals will often raid and destroy your colony while
your troops are away, or the CP will easily beat off your attack,
leaving you defenceless.


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3 Colony Building
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3.1 Where should I start my first colony?
The ideal first site is placed near a river at the base of
mountains with access to the sea and a good mix of plains and
forests/jungle nearby. Use the Z key here - this will display a shading
of the buildable area around your central choosing point. On earlier
versions successive presses of the Z key showed successive growth in
colony bases, the latest version only has a single shading - but shows
all areas via alternate shading.
Principally you should be looking at the 2nd level of zoning. It
is relatively easy to get your colony off level 1 and is recommended
that you do so ASAP. I usually concentrate on getting a good wood and
metal production started and use this to get enough supplies to be able
to expand to a level 2 colony base. Keep an eye on your population too -
it's very easy to have too many producing squares and not enough
population to run everything effectively - you would have been better
off building a church or two instead.
When your settler unit first arrives - instead of off loading and
moving the settler separately, place the settler under the leader on the
same ship. This will allow you to get the settler unit moved further
than it would on its own.

3.2 How do I get points for building colonies?
{mig@quicksilver.com}
If I remember correctly, colonies score points at 5 points per
city center level, plus one tenth of a point for each building level
(ie: 4 level 4 mills are worth 1.6 points). If you do some quick math,
you'll see that a full level 4 city is worth ALOT of points per turn.
Computer players won't make more than 5 or 6 colonies, but if he has 6
and you have 3, he'll be making lots of points on you. Also, if he
captures 2 or 3 colonies, he'll be growing them and making points on
them, that's likely the source of his rapid point acceleration.
There is a strategy guide and it's fairly good at explaining how
to properly build colonies. Might be worth picking up if you don't think
your colony-building is as strong as it should be. You can also learn a
great deal about that by putting your colony on "AutoColony" right when
you create it and see what the computer AI would be doing if he put the
colony down in the same place as you. Not as fun as playing the game
for yourself, but it's a good learning experience.

3.3 What's specialisation, and how does it work
(mig@quicksilver.com)
Specialisation bonuses are based on building-level-grid-squares
(ie: farms are worth 4 points per building level), in blocks of 20: the
first block is worth 1% each, the next block is worth a 0.5% each, the
next block of 20 is worth 0.25% each, such that you asymptotically
approach 40% total possible bonus. Once this bonus is calculated for
the largest commodity sector in your colony, the bonus value of the
SECOND largest commodity is subtracted from the first. As you can see by
how the numbers start high and then shrink, even having 10 building
levels of another commodity reduces your possible maximum to 30%.
Bonuses are calculated for mills, mines (gold and metal lumped
together), and farms. Commerce does not gain production bonuses.

3.4 Hints for the beginning CNW player
{mig@quicksilver.com}
1) Start on the easier levels.
While this may be obvious to most people, some have tried to jump
in on the harder levels and gotten massacred by the computer. This game
can't be played in the "traditional" map strategy style (aka Civ, Civ2,
MoM, whatever), since the basic modelling of growth and economy is so
different (in those other titles you tend to have large numbers of
cities and build one thing over many turns, in this game you only build
a few colonies, but build numerous things per turn in each)

2) Be very careful about placing your first colony
Colony location will make or break colony growth, and since all
growth in any of these games works off of the "compounded interest"
concept, being a few turns behind the computer at the beginning of the
game can often be a drastic difference 50-100 turns later. Since wood
and food are necessities of any colony, try and place your first colony
on the border between forests and plains, building your producing
buildings (mills and farms) where they will get the most production
bonus (production bonus along with resource and labor costs are
displayed in the statusbar at the top of the screen). If you can also
get your colony near enough to mountains such that you can build good
mines by the time your colony grows to level two or three, that's a
bonus, but you _MUST_ make sure you have access to either the ocean or a
river that leads to the ocean in order to be able to trade with your
mother country in order to get the GOODS resource.
The goods resource is generated from commerce buildings and,
you'll quickly notice, a commerce building requires two goods to build,
thus you're required to trade with your mother country to start up your
own self-sufficient goods production. Flat land is also a must for your
colony site, so use the Z key to examine possible locations to get a
better angle on how much flat land there is in that area.

3) Manage your pipelines carefully
There's two separate "pipelines" in the economic model of CNW.
The first you'll have to work with immediately, that is your Labor
pipeline. If you don't have enough labor to staff your colony, your
production will begin to rapidly suffer.
Your colony population will grow 8% plus 10 per church level every
turn, but if you don't have enough empty housing for them, they won't
show up. Thus if they ever do maximise housing you'll have to build
houses that turn, which won't appear till the next turn, which means
your population growth will be stalled for two turns. Always keep an
eye on your housing. In the same vein, try to get a good handful of
churches in your colony, too, as they'll significantly increase your
population growth early on (when it's most important to grow fast).
Also, all "happy native" increases caused by the Missionary
specialisation are centred on the churches in your colony, so if you're
playing with Missionary try to place your churches where they'll have
the most impact on neighbouring tribes (without taking up high-
production-bonus land better put towards mills/mines/farms).
The other pipeline in the game is the goods pipeline, which you'll
have to start dealing with once you begin to upgrade your colony and its
buildings to level 3. Goods are generated by Commerce buildings which
consume 1 wood, metal, and food per good created (although higher level
commerce buildings consume less as a percentage than the level 1
building). These resources must be available to the commerce buildings
at the end of the turn, such that if, say, you exhaust all of your wood
on your turn, you won't be able to produce any goods during the turn
processing. Keep an eye on how much your commerce buildings consume and
try not to let your commodity levels drop below those values.

4) Butter before Guns
This isn't as exact a rule as the above, but our general feeling
for the game is that the LAST player to militarise his colonies tends to
be the one who wins, so long as they have enough military to match
whatever the other colonies have by the time the other colonies can
bring their military to bear on him. That may be a bit confusing, but
suffice to say that it's not terribly important to build up a strong
military early on (though a single fort in place to provide militia
cannon against raiding natives is quite useful). Once you do begin to
militarise your economy, make sure to get a war college built and start
spending money on military technology. Technology advancements are
often the needed edge in properly carrying out a full scale invasion of
your neighbours.

5) Don't play as the Native.....yet.
The "Native" player is meant for people who have at least a fair
amount of experience with the game environment and tends to be more
difficult to play at the same raw "difficulty level".... playing the
Natives at "Very Hard" is our version of the "Impossible" level found in
other games. Because the natives have a much lower economy level, you
have to be quite adept at building up large numbers of colonies rapidly
and at being able to command large numbers of armies in the field in
cooperation. Once you feel that you've got those basics down well, give
the Natives a spin and you'll find that the game takes on whole new
levels of subtleties

6) Practice combat
Lastly, one of the most important things you can do is to practice
the combat mode using the combat demo accessible off the main menu.
This is where you can learn how to kick conquistador bootie without
having the outcome affect a full strategy game in which you've invested
a great deal of time and effort. There's nothing more discouraging in
spending 10 hours building up a nice brace of colonies only to see them
swept over in a firestorm of military from one of your opponents. Use
the combat demo to learn the necessary tactics of using Combined-Arms
(attacking with different units at the same time.... cav-art-inf) and
Flanking (attacking the same square from different directions at the
same time) to get the attack bonuses needed to turn the enemy's army
into nothing more than a bunch of blood-splats on the ground.

7) Use the most current version
As an afterthought, if you're not already, you should hit our
website or interplay's and grab the most recent patch, which has a
number of bugfixes and extra features (including interface tweaks). The
most recent version is 1.12 which is a progressive upgrade to 1.10 (you
have to upgrade to 1.10 then to 1.12 since 1.10 patches some of the
actual datafiles).

3.5 Fast ways to build up Colonies
1) Use trade from more established colonies for the lacking materials
- usually wood, metal and goods.
2) Build a colony near an enemy colony, and then raid that colony.
This can give a huge influx of commodities way above and beyond what
would ordinarily be accepted by your colony.

3.6 Colony building strategies
There are two schools of thought about the general strategy behind
a colony layout.
1) The more popular (or so it would appear anyway) method is to build
colonies that make the most use of the specialisation bonus. This
results in colonies that specialise in metal production or wood
production or farm production. It is not unusual to see the farm
producer also having a very large number of forts as well - which then
becomes a troop factory for rapid production of armies.

2) The "lazy" method (sorry mig ;-) ) is for those who couldn't be
bothered managing all the trade from specialised colonies. This strategy
is to build generic colonies everywhere. Yes some will be better at a
certain commodity than others, but not to the total exclusion of one
over all others.

In any case, these are general outlines of strategies followed. I
prefer the specialise strategy but am not fanatical about it. There are
other deciding factors: Terrain, has a huge impact on what each colony
can or will build for; Current needs, I may not need a metal producing
colony as my initial generic colonies can cover that aspect; Initial
colonies, my initial colonies are as generic as I can make them - though
possibly with more of a slant towards wood production.

When building colonies it is far more effective to build lots of
lesser producers than concentrate on a handful of good ones. (Now to
rephrase in English... :-) ) Basically, rather than building 1 or 2
mills and then saving/spending resources to get them into higher levels,
you are better off to build more level 1 mills. And only start advancing
them when you starting to run out of decent mill land. This is more of a
guide, than a hard and fast rule. But it seems to hold pretty true.

3.7 War College Research
Start dumping excess gold into a War college as soon as you get on
your feet. You will need its expertise to produce troops of a quality to
match the CP's. You only need one War College so use trade to shift gold
to it.
Concentrate your gold into one topic at a time. You will get more
useful returns, faster, that way.
Defence is cheap, so initially I prefer to spend my money there
rather than on attack bonuses. Mainly, as in my games, I tend to be the
subject of attacks early on, rather than leading them.
Don't worry about spending money on the leader topic for a while.
A level four leader can be bought with 11/7 (units/#attacks) stats,
which is sufficient for some time. And incidentally fits nicely onto a
level four ship.

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4 Exploring
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4.1 Any hints for exploring?
Initially you should be manually controlling your explorers. The
computer does a fair job of exploring on it's own, but can do some odd
things. Eg It tends to group your explorers together, rather than
spreading them around so as to cover a wider area. Use your ships to
follow the coastline - this will help discover river mouths - which your
explorers can rapidly move up to get extra points (and naming rights)
for rivers. Rivers always lead to mountains so keep those explorers
heading uphill to discover mountain peaks.
It is quite difficult to tell from most peoples normal zoom level
which way is up on mountains. A way around this is to zoom almost right
in. This makes the subtle gradient changes far more obvious, especially
the "hidden" back side of mountains - I've previously sent explorers
over these "cliffs" on many an occasion - often losing discovery rights
because I was in a race with a CP for the top.
If you find a mountain range, send at least one explorer along the
ridge at the top to get the discovery for finding the peaks, try and
send at least one explorer along the base on either side to collect the
rivers.
If you are not in a points game though, you are far better off by
scouting the surrounding land and sea around your expanding colonies.
This is to minimise the risk of an enemy army sneaking up on you.
Be aware that higher level explorers can move further than lower
ones so it may be appropriate to replace all your level one explorers
with level 4's or 2's as appropriate.

4.2 How does the points for exploring work?
{mig@quicksilver.com}
You score 1/10th of a point (I think) for every new square of the
map you uncover, PROVIDED that no other player uncovered that map square
first. A good strategy (the CP doesn't yet know about) is to leave one
explorer on the boat and sail the boat halfway around the world before
letting him off, so he'll be in virgin territory and score major points.
The native player, who starts off on the other side of the world, has a
major advantage here, since it is a long time before he is competing for
exploration of map squares.

A quick note here: you do _not_ get any points for uncovering sea
squares. I discovered this in a PBEM game - playing as native; I started
out being about 5 turns from any land - looked really good being on zero
points for such a long time...

4.3 Strategic Exploring
This can be very difficult to do. One of the very fun things about
playing CNW is the ability to find and name discoveries - this is an
added bonus in PBEM games when it can even get down to a bit of
psychological warfare (Although "Mt. Steve Is Smelly" was just asking
for trouble... :-) ).
The thing to remember though is that if you are _not_ in a low
points game (ie < 1 =" +4" 2 =" +6" 1 =" +4" 2 =" +6" 3 =" +8" charge =" +6"> 2000
range. Basically the grabbing of naming rights would become all
important. The native player would have a big advantage over the
European players as they wouldn't have to compete for square uncovering.
In a game like this I'd be concentrating on building ships and
explorers. Load the explorers onto the ships and move them around the
world - to get a leap ahead of the CPs.
The use of the timer would make this a very fast game.

2) Win by naming.
Similar to 1 but the difference is that this must be played with
other humans. Basically the winner is the person who came up with the
most creative and/or original insult to the other players - "tasteful"
may be an option or not.
Yes this is childish and extremely immature - but it's fun so who
cares?

4) Try dropping the points to the 5000 mark and playing a fast timed
game. This would become a very different game from normal CNW; after
all, most of us take our time about planning our moves - if the time
taken is "restrictive" then we may not do so well under pressure.
The points skills would become very valuable in such a game. This
would be different from 1, in that 5000 points is a little too many to
be able to rely on exploring alone.

5) Errr... can't think of any others off hand ... anyone?


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10 Native Player Tips
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Expand hard and fast. You MUST have a numerical advantage to win
against the Europeans.
You should be aiming to send out raids on European colonies ASAP.
Basically you have to hit them before they can start mass producing
level 4 troops.
When attacking European colonies, attack with more than one army
on the same turn. May be overkill but you can be sure that 5 armies of
14 units will take that max level four colony out - the commodities
influx from a successful raid is very useful too...
The Native player doesn't have to worry about the European CPs
attacking for some time - they'll tend to get embroiled in wars with
each other long before you become a threat. So you can get away with
having lesser defences than the Europeans, as you'll only have to defend
against native raids.
Sometimes you will find a European colony that is set up near
yours, stomp it hard and stomp it fast. You cannot allow them to be in a
position to start launching raids against you.
Set up a few leaders inland from your colonies, typically in a
direct line between your colonies and the European colonies. The CPs
will usually try sending armies overland before sending them via boats.
As a native player you _must_ stop those armies before they hit your
colonies. As it is much harder to beat them off.
The use of ships to act as sentries is very effective for the
native player. Principally as a 2nd level ship is a lot cheaper to build
than a level 4 ship loaded with a leader and troops. But don't use one
or two, I'd suggest that upwards of five is necessary to be completely
effective. Don't try and capture either, sinking is far more successful
for the native player, especially as the European ships will be loaded
with troops which can help in a boarding action.

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11. Multiplayer
***********************************************************************
Urrrr... find someone to have a game with?

You will tend to find that most people play more conservative
against other humans - mainly as they are not as predictable as the CPs.
Clear away the sea around your colony base to reduce surprise
shipments of uninvited "guests". Also do the same for the land. This is
even more important than against the CPs. The CPs will generally follow
the coastline, humans won't...

I tend to ignore CPs in multiplayer games, mainly as they are not
your biggest worry. I'll only take out CPs if they are between me and a
human, or if they are a little close for comfort and it is likely that
we'll come into conflict sooner rather than later.

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12. Tuning CNW
***********************************************************************
12.1 Is it just me or does this game not take a Cray to run it after
about 50 turns?

{mig@quicksilver.com}
Ah, there was a bug in the original version (1.0) which, after 50-
100 turns, caused all the player's pieces to get quite unresponsive and
make the AI go out in space and take way way way too long to do its
thinking. We fixed that bug pretty quick with the 1.05 and 1.06 patches
(and I know for a fact that at least the 1.06 patch went into
production, so any box you pick up these days is more than likely to be
1.06). If you're still running the first version, you should probably
move up to 1.11 (or 1.12 if it's available yet...tunes up some memory
usage, "under the hood" type stuff we learned the hard way from the Mac
version).

On the other hand, if you are running the most current version and
are still having "slowness" problems, you can try the following things:

1) Turn off the "Max Zoom" option.
If you're running on an 8MB machine (especially on Win95), the
amount of "real" memory available to the program while it runs is
usually quite small. Turning off the "Max Zoom" option reduces the
memory footprint significantly, speeding up those machines that are
doing too much VM work. This option is only available in 1.10 or later
patches.

2) Tune SMARTDRV properly.
If you're running in DOS, you'll see a good performance boost by
running SMARTDRV at about 256-512k. BE VERY CAREFUL: if you only have
an 8mb machine and just type "SMARTDRV" at the command line, the dumb
program defaults to 2MB of cache. This would make CNW virtually
unplayable (since you then have a 6MB machine, yuck). Check to make
sure you're using a nice, SMALL, smartdrive cache.

3) Set the sound option to "Game Only."
Since it's trying to stream and mix audio while it's also trying
to computer the AI moves, a slower processor (especially when coupled
with a slower CDROM) will often gag and die here. If you make the music
play only in the game, your CPU will have much more time to get done
with the AI activity quickly.

4) In the same vein, for those people who got a 1.0 version of
conquest, there was no "full install/partial install" option. What you
can do, however, if you have 30MB to burn, is put the DATA\CNWSNDC.WAD
file from the cd into your game directory. This will speed things up
further.

A smaller note would be that if you have 16MB or are running under
Win95, you should run the CNWMAIN.EXE program, NOT the batch file.
You'll get a slightly better performance from it in that manner.

***********************************************************************
13. Differences between CNW and CNW Deluxe
***********************************************************************
{mig@quicksilver.com}
A list of major features for Deluxe is:

1. Scenario Template files -- text-based files that allow you to set
up the Abilities for each player and set the contents, number, and
arrival turn of the Ships which arrive in the game. Thus, you can now
build a "militarist" scenario in which ten ships loaded with soldiers
arrive every five turns. Or you can build a mega-Settler scenario in
which every player gets three Settler units. Templates also contain the
map-generation parameters, so you can specify the random-number seed.
You can even make one or more countries Independent from the start.

2. Mapped Scenarios -- You can create a world and then place cities
and units wherever you want them. Thus, you can start a game in which
the initial colonies are already fully developed. Of course, both
Mapped and Template scenario files can be sent to other people (though
they're for solitaire play only).

3. Early Diplomacy -- lots of people asked for the ability to do
Diplomacy starting at the beginning of the game. So now you can.
Mother may get upset with you if you get too far away from her desired
relationships, but that's your problem. All Diplomacy options are now
enabled if you click on the Early Diplomacy check-box.

4. Country Personalities -- each country now has certain special
characteristics. One gets bonuses in combat, another has better trade
than the others, and so on.

5. Special Discoveries -- we now have several classes of special
items that can appear on the map:

* Metal Veins: Gold, Silver, Copper, Tin, or Iron
* Gems: Diamonds, Emeralds, Rubies, Sapphires, or Topaz
* Hardwood Forests: Oak, Cherry, Redwood (not really a hardwood),
Teak, or Maple
* Medicinal Herbs
* Agricultural Regions: Rice, Wheat, Barley, Corn, Oats

Each of these discoveries affects grids within a certain radius,
giving a bonus to the production of a certain type of building. Some
are better than others, of course, and they can overlap, resulting in
the occasional super-location for a colony. Each, of course, has a cool
animation to go with it.

To get the benefits of any of these, you must control them by
having a unit or units nearby. This of course opens up all sorts of
possibilities for combat.

6. More Special Discoveries:

* Temple of War
* Ancient Ruins
* Fountain of Youth

These are really fun. The Temple significantly increases your
combat abilities. And the Ancient Ruins do a variety of different things
(we won't tell you exactly what)

7. Cheat Codes -- not many, but we did add a few cheat codes to the
game. We'll tell people about them sometime down the road, so we don't
spoil all of the fun.

8. Improved Naval Combat -- we've adjusted the math because we wanted
the results to be a lot more balanced. It doesn't look any different
from the outside, but it feels better than ever.

9. Various bug fixes and minor enhancements -- we've incorporated all
of the changes from versions up through 1.12, plus a number of other
things we decided to change when we made the Macintosh version. All of
these are now included in this release. We've done another round of
extensive Q/A testing, so this is a very solid product.

Anyhow, I snipped the end part, but that's straight from the boss-
guy himself.

THE END...so far anyway.

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