Cash won't kill the king's men

The key to beating the king is simply to have a huge food base for raising more horses than you can lose in a round.

In order to increase the number of soldiers you can field, you need muskets, which come from tools and ore.

In order to increase their odds of combat success you also need liberty bells.

So, in the ideal analysis, the only professions you need are farmers, fishermen, ore miners, carpenters, lumberjacks, elder statesmen, a couple of blacksmiths, and one or two gunsmiths. The other professions help you earn cash which helps you buy tools before you can produce enough yourself, and they're an effective way to buy privateers, which actually get you more muskets than gunsmiths ever will. but are uneccesary. Extra. They just speed up the rate at which you can aquire the actual neccessary might for killing the king.

I don't even put much effort into building artillery or fortresses anymore. They're helpful against European colonial powers, but not against the king. The king lands a handful of troops every turn, and all you need to be able to do is kill that stack the turn it lands, and it'll never attack a colony. In the worst case scenerio you have to fight the king's calvary on flat land outside a colony. With continental calvary that's 5(+50% attack bonus) vs. 6. Sometimes they'll land on forested or mountainous squares which increase your ambush bonus by 50% to 100%. There's not much to it, just a lot of horses so you can create and maintain the best combat odds possible.

Killing the king's stack the turn it lands is also beneficial because it allows your wagon trains to fly around, bringing horses and materials to where they need to be.

Anyone who has won a game of Colonization will probably agree, but it's strange that a game based on economics has so little to do with economics as its victory condition. It's simply too easy to ignore the cash crops in the game and instead stockpile horses.

But isn't this how it was in history? I mean the colonial army did not win because of a prolonged war but instead they win by way of ambush and hit and run. (as oppose to the European style of march and fight face to face the so called gentleman way )

Except of course in the game if you have enough privateers you don't even need to fight a land war. Just send those redcoats to the bottom of the ocean!

Dark Sheer said:

Except of course in the game if you have enough privateers you don't even need to fight a land war. Just send those redcoats to the bottom of the ocean!

Click to expand...

I don't know about Freecol, but in the original Colonization game, if you had more then 3 (or 4, don't remember the number exactly) privateers, you would lose every sea battle with your privateers until you had again 3 Privateers.

But the startegy works with frigates. Build enough of them and the King's Army will never reach land.

Berrie said:

I don't know about Freecol, but in the original Colonization game, if you had more then 3 (or 4, don't remember the number exactly) privateers, you would lose every sea battle with your privateers until you had again 3 Privateers.

But the startegy works with frigates. Build enough of them and the King's Army will never reach land.

Click to expand...

I always noticed that my odds seemed to get worse and worse with more privateers.

But stopping the ManOWars with Frigates seems impossible. They virtually never sink a ManOWar, and it seems to me the ManOWars just appear next to your coast instantly. I've never seen one floating off-coast stuck between a turn. Then again my navy usually sits in colonies because if they spend a turn outside a colony they get sunk. I shall have to try this in my next game.

Does anyone have a solution to European colonials attacking you colonies without declaring war? It happens to me every game. It's usually before I have any garrison troops, but buggy nonetheless.