1. how do i buy muskets? how do i make tools?
In the europe screen you can drag guns onto your ships hold to buy a stack of guns, or you can shift drag to buy a specific number of guns. Or you can buy soldiers that come with guns by opening diplomacy with king, he will sell you a cannon or soldier. Or you can click the $ symbol in europe screen above docks to buy a soldier. Or you can hurry buy immigrant soldier if one is available (one of the 3 random immigrants above docks to the right of $ symbol.
You make tools by first mining ore then putting a colonist inside the blacksmith shop in your city, that will generate one tool for every ore you work on.
2. is there a maintenance cost for cities as in civ 4
This is a little complicated, there is no maintenance cost per city like other civ games, and it doesnt effect corruption waste or inefficiency. But for every city you make next to an indian you need to pay gold for every tile of land you take from them or steal the land and that lowers your relations with that tribe. Also when you grow a large city you effect the way of life for indians and they buy guns, booze, and other things that cause their society to deteriorate. This results in a negative to your diplomatic relations.
And finally when you have large population cities it makes it harder to generate a large rebel sentiment percentage, making you produce more liberty bells for a longer period of time and that causes the kings expedition force army to grow in size making it harder for you to win your independance victory.
3. what is the best number of cities to make?
One if you can get away with it, or more if you are trying to be self sufficient and need to gather certain materials. Or you could designate one city as a breeding ground where you only fish or farm with no other colonists eating food or working jobs to grow more colonists that you use in other citys, turn into missionarys, or turn into soldiers to attack or defend. You could designate one city to have lots of lumber and carpenters with an armory or shipyard to build cannon or ships. You could have one city with alot of hills to mine ore and lots of blacksmiths to make tools, and lots of gunsmiths to make guns, in such a city you could be generating over 30-40 guns a turn to be used to make warships or soldiers or dragoons. Or you could have one city that harvests raw materials and fashions them into cloth, rum, cigars, coats or just gather silver and sell these things to europe, indians, or other colonys for gold generation.
4. what is the best thing to do with the immigrants i recieve?
At first you want to scout, then settle into one of the city types i described above putting them to work.
