Beating the King of Spain in my second game

[Krupo]

After starting my first 'trial' game as the English, and producing liberty bells for 200 years, causing a giant REF To form , I abandoned that futile effort (100 HOW many troops plus dragoons etc?), and set out for a new world with the Spanish.

This being my second game, there were still a few things I didn't know - as I had not visited the forums yet. One of my failings was not realizing that you can PURCHASE specialists. This is obvious if you clicked the big green dollar sign, but for some reason this eluded me. I blame poor UI. Or too much New Spanish wine. Funny we can't grow grapes, but I guess viniculture out here is a relatively new thing.

Anyway, after muddling through the game with a rag-tag force of semi-specialized labour-folk, I realized I should declare independence soon.

But something else was bothering me - the French had been pumping out liberty bells like mad, while I was sensibly waiting for the "blitz" period. The unfortunate side effect was that they were next door to me and their borders were eating into those of one of my former awesome cities. It ended up losing almost all its work cells to their borders!

Sad.

By this point I knew that the AI had horrible, well, intelligence, so I mustered up all my free colonists and sent them to invade and destroy the French for this travesty of game design.

Except I stupidly made diplomatic contact and demanded all their money. And of course this was that rare scenario where they complied.

Now the game is telling me I have a 10 turn peace treaty. Wonderful.

Fine, I'm Spanish, let's get our jollies by setting fire to a native settlement instead.

On the way to one big known village, I find the last Comanche holdouts, who had earlier terrorized my people over some silly "non-payment" dispute.

The mini-native war over, I turned my forces around, only to see that Champlain had cleverly declared independence, and the French king was destroying him with haste.

Great, so much for that idea.

No matter, time for independence, in my next post.

 

[Krupo]

I bought the game on Steam, which is cool because if you ever want to see a high Steam score, get a "Sid" game in your list. And it's scary too, because it tells me I've played the game for 22.1 hour already.

Of course, one of the reasons I've played for that long is because I decided to fight this war to completion, NO MATTER HOW LONG IT TOOK.

I don't need a computer to tell me I "won" according to its arbitrary mechanism to bump me into the Hall of Fame. I know I've won when I've achieved one of two criteria:
1. wiped out the king's land forces
2. stopped him from reaching me by achieving naval superiority.

I smartly avoided telling all my New Spaniards about the joys of rebelling until I was ready to engage in the "Liberty Burst". And so with newspapers in most of my cities, save the smallest newer colonies, I sent 2 or 3 men into the townhalls to spread our populist agenda.

I call it a populist agenda, because no elder statesmen dared immigrate to New Spain. I guess they enjoyed spending quality time at the Royal Court. That, and as I mentioned in the first post, I didn't realize I could BUY these guys if I so chose, until late in the game.

By then I figured spending 2000 gold on horses, tools or guns was a better use of my funds.

My penalty for the unprofessional liberty push? REF grew to about 20-24 units. Only 4 MOWs, though, so it wasn't as bad as it could've been.

I declared independence with joy at 50% and marshalled my people into position. My initial tactic was to abandon two of my three coastal cities completely, and to have weapon wagons ready to rearm everyone to re-liberate those two cities.

With a couple of hapless converted natives manning the fishing boats running out of my forts (due to earlier Indian... interactions, there were stockades/forts in those towns), the Royal Spanish army showed up and nabbed those cities.

On a nearby hill I had a stack of doom with cannons and dragoons ready to take back Isabella without breaking a sweat. Veracruz was a little trickier because I made the genius choice of locating a city next to a LINE of hills, but after a few men paid the ultimate price - thank you my "indentured servant" friends - the town was mine again.

A funny little thing happened on the way to liberation: the Spanish docked an MoW in each of those cities!

You can only imagine the joy I experienced when I sank HALF their navy. I was mildly annoyed the game won't let you capture the boats as that would make life even sweeter, but there would soon be more significant annoyances.

Having lost two of their comrade ships and the entire invasion force, the Royalist Captains were no doubt wary of being blamed for this debacle, so they were in no hurry to return to Europe. Instead, they used up their stores of gunpowder blasting my coast.

Yeah, nice one, there.

My men rushed back into the coastal cities and cranked up SoL production - time to even the score, they decided.

Of course, it takes a while to build SoLs, especially if you need to put some shipyards together first, but the 20-odd colonists did fast work after putting their gear back in the weapon wagons. Soon I was ferrying tools and guns around with haste to complete construction of three SoLs. But I knew simply throwing them by themselves at the MoWs was suicide. I would need to use some kind of stratagem. Would privateers be a good tool to soften up the MoWs?

 

[Krupo]

I brilliantly constructed a privateer a short while earlier, on the WEST coast of my continent. The map was of the second-largest size this time, so it meant a 4 turn trip. Which was not a problem, except for the DUTCH MoW hovering on my west coast. He must enjoy the sunshine.

Fortunately my privateer caught a break when the Dutch were north of my colony, and my privateer made a freedom run to the south, smartly arriving in Veracruz in time to join the fun.

I had two privateers and two SoLs. I then engaged my highly sophisticated "what if" scenario generation machine (i.e., saved the game and prepared to save/reload in the ultra-cheesiest fashion possible).

The What If machine told me that I would have to lose the privateer, and one SoL, and that my third SoL would be victorious.

Brutal. Fine, whatever.

And so the battle went down as predicted by the What If machine.

I had all four coastal cities - both the one on the West Coast and the three on the East - gearing up for more SoL action, but this was dragging on far too long.

I needed a smarter strategem. As my replacement SoL was leaving the dock, I realized I had a friend in Trinidad.

 

[Krupo]

During one of my earlier skirmishes a charming young man by the name of Nathanael Greene rose through the ranks of the New Spanish army to become a great general. Gee, I wondered, was he much of a sailor?

Yes, yes he was.

He rushed over to Isabel to lend his support to my SoL, privateer, and a lucky cannon that happened to be in town. A stack of 8 or so cannons took a 'training walk' to ensure the points would be allocated to the naval units, and they were. I think some of his charisma would've spilled onto the 'extra' cannons, but I didn't want to take any chances.

And with that, I had a privateer with a couple of upgrades that was just finishing up healing its wounds from its earlier skirmish with the first SoL (it smartly retreated instead of dying a heroic death).

And so with the New Spanish Ship Nathanael Greene ready to deliver a glorious knockout blow to the Royalist MoW, my un-upgraded SoL sailed out to a heroic death, and my newly healed upgraded privateer sailed out to finish up the prep work for the NSS Nathanael Greene.

Except the NSS Nathanael Greene would never end up leaving its dock.

In the year of our Lord, 1858 that valiant crew of brigands on board the privateer scored the luckiest shot of the war and sank the last Royalist MoW.

The WoI successful, and the last 5 units of the REF would be decommissioned and merged into the regular Spanish army, and the El Monroe Doctrine would keep the Western Hemisphere the preserve of the newly born Republic of the New Spanish nation of Mexico.

Someone correct Wikipedia, Mexico was born in 1858, a heavily armed colony ready to kick the Old Royalists out of New France, and to add it to its glorious borders.

 

[dalgo]

Well done.

 

[best_defense]

I voted "Something different I will write about in response to this thread."

Here is my story:

I kept the villages in front of my BEST ECONOMY city. Then king's man-o-war always move into that village, then unload units. After killing all king's land units in the village, the ship would be destroyed too. Because I didn't build any warship, therefore King only got 7 man-o-war, but 100+ land units. By the time I wiped out all the ships, king still got nearly 100 land troops waiting in Europe. I didn't lose a single city (6 in total). Here is the map (not good drawing, I may add a screen capture image next time):

SXXXXS
SXXXNS
SSXCXS
SSSXXS
SSSPSS

S=sea;
X=land;
N=native village;
C=my city/settlement
P=ice/pole

 

[nate895]

I like to try to go for naval victory, but that usually isn't possible, so I retool to fight a proper guerrilla war with some cannon support.