Epic Failure HELP!

[lermfish]

Help me!

I have a slight problem called, "I'm Used to Playing Civ4, a Much Slower Game, and I Always Forget to Build an Army, or Even Produce Liberty Bells, Resulting in the King Increasing his REF Over Time, and Screwing Me Over at Turn 281 When I Finally Remember to Produce Liberty Bells, But End Up Overproducing!"

It's a real problem, you see.



Does anyone have any tips?

I've tried the others, but...

 

[Big Mark]

Build your economy in the first half of the game (or up to turn 200). Put no one generating liberty bells. Make sure you have an infrastructure to crank out guns, horses, cannons and ships.

Then on some set turn -- maybe 200 at the latest, crank up the liberty bells. Put as many people as you can generating liberty bells. If you don't have enough elder statesmen, put soldiers in the town halls. (You can turn them back to soldiers when the war starts.)

Once you have 50% rebel sentiment declare independence. Immediately. If you have built up your navy to at least 150% of the king's you can win in no more than 10 turns by sinking all his ships.

The REF is a function of liberty bells and soldiers begged from the king. Use political points to get founding fathers prior to your liberty bell crank-up.

Never, ever wait past 50% to declare independence. All you do is give the king more toys to fight you with.

 

[milvang]

At turn 281 i would say it is still possible to pull of, depending on trh size of the REF (Royal expeditionary force).

If you have enough money to buy an army to fight the REF, all you need to do is to produce max liberty bells. You can delete all the colonists that you dont need, or a less extreme is to build some new cities and produce max bells there. If you have 80%+ of you population producing bells, getting to 50% should be doable within 10 turns. Once you hit 50% and can select "all men are free", kick those freed slaves out and delete them for an extra increase in rebel setiment which would help you win the war.

That leave just 9 turns to fight. The only way to win in that span is to kill the REF ships. With a little luck about twice as many ships has the REF has in a mix of privateers and ship of the line, will do it. But you cant let any of them escape. In general sacrifising a privateer on a Man-O-War allows you to kill it with a ship of the line after (depending on rebel setiment)

 

[HermannLombard]

lermfish, those ideas should work fine, though I'd never cut it as close as Turn 281! It's too likely that the King will have some stray units and win because you ran out of time. (It's counterintuitive because most revolutionary wars are won because the mother country ran out of time and will to fight.)

Anyway, if you look around you'll see threads with other approaches. One idea you will often see is to produce absolutely no navy at all, just buy enough guns and horses to produce enough dragoons to slaughter the REF as each wave lands. As milvang said, that won't work if you cut the time too short.

Once you have some vanilla victories under your belt you may want to try Age of Discovery II where (among many other things) the WoI clock starts when you declare, so you don't run out of time waiting for the King to ship his units to the slaughter. [Apparently the forthcoming Firaxis patch will address that particular issue.]

 

[lermfish]

Thanks, all of you!

That was a lot more detailed than the other guides: "Don't crank out bells, and build an army."

I think I might dust off my copy and give this a try.

 

[Droknar]

On the "normal" game length, you are given 300 turns to win your bid for Independence. I personally find I need about 150 turns or more to safely conclude the fighting in any war, especially on larger maps where I may have a number of widely spread cities I must recapture. Transportation is very slow, so if you have a big, widespread war, you will need a ton of turns to win.

By simple aritmatic, if I need 150-200 turns to win the fight, then I need to declare Independence by turn 100, or year 1590 A.D. or so). Every game I play aiming for Independence by 1600 I win quite easily since I have plenty of time to fight the war. To do that you need to start producing bells almost immediately, with the first 10-20 turns. Ever since I decided to give leeway to the time (turn) limitation, I have not lost a game once in several games on conquistador level.