1.) Do random forests appear, and do light forests turn into regular forests? Are either of those two situations affected by an improvement being on the tile.
2.)What is typically the best opening to make some money, i have been trying to buy like 4 or 6 colonists from europe while toting back about 20-30 cigs or cloth each of the 2 or 3 trips. I try to sell off to the indians if they aren't too much of a detour, even though they only buy at about ~75% of europe prices i am trying to avoid the tax increase for extra sales.
3.)What is typically the best thing to do with a soldier and hardy pioneer start? I have been settling soldier, and using hardy to get info on 1x tile away tribes. Then either improve if I need food or settle in the capital, and make some cigs/cloth from the indian's purcahsed resources and small 3x/4x of resources that trickles from city square.
4.)man this game need a BUG mod or similar to compile all of the sell pirces, inventroy, demands, training, etc. I hate having to leave indian trade/europe to check inventory in different towns, and i have only tried to manage 3 towns let alone my share of a standard map.
5.)how hard would it be to change the, "you have ships waiting in europe" messages to when i click end turn, instead of after they wasted movement. Not always remebering to click send to NW icon sucks!!
#1 - I've seen random forests pop up, but rarely.
#2 - trading with Indians can be a good idea - remember that you can enter their villages with a dude to talk to the chief and find out what they really want. Unfortunately, it's usually guns, horses and tools (trade goods suck after your first sale). If you have extra g/h/t, though, and the Indians aren't a threat to you, it might be worth selling to them (especially if it gives your European opponents a headache!).
I remember seeing these Apaches braves running around with guns, and I asked myself, which idiot sold them guns? I blamed the French.
#3 - haven't figured out whether it's better to just settle two colonies right away, or make one and maybe improve it quickly. I'm leaning towards the "mega-food colony" approach as I find having enough people is my key challenge.
#4 - this is almost a "classic" Microprose game, in the sense that you could either set up a series of note-cards or simply run a spreadsheet on a second monitor to track all this data to come up with the best results. The scary thing is the prices overall are pretty similar to what they were in Col1, and I can remember what those ranges are (1/9 food, 1/4 lumber, 19/20 silver, etc.). If you play it long enough you may just end up memorizing some of it.
The biggest challenge, I find, is remembering "how many tools did I have in that city?", in case I want to protest a tax hike but don't want to have too many goods tossed into the harbour.
I'm getting sorely tempted to revert to the Col1 tactic of keeping all my junk in non-coastal cities to avoid this problem...
#5 - maybe a good mod can fix that; I usually send them out immediately unless I'm waiting for something special.