If you somehow lose your initial dragoon to players, indians, or pirates then you can also disband your colonist and ship forcing the game to respawn your initial soldier and pioneer in a new caravel. There is a slight tax hike for doing this but you can still go back to europe again and trade tools for horse to remake a dragoon. This method of warfare is best used with spain since you will keep respawning with a veteran soldier that will get very fast exp if you are playing jose. Typically, killing your first enemy unit with your dragoon you will earn 2 promotions and i suggest you take veteran 2 and 3, but veteran 2 and formation is also a strong way to start out since that will make you very powerful against both dragoon and cannon defenders.
Attacking forces are mostly comprised of dragoons and cannon but most people dont realize that plain old soldiers are the best defense everywhere except open flatlands. Most people will try to counter your dragoon and cannon rush with dragoon and cannon of their own but they will find out that thier army is useless against you unless they have 2 dragoons for every one unit you have. And not only that but you would be suprised at how many noobs will try to defend their city with dragoons thinking that its the best defender with the highest base str and also a 50% bonus vs cannon, who are the best city takers. But they are suprised to find out that not only do dragoons get no defensive bonuses from turrain, fortress, or rebel sentiment, they also do not recieve a bonus vs cannon when defending unless they have the siege promotion and that is just 25% not the 50% innate flanking bonus that dragoons get when they ATTACK a defending cannon.
How to properly counter this strategy:
What this all means is that if you are trying to defend your city and you have alot of resouces then by all means stack as many dragoons in your city as you can, or simply put them to work inside the city and arm them from warehouse when an enemy army approaches. If you attack with all your dragoons as soon as the enemy gets their cannon next to your city then you will decimate their smaller army. But if you do not have alot of resouces then its best to fortify as many soldiers in your city as you can afford while constructing fortress as quickly as possible; give these soldiers min man promotions and anti siege weapon skills, then formation. If you have a stockade and they start to bombard with cannon then on the turn they get your defenses near 0% you rush build the fort by paying extra gold. If you have a lumbermill and they are bombarding your fort then rush build the fortress when they get the fort near 0%. Doing this can delay the attackers so you have time to bring horse and mount up your soldiers for a zerg attack on their cannons. And if you cant delay the attackers then pull your colonists out of your city until you have 100% rebel sentiment, that will give your defending soldiers an extra 50% defense that cannot be bombarded. But the most effective counter to this strategy is to not make a city and just scout with your two units while you use your caravel to trade guns and horse and trade goods to indians while buying raw materials from indians until you can afford to buy a privateer, frigate, or ship of the line. And then just sink the enemy caravel that is running around with the elite dragoon and cannon. Once you take out the initial cannon and dragoon then all you got to do is spot their caravel spawning at the zone to europe and blockade it with your warship. Then you can safely build a city and army to attack their city.
Anyway, once you have your dragoon and cannon you should consider augmenting them with one veteran soldier promoted to defend in forests with the ranger 1 and 2 promotions, then get surgeon 1 to heal your cannon faster and finally veteran 2 and formation to counter dragoon attacks. Its actually pretty quick to pick up those 5 promotions using jose and a veteran soldier if you are very careful about who you attack. You should try to get most of those kills defending with the soldier but if an enemy unit is weakened or out in the open you should be able to finish it off with your soldier. And dont forget that you can also get ranger 1 and formation from 2 founding fathers, you will also end up with mountaineer 1 making you an immovable object on forested hills.
For your dragoon you want to get veteran 5 first and then formation and siege, then skirmish 2. For your cannon you want bomb 2 then veteran 5. Dont attack with your dragoon unless you are mopping up the final defender or a weak unit in the open. And after you attack with dragoon move immediately back to your cannon to defend. Dont attack anything with your cannon unless you have 85-99% or better chance when attacking a city. If their city is bombarded and you have lesser odds of winning than that its best to use a fresh cannon with no skills on it to weaken the toughest defender before you open up with your elite cannon. If/when you get a soldier you should just defend with it unless you are mopping up the weakest stray enemy units.
After you have these 3 basic core units for your attacking force i suggest you build a frigate or ship of the line so you can bombard defenses to 0% before you even move into firing range of the enemy city. This will allow you to begin destroying the defenders with your cannon one turn after the defender has had a chance to launch a premptive strike against your army. Doing this will eliminate the most powerful defender right before you start clicking promotions to heal your dragoon and soldier who just fought off the last turns attack. Keep in mind that if your dragoon gets heavily damaged in the first battle turn and you dont have a promotion available to heal him it might be a good idea to make a fighting retreat to a safe location you can heal up at. This way you will be able to divide the enemy army up, and if he leaves his city to come after you then he loses his fortify bonus. But most of the time defenders are too stupid to attack your army in the first place, they think they can just defend with a large army and hold out while you get damaged on your first attack and THEN retaliate with fresh troops when you are hurt. But that will never happen since you will only attack with the one cannon every turn destroying one unit a turn while your defenses get stronger every turn as your soldier fortifies in the forested hill. By the time they figure out their mistake you are in a position to throw your dragoon at them as well each turn, now destroying 2 defenders a turn.
Now of course you might say, how can you attack each turn without resting health between fights? And the answer is: once you have 5 promotions on each unit you will destroy the enemy without taking more than 5-10% damage. Sometimes you wont take any damage at all. And if you do not have 5 promotions yet then guess what? You will get exp so fast from having jose and veteran soldiers that you will have a promotion literally every time you kill something for the first few kills and then maybe every other kill. Now if thats not enough health for your attackers then that leads me to my next modus operendi.
Generals.
You will get a general after wiping out about 2 or 3 native settlements, it can take a little longer when fighting other players since they will have less defenders. The question is what do you do with the general once you got it. And there is more than one good answer, first of all if you are on offence the whole time and not meeting much resistance then its going to be less likely that you will get attacked at your city, since you will be destroying the enemy cities as fast as your scouts can find them. But if you are totally raping a few players while 1 or 2 others are somewhere out there with a moderate score listed then you should start to prepare for an attack on your city just in case. So if you need a good defense then you should put the general on a veteran soldier and give him min man promotions 1-3 and then anti siege bonus. Those 4 promotions will make him insanely hard to kill, and if you should have formation from founding fathers by now so he will own dragoons and cannon very easily. Its highly unlikely that you will come up against anyone with a soldier that has grenadier 3 and veteran 6 and skirmish 3. But thats pretty much the only thing that can kill your uber min man defender while you have 100% rebel sentiment fortified on a hill in a fortress with balboa the founding father that gives 25% defense to settlements.
The second option is giving your general to either your core dragoon or soldier so you can have surgeon 3 with your army and heal between engagements faster than the enemy can call in reinforcements to take you out. I used to give my general to my dragoon always since he is the first veteran unit i begin fighting with, so he will have the most promotions when i get a general thereby min maxing my power onto one super horseman of the apocolypse. But i have since then changed my strategy, instead of wasting those 3 promotions for surgeon on my dragoon i instead get more veteran promotions making him a more powerful defender of my cannon. And so i instead put the general onto my veteran soldier who is set up to defend my army in the wilderness. I dont get as many veteran promotions right away with my soldier but hes already good enough with his defensive tactics.
And the third option involves a completely different strategy that is based off an early naval power advantage. Instead of rushing the enemy with dragoon and cannon from turn 1 you instead sell your initial guns and tools to indians, buying raw materials from indians, selling raw materials from indians and your center tile of city to europe, and then buying a shipload of 100 guns and horse to quickly sell to the same indian if he has enough gold or to the next indian down the coast. While you do all this trading you also stuff all your colonists and even your veteran soldier into the town hall to get early political points and also produce political points in your carpenter shop instead of structures, unless you really need a dock for food. And in a very few turns, normally 10 turns, you can select peter minuiet as your first founding father. Once you have him you should have over 2k gold from your trades with indians and europe, so you rush buy a privateer. If you can afford it then get the frigate since it can bombard and has more raw str and movement. You wont be able to capture cargo but thats not what your economy is going to be based on. In fact your economy will be based on your military success and skills at robbing natives blind for your shiny beads and boom-sticks, combined with backstabbing attacks on your nearby natives once they run out of gold buying your crap.
So now you have a warship and almost nothing else left but a few gold. Now you request military aid from your king and he will give you a cannon for the wholesale price of just 140 gold, on quick games. If you have enough gold left request aid from king again and you will get either another cannon or a veteran soldier. Transport the cannon and a soldier/dragoon to your city to defend while you start a war with your pirate/frigate. Note: the pirate will not actually start a war but it will be easy to figure out that you are behind it since you got peter first. So expect some attacks on your city, once you got peter you should have started a stockade. And after you got peter you should have pulled your colonists out of town hall and started lumberjacking and carpentry to get your defenses up fast. Get fort next, then lumber mill, then fortress, print press and newspaper. After you got fortress you need to get your people back in town hall and have the extra labor keep working on production. During this time you are selling off the raw resource your center tile provides to fund purchase of the tools you will need to build these things. Once you got newspapers you should build an armory so you can have your spare colonists making guns and cannon. Eventually you will have to purchase a second naval ship to defend your main one between battles. You can make the money for this by turning tools into guns and selling the guns to indians. The tools cost 2 gold per and you can sell the guns for up to about 20 per if the settlement is demanding them. There is no better way to make a profit, not even silver. With the proper setup you can be making over 45-60 guns a turn. That involves having 3 gunsmiths, armory, magazine, arsenal, print press, newspaper, 3 elder statesmen, and the founding father bonuses that apply to liberty bell generation and bonus guns per arsenal, along with the food production to support them. It may seem like alot of investiment to get a huge return but if you think about it guns are just way more useful than silver. You can turn guns into soldiers, dragoons, or warships, not just sell for gold like silver. And silver has a major flaw in that only europe will buy it and selling so much over time will devalue it to the point where you only make half as much profit as when you started out. Not to mention the % the king takes out in taxes.
While you are out sinking enemy ships, and after you have a moderate defense setup, you should take a dragoon and as many cannon as the king will sell cheaply to you to start razing native villages. You will only really need the one dragoon to defend and the rest can be cannon to quickly take these villages out. Doing this will earn you that great general we were talking about. Ok so you have a warship or two, a veteran dragoon, about 3 cannon, and 1 or 2 veteran soldiers defending your city. Now you bring all these units to your city and activate the general on your warship giving out promotions to the dragoon and cannon as i described earlier. The Veteran soldiers should all get min man 1 and 2, and if you have another soldier give him veteran 1 and surgeon 1. Now buy a galleon with the gold you got fighting indians and put your dragoon, surgeon, and all your cannon into it. Keep the galleon with your warship/s and start partolling the coastline razing every city you come across. You do this by bombarding with frigate or ship of the line and then attacking with cannon from the safety of your galleon. Looking back at this its prolly the most cost effective if you rush buy a privateer first and then buy a frigate or ship of the line for the bombardments. If you buy a frigate first then you will have to pay more for the second frigate, but if you get a privateer first you will spend less and then gain possible cargo to sell for a profit to recover some of the cost. And it works out so that if you buy the privateer for 1600ish and the 3375 for the ship of the line you will end up spending about the same as if you payed for 2 frigates since the first frigate is about 2250 and the second one about 2800. Not to mention the fact that an early pirate will have more time to gain early exp ganking caravels and merchanmen that will also contribute to a faster great general. And if you put the general on your privateer it can and will sink a frigate or ship of the line in open waters that has no experience. I have personally gotten a privateer to veteran 6 and with 75% bonus to str you have 8.75 str, and then you can get skirmish promotions to give you a greater withdraw %. The best a frigate can get without a general is 12 str vs ship of the line, making a privateer with general the most powerful naval unit you can get when fighting enemies that have no experience.
Would i put a general on a veteran privateer if i had a ship of the line with no experience? No i dont think so, because the ship of the line had more base str and should get at least a couple promotions from the general making it the most powerful naval unit in play. But if i had a privateer and a frigate i would likely put the general on the privateer. Otherwise the enemy could get a ship of the line and destroy my frigate easy.
All this brings up a question i have for you. What unit do you think is the most effective place to assign your great general, ensuring victory over your enemies in a war of conquest against other competing colonies. NOT to fight the king's army.
I will start a new thread in the general strategy forum to ask this question and poll.
If anyone has a comment, criticism, competing strategy, or just thinks they are a better player than me please enlighten me. But trolls can meet me in game to figure out who has the bigger balls.
