Guide how to win playing as intended. Sute for any dificulty level.

[Mutineer]

How to win In 10 easy steps.

Strategy work for me near 100% guaranty on patriot difficulty. I did not try use it on Revolutionary yet.
Checked on normal speed, normal size, New World script.


Step 1) Founding settlement.

You want to build settlement near wood and food resource. Other think do not matter.
It is advisable to build away from native settlement, in order to avoid negative native reaction in a future.
So, use your soldier to found town, worker can improve tie.
I recommend building church straight away, because of step 4.

Step 2) Priority - exploration.
You want to explore everything around as fast as possible.
Straight after building your town look in your F2 screen. You have 100 gold, enough to faster 1 emigrant. If you see scout, hire it straight away. If not, then -
Collect 50 guns and head to nearest Indian settlement.
Sell guns, now you have about 800-1K gold, depends.
Press F2 and get folk from emigration until you got 1-2 scouts.
You will spend most of your money
Professional scouts are best to explore. You can not buy them but there 3 ways to get them:

Immigration, Some villages teach it and some time when you talk to chief if promote your units to professional scout.

So, if you was very unlucky and did not get any - buy some horses and make some scouts.
Send them to talk to chefs and you might got lucky. Avoid burial ground and ruins with them.

Step 3) Priority - suppression.

Well, you are not alone in this word. With standard settings you will have 2 rivals.
Easies time to deal with them is right from the start.
If settlement does not have any guns in warehouse and no units defending it - it is easy picking.
If you find your rivals very early your scout can deal with them. But most often you will need a few turn to find them. In mean time your scouts will collect some gold and your ship will carry scouts/immigrant to your city.

So, your scout located one rival and collected 1 K gold in mean time.

Buy 100 guns and 100 horses. Make 2 dragons, put them into ship and go to your rivals.
2 Dragons will be enough to take all his settlement if you are not too late.
After dealing with one you can deal with second if located in time.

Keep settlements that do not use Indian land and raise every one that does.
Other wise Indians will think you steal there land and it will lead to problems in future.

If you found some rivals too late to suppress buy early 2 dragons or some rival created secondary settlements far away you will have to invest into privateer, 1 per rival.

 

[Mutineer]

Step 4) Priority - Spread the word and pray.

Background. It is my believe that amount of crosses needed depends on your total units population.
I am only unsure are converted natives count or not. The moment missionary create mission he does not count as a units any longer.
So, convert all unprofessional folk and some specialists, like rancher or gun maker to missionaries and send them everywhere. The rest sit in churches and pray. I build up to 3 churches and make folk to pray in them. That will create a steady scream of free immigrants, which go and become missionary.

I do not make raw material specialists missionaries and other professionals missionaries. So, your population start to grow, because missionaries take longer and longer to reach more remote Indian villages. So, on some stage production of crosses stop to be efficient and we go to step 5.

Step 5) Priority - development.

So, your total population grow and first converted natives come. Time to fire all priests ( you can leave professional to make some crosses) and start to produce.
Decide on your first industrial centre. In should have wood, (but not necessary). Most important is food.
You will want to stick many industries there and school/uni in future, so you need food.

If you lucky enough to capture city with limber mill build use it.
So, one of your city build limber mill, may be some other build one of shops.
Other just having specialists work in huts for a moment.

Use your exploration money to buy carpenters and after you build limber mill go to step 6.

Step 6) Getting some founding fathers. Peter is just to good. -25% hire cost is better and any other early fathers. 1 turn travel to mother country is good, but you most luckily lost it already.

One or 2 easy ones not to bad, but you want this - 25%.

So, put your first limber mill to produce political point on full speed.
Hopefully if you suppress your opponents well you will get it.

 

[Mutineer]

Step 7) Build multiply industries.

I found country with about 3 industrial centres an lots of raw material villages work the best.
So, after you got Peter you build you first factory and uni your profits to get more carpenters to build 2-3 limber mills in food rich cities. Then you can specialise them for more industries but set up one city for learning straight away. Build school-colleges-uni and start educate your free folk to elder statesmen. Do not use it for anything else. The moment you start to produce them all your education will take longer and longer very fast, including Indian study. So use Indians to educate your folk to raw material professions early on.
After finishing factories your other centres build schools-units and then printings press/news papers.
In mean time keep natives happy. If you did suppression stage well you are only one who trade with them. So, sell them think for profit and gift them cheap stuff you can not make profit selling, preferably your own produce. Try to get +2+4 for fair trade to upset any land stealing, declaring on there friends and life stile penalties.
Produce statesmen, but not produce any bells, use them as preachers, old churches become handy.
Do try to get about 2 tools factories and one guns factory.

Step 8). Switch to bell production.

Switch you elders to produce liberty bells, stick some non professional in villages to same. IN a mean time spread your guns and every warehouse. Do not make any standing army, just spread horses and gun in every city. Do not produce horses yourself - too expensive and slow. Buy them form mother country.
Villages after making dock/warehouse make printing press.

You will start to get a lot of fathers, skip some with instant bonuses in favour of long term bonuses. You borders expand and you absorb some villages.

Step 9). Final push.

You fill all cities with guns/horses. You absorb some Indian villages and got fathers letting you but land very cheap. Build 1 pop cities and stick this one pop as bell maker.
change some farmers/ raw material producers and make them bell makers. Start imports guns/horses mixture to put in every new village. Together with more founding fathers your bell production grow fast and in next few turn you at 50 % - revolution.

Step 10) Beat the king.
You revolted. If you in good shape your taxes between 45-60%.
Adopt native right, monarchy ( you still making enough money to trade), free slaves (+2 pop in every of your villages). I prefer control arms for more bell production. We do not need unarm colonists, we have guns and hopefully with a lot of free promotion.
Now instantly use all your guns/horses to make a lots of dragoons and some soldiers in most luckily to be attacked cities.
Move grenadiers to place from where they can get to where king will land.
Now use them each turn to wipe out all landing parties, carry more guns/horses to use more absolute raw material producers to your army and win.

 

[r_rolo1]

Nice to see you around Mutineer ( BTW did you skipped BtS altogether? )

I suppose that what you wrote is pretty much what the devs had in mind when they were making the game.... Too bad that the applied mechanics were not the more correct ones.

 

[Mutineer]

Well, it works. I have fun playing like them. If they correct a RAF formular it will probably become mainstream. I still think they are missing final part, making your colony economically independed and this way making it economically profitable to declare independence.

BTS come in time when I was moving back to New Zealand from Japan. So, moving, settling down and work took my time. Need to relearn how to dance with tall ladies (my main hobby) took my concentration to. Japanise are very short and I am 6'4''. I bougth it late and actially enjoing it. I think they did manage to make best version. Philosofical trait went to hell, but still...

 

[sophie]

Well, it works. I have fun playing like them. If they correct a RAF formular it will probably become mainstream. I still think they are missing final part, making your colony economically independed and this way making it economically profitable to declare independence.

My friend was talking about that after the first time as well. He said he simply didn't want to declare independance because he liked making money too much.

 

[Refar]

How do you deal with the other europeans respawning ? Keep "suppressing" ? Or just ignore these at some point ?

 

[maverique]

Thanks. I was desperate for a good strategy for this game and I'll be sure to test this one out. I gotta suck at this game, but even at explorer I was having a rough time

 

[Öjevind Lång]

Thanks. I was desperate for a good strategy for this game and I'll be sure to test this one out. I gotta suck at this game, but even at explorer I was having a rough time

My thanks too. But I do think it was a bad idea by the developers to punish the player for generating liberty bells early, and to focus the game exclusively on the Declaration of Independence form the outset. A longer game with different phases, as in the orginal Col, would have been much more fun. Not least the money-making bit. I'm learning how to win easily now, but unfortunately, I find the game bit of a bore. Col has no heart, the way Col I has.

 

[Mutineer]

How do you deal with the other europeans respawning ? Keep "suppressing" ? Or just ignore these at some point ?

yes, keep supressing if they are not too far away and you found them in time. Eventially they will run out of colonists and stop bothering you. Some times they settle there scout on other side of continent and finding them could take time.

 

[Infantry#14]

yes, keep supressing if they are not too far away and you found them in time. Eventially they will run out of colonists and stop bothering you. Some times they settle there scout on other side of continent and finding them could take time.

Usually they only respawn once or twice. I think they stop respawing because they paid all their gold to buy new units. Also, I play at Conquistador levels, so this may not apply to more difficult levels.

 

[Refar]

No they will respawn indefinitely. Once you completely eliminated them, they will get a new starting complement (Ship+Pioneer+Soldier) spawned. Btw - you the human will respawn as well . So best use the Privateers to localize the spawning point (it's fixed) and keep suppressing them on water. You will need 2 ships per civ tho, as it is one battle per turn.

While not posing any danger/serious competition at that point, this is the by far most annoying - and pointless - "feature" of the game. I seen them resettle a city and DoI with a population of 2...

 

[Mutineer]

Well, succesfully tested strat on revolutionary. Won using it.
the difference was that used 2 dragoons to supressnear by duch (1 die), and 4 dragoon to supress spanish (found them a bit late).
Run churchess longer becaus e of need of populations and specialists. Got a lot criminals from immigration. Had to pay more attention to natives who got mad faster. Otherwize main princimples of start hold well.