Post Short Tips/Tricks Here

Thunderfall

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Feel free to post any short tips/tricks you have for the new Colonization here... :)
 
1.Cant get those Converted Natives study in your school for elder statesman or whatsoever? make them study in a village in which they have just been converted for a profession , after that clear their speciality to transform them into Free Colonists which can freely enter educational buildings.

2.At the begining of the game rather head for the continent than for the islands. Hurry a seasoned scout from Europe and send him on explore. Find all the treasures you can ASAP and save up enough gold for a Privateer ( ignore King's demands for now ). Buy it, and use this vessel to wipe out all enemy caravels coming into/out of Europe. You will plunder them for resources which can be sold for a profit and at the same time will hurt AI's resource flow which will inevitably slow them down. Use the experience for navigation promotion in order to get more movement to chase those traders even faster.

3.When founding new settlements which only role is to extract specific resource ( Fur , Tobacco ) you dont need any buildings at all ( maybe only the Warehouse but it depends on the flow of your Wagon Trains) so instead of wasting these hammers you should rather spend them on Points ( Political , Exploration etc ) so you can really rush those Founding Fathers like Peter Minuit or others of your liking.
 
1. When you get treasure, bring it to a coastal city, but don't cash it in until you need the gold. You can hide it from your king's gold demands that way.

2. When your ship arrives in Europe you will have an opportunity to sell cargo and purchase stuff before your king has a chance to ask for gold or raise your taxes. If you want to buy something expensive do it now before your king can take your gold away. Otherwise, since tax raising is rare, exit the screen and after you conclude any business with the king sell your cargo.
 
Is the REF military power too much for you ? Try this :

Build some ships of the line, the AI will counter this with massive production of man o war. I had built 8 ships of the line, as a result the REF consisted of 60 ! man o war's by the time I declared my independence. But its land forces where less impressive than usual, I could almost keep pace with their numbers. And you dont need to beat all those ships for a victory, only beating the land forces is enough to get a victory.
 
I'm still tinkering with some of the details on this, but it appears that the King wants to attack your smallest/weakest coastal cities after you declare independence.

A "honeypot" town may be a workable strategy. This is a small, weakly defended town that can be easily reinforced and/or recaptured. Alternatively, a couple of very strong coastal towns with the remainder inland might work, too. The REF expends most of its strength trying to break "The Rock" and your inland forces mop up what's left. I'm basing this on one war for independence, though. Eight coastal cities and only two of them got attacked by the REF and those were next door to each other.

I also noted that my Native allies DoW'd the king. Didn't do me much good since they were on a different landmass (protection from the other nations), but since the REF's bonuses are all related to attacking settlements, I suspect that they wouldn't be able to defend well against Natives with bonuses for attacking outside of settlements. Making nice with the neighbors would be a VERY good strategy.
 
Instead of buying the Veteran Soldier from Eu dock, you could ask for the King's "military aids", which costs around 1k gold.

This is cheaper than getting from Eu market, which price progressively increase as you buy more.
 
Instead of buying the Veteran Soldier from Eu dock, you could ask for the King's "military aids", which costs around 1k gold.

This is cheaper than getting from Eu market, which price progressively increase as you buy more.

But it requires that you pay up when he wants some pocket money, which can be quite expensive.
 
Keeping your gold low to "hide" it from the king's demands is good, but outright rejecting him is better. The benefits for doing so seem to far outweigh accepting-- Dale, one of the testers, has also indicated the penalty for such an action is also quite low.

Another tip is to make sure to look up the traits on the Indian tribes you are fighting. If you feel the need to go rampaging on your neighbors, focus on the ones that give bonus money when you plunder (Aztecs, Incans, Tupi to a lesser extent). Or focus on sending missions to the ones that are "Impressionable"-- you'll get more converts.
 
I've tried this, and it seems to work pretty well. Found one of your colonies near extensive food resources. I found one plot with three fish resources near by. I obtained three expert fisherman to work the spots and was quickly generating +20 or so food, which quick generated additional citizens. They can be sent where need to found or populate other colonies. This is similar to the specialist city concept in Civ IV.
 
You can use merchantmen as bait for the Kings Men O War. Hopefully the merchant will survive, and flee to a drydock, while taking the MoW health far enough down for your Ship of the Line to counter attack. Much cheaper than using two SoLs.

Alternatively, assign a great general to a ship of the line, and take skirmish 1-3 for a 60% chance of withdrawal.
 
Instead of buying expensive Elite units from Europe, just keep buying cheap farmers and then convert them yourself into military units.
 
Road all your coastal tiles before DoI. I forgot to do one hill and it cost me a lot of units. Every time I killed the last unit on that tile my dragoon had no movement left so was stranded and the next turn it was defeated by the new landings. There is no way to add a road after independence as your pioneer can't survive there.
 
Let's not forget a holdover from the original Col:

For additional storage, park a wagon in your colony. You can store a lot more muskets this way, or hide a good from the computer so that you'll never have to throw it away in a goods party when the king comes knocking. Downside: you have to manually unload raw goods to process them and manually unload muskets to make them available to your colonists.
 
Col2 might be programmed to avoid this, but I guess it can't hurt:

I wonder if this one still works:

In Col1 I would try to keep 1 unit of trade goods in a colony in hopes that it would become the target of the next goods party, rather than some good that was actually important (losing guns, horses, tools tended to be a blow). I would do the same with other goods that I didn't use, like sugar and rum if my colonies had no land for sugar.

Often times I was able to throw a party and dump something that I didn't care about trading with the king! (Most of the time when I go through the game, I don't have the tiles to produce sugar or cotton or rum and cloth as a result)
 
Dragoons are the best unit - they are almost even against much of the REF, and if they survive long enough the skirmish upgrades give them really good survival odds. Horses are cheap in Europe, so stockpile them next to your guns and save your domestic food supply for generating colonists. If a Dragoon is in a city that's about to be attacked, and have not moved, they can be downgraded to soldiers before you end your turn. So you don't lose defensive bonuses unless you attack or end a turn outside a city.
 
Dalgo, I remembered that Col1 trick late in my last playthrough. I'm going to try it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, then kudos to the programmers

nitpick: Although, it's not really the king who decides what you throw out is it? I haven't carefully read it in a while, but I think the computer chooses the good and then you choose whether to pay the tax or throw out the pre-determined item.
 
Now if you hide those goods he'll switch to an inland colony.
aww.

It makes sence though. "We refuse to pay your tax and will throw 45 tonnes of lumer into the... field!" :rolleyes:

What about using "tax galleons"? In Col1 I uually had one anchored just for that purpose (when I had more than one costal colony), and wagon swapped each turn when time was getting close to another tax increase.
 
Delay first settlement for 12 turns.

Caribbean, Marathon, Huge, revolutionary.
First looked at queue and saw fisherman and scout. Immediately sailed back to Europe, sold tools and guns and bought fisherman and scout. Sailed back.
In Caribbean loots of places with three fish, took one with fisherman, quickly found natives who do fisherman. Left two starting colonists training and set scout off.

I think the extra 12 turns delay was worth it, if only to set scout off 12 terns earlier. Not sure delaying would be so good at quicker speeds.
 
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