I give up

It stinks. I won by gaming-the-game not by playing-the-game. It all comes down to REF. You can work around pretty much everything else, but you have to game-the-game to avoid an overwhelming REF. Too bad.

Maybe I've just been lucky so far but I've won consistently by concentrating on liberty bells from the start. It makes for a much more enjoyable game because you can expand your territory faster, use the poitical points to chase down all the most valuable FF and the production increase gives you a strong economy. The REF does get huge but your troops start with a big combat advantage that increases every turn to the point where even my SoL were routinely taking out Man-o-War one on one. In one game my free Frigate killed four MoW before losing, mind you that was with Bolivar who amplifies a high RS.
 
I limited myself to 5 cities and averaged their size.
1) Port city (only one port because King's Navy makes them untennable)
2) Heavy Industry city (36 guns per turn and cannon)
3) College city (lots of food, lots of master craftsmen)
4) Horse city (lots of food to make lots of horses)
5) Major trade good city (Fur in this case, and lots of it)

Why is this gaming the game? It sounds like a sound strategy. Or is it just TOO effective?
 
I wouldn't call it out-gaming the game, I'd say you're actually playing the game as it was meant to be played. Out-gaming would be the one-city-delete-colonists approach described over in the strategy section.
I would however agree that reaching independence and keeping the REF size in check feels too easy once the mechanics are understood.

What bothers me about the REF and RS implementation though is that it can truly be capped (= impossible to achieve DoI) if you're not careful but there's nothing in the game to even hint at that, which is silly IMO. This approach just feels too rigid.
Larger colonies having a harder time to reach independence is one thing; outright impossible though, hmm.

For the record: I've tried a few games recently where I've generated LBs from the very outset and it doesn't affect REF size all that much. For a long time global RS will practically stall because the colony grows just as much as the increase in LBs; only once number of colonists stops increasing does global RS push up towards 50%. Apparently global RS is the sole trigger for REF size increases.
 
Why is this gaming the game? It sounds like a sound strategy. Or is it just TOO effective?

I call it gaming the game because several logical decisions would hurt you. More than one sea port is a good logical decision but would hurt you.
Lots of little settlements to exploit various resources is a logical decision.
 
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