My Die Hard Tips To Win In Colonization No Cheating! :Titan:

1) Play with whatever nation you wish.

2) Play method: play like the French did in reality! - be friendly to the natives; - trade muskets and horses to natives especially those next to enemy cities! - make missions in all native camps in your territory (untill they get offended) --> Why all this trading weapons and horses to natives? Well, the natives in enemy territory will attack enemy colonies of course! This may also help them from becoming extinct. Your 'own' natives must also be armed. If an enemy invasion occurs, most times 'your' natives will attack the invaders if they invaders are numerous. You can also use a missionary to incite the natives into warfare against your rivals.

3) I never set up trade routes. Always use your first colony to ship stuff to and from Europe. Make your first colony like a capital: build most major improvements in this city. Keep the other colonies small and simple untill you really have time and money to improve them.

4) Warfare is not as random if you stick to the following rules: - make stables and warehouses everywhere, make sure you have plenty of horses when you start war; turning a colonist into a scout is the fastest way of moving a horse unit around, don't use a wagon for this purpose. - only attack with dragoons so you won't loose muskets.

5) When you have a carpenter, use him to build a lumber mill. You need 3 colonists in a colony but when you have switched to lumber mill order you can move out the other colonist(s), unless you have a stockade. When the lumber mill is finished, move the carpenter to the next colony that needs a lumber mill.

6) When most of your colonies have a lumber mill and have most basic improvements, switch as many to produce artillery. You can buy the first 4 or 5 from Europe but after that they get too expensive. If you have 4 or 5 colonies producing artilleries, you can get a nice colonial war going against the other European nations. If enemy nations ask for peace, give them peace and see if they will pay you any money. After they have paid you (or not), you can merrily continue war! This is one of the great things of Colonization: attack, make peace, blackmail them then attack them anyway. They will get weaker and weaker!

7) Later on in the game, as taxes get too high, trading with the natives can become very profitable.

8) Privateers are a must! Be sure to build a dock works first though. Privateers are the fastest ships and it's sure nice to capture loads of muskets and tools from your rivals. Keep 2 as a minimum and of course choose Drake.

9) Do NOT attack the natives, ever! If they are hostile, give them stuff for free or let them attack your settlements so they get it out of their system. It's safe to always unload your ships when they're in port though. Otherwise if they get damaged in an attack you will loose the ship load.

:ok:

:angel: Okay, here's one "cheat" for desperate people: :evil:

If you are presented with choices for the next Founding Father and you don't like any of them or you want to choose one specific FF who's not on the panel; press [Esc!]

The choice panel will disappear but the next turn it will reappear with new choices. Keep pressing [Esc] untill you get the FF you really want. This does not affect your Liberty Bell production (though I'm not sure, keep an eye on it).

I find attacking natives extremely profitable (annd fun too!) you can make lots of money from getting Cortez and going on a big genocide. This will give you piles of cash to fight your wars and, if you get a misionary following your troops around, you can get loads of people! :cheers:

I didn't know about trading with the Incas like that. I think I'd get a bit bored of that after a while. I always colonise NA because I like its larger size and variety of terrain type (most of SA will only produce sugar).

This is probably my favourite game of all time. The thing I think is most in need of improvement in an updated version is an Indian intelligence report that breaks each village down according to: 1) what skill can be learnt there (if it hasn't already been learnt), 2) what they would like you to sell them, 3) what they can sell you. This would be so much more helpful as currently, I have to do all this in a spread sheet.

Here are my basic (and general) strategies. Most of the strategies in Colonization revolve around comparing short term gains with long term gains. Don't be impatient. Also, it's about doing things in the right order, especially regarding which Founding Fathers you get. Finally, it's about trying to become self-sufficient in all ways (manufacturing, education, etc.) as soon as possible so you're not giving money to the crown.

1. Choose the Dutch, or perhaps the English. The Dutch not only start with a better ship, they have a major advantage with trade. Once you get further into the game and are producing a fair bit and trading with your home country, the bottom will fall out of the market (I think it does anyway because of your rivals). The Dutch aren't affected so much. The English get lots of colonists, but this may actually mean you have far too many to manage comfortably and your colonies end up extremely backward. I'm not so sure about the French, but I don't think their advantage is all that good anyway since if you trade with them normally and have walled colonies, you'll be fine against their attacks. The Spanish are just atrocious. You don't want to fight the natives, really.

2. When you build a colony, fully plow the colony square first. This will make the square more productive for food and a cash crop. This extra food allows it to support an additional colonist, which is very helpful early on. Later on, develop the resource squares.

Try to produce the things relevant to your colony first. The most important is by far the lumber mill as this improves your ability to produce other buildings. Next should be the following (in no particular order): docks, stables and school house -- all of these will assist your colony greatly. At some point down the line, you may need a warehouse, especially for your bigger colonies. Early on, produce a manufacturing building for the one cash crop a colony will specialise in (it's more efficient to have one colony producing cotton/cloth and one producing tobacco/cigars than having both producing both) and forget about building the other manufacturing buildings. Further down the line, improve your manufacturing industry and also develop your liberty bell production with newspapers and printing presses. You'll also want to at least build a college, if not a university down the line too as this will make training colonists much more efficient (and most manufacturing professions require college education).

I really don't go in for building a massive military force early on. Personally, I don't find the combat elements of this game to be that exciting that I like to just go off on a war or two, even if it's counter-productive. I will have one or two units to defend colonies, but everything else can wait. The resources that will go into building armies early on can be better invested. You should build wagon trains (not too many, too early though) as these are vital for trade.

3. I try to get three colonies up and running fairly early on, and then expand from there. I like to have two producing cash crops and the related finished goods (usually one is cotton/cloth), and one producing ore and tools. This means of course that you'll need to have access to the right terrain types as resource squares. From there, I gradually spread out to the point where I will have about two (or maybe three) colonies for each cash crop/finished product, and about two or three for ore/tools. This will give somewhere between ten and fifteen colonies, which will give you a massive economy. Any fewer than this and you won't be taking full advantage of things, any more than this and you may not be able to develop each to its full capacity. Make sure your colonies are all on the same land mass and connected to one another by roads, etc. This makes trade better, and also the WoI much easier. Furthermore, I like to have at least half of my colonies inland. This means they won't be accessible by ships, obviously, but it does mean they're quite likely to have Indian villages to trade with. I then move goods around between trading them with the Indians and moving any excess to the ports for trade with Europe (or manufacturing before I can build up my inland colonies). More than all this though, when it comes to the eventual WoI, your inland colonies should be safe. The royal troops will land next to coastal colonies and attack those repeatedly. This will leave your inland colonies safe for production and defence, and also mean you can then fight a guerilla war.

4. Get a few scouts and send them out to Indian villages (but don't start exploring Lost City Rumours until you get Hernando De Soto -- once you get him, go for it).

4. Use the Indians as much as possible. They will give you gifts and/or information, and they will also train your colonists. Some professions (the "planters") can only be gained this way. Trade with the Indians! You can make a lot of money and not pay tax on this. Basically, the tax you pay to the crown is used to raise the armies that will fight you in your War of Independence.

5. Regarding wars, it's fine to kidnap enemy colonists, but don't capture towns as any of the following usually apply: 1) they're a long way from your other colonies, which will make them hard to defend in the WoI, 2) they're in bad locations (islands especially are both hard for bringing reinforcements to in the WoI and also don't have enough land resources a lot of the time), 3) the computer often completely defoliates its colonies, meaning you'll have to bring wood in for construction (a major hassle), 4) the computer often has Indian converts (who will not be nearly as efficient as professionals), 5) the computer often has masses of poor colonists. All in all, captured colonies will be a major drawback for you.

Do not start killing the Indians off unless they're seriously hampering the expansion of your colonies! At the lowest level of the game, you get -1 score for each village destroyed, more at each higher level. As you get +1 per 1000 gold, unless you're getting 1000 each time you plunder, you're losing points. More than this though, the long term profit you will make from trading with the Indians will far outweigh any money you'll make from killing them. I personally don't arm them with horses or muskets though as in the past they have used these against me.

6. Once each colony is past its early stages, you need to start thinking about its liberty bell production. The drawnback of rebel sentiment is increased taxes (and I think increased royal military spending), but rebel sentiment makes your colonies more efficient at production, and liberty bell production helps you to get new Founding Fathers quicker. Once you get one colony with a university, you can start producing your own Statesmen, so this helps.

As far as Founding Fathers go, some are excellent no matter when you get them, others are very useful depending upon when you get them, and some are just terrible whenever you get them. I won't go into the middle or latter groups as there's too much detail. I will say though that generally, I don't worry about getting most of the religious FFs until I have everyone else.

Here's my pick of the crop: Thomas Jefferson -- get him first if you can as he increases your liberty bell production, therefore meaning you can get other FFs even quicker. Along with Jefferson, other FFs who increase your liberty bell production (such as Simon Bolivar and Thomas Paine I think, although I think you can't get Bolivar until near the end of the game) are very useful. Early on, two other "must gets" are William Brewster and Hernando De Soto. William Brewster stops you from getting any colonists from Europe who are criminals or servants. This might not sound like much, but basically, these colonists suck, big time. To be good at anything, they'll have to be educated (a tiresome process that slows down colony growth) or improved via combat (a general drain on resources). Brewster also lets you choose the next colonist to appear in Europe, which is a lot more useful than letting the computer do it for you. De Soto improves your scouts' abilities to get positive results from exploring Lost Cities (the differences are dramatic) and he gives your schouts an increased sight radius. Bear in mind that getting De Soto without Brewster will make the Fountain of Youth a real hassle, but getting De Soto after Brewster will make it a major windfall.

From there on in, it's largely a matter of your style of play, but I tend towards those who improve my liberty bell production, colonies and trade, not the warrior or religious types. Many FFs aren't useful until later in the game. Those I get early are: Hudson (sure, he eventually causes your furs to flood the market and become worthless, but he's great in the early stages), Pocahontas (pacifies the Indians until you can build up your defences), De La Salle (give colonies stockades for free).

Ultimately, you should end up with a whole lot of highly developed, heavily fortified (fortress, artillery, spare muskets and horses) colonies producing a lot of trade profits, with a sizeable force of mounted units stationed in a couple of central, inland colonies. When you start the WoI, the royal forces will land beside coastal colonies. Your colonies should be able to defend themselves until help arrives. You should then move a mob of about five or six units in to hit the royal forces in a guerilla war. In this way, it should take you one or two turns to destroy each landing force and you shouldn't have too many problems. It's only if the royal forces become entrenched, start taking out your own forces, and besiege too many colonies that you'll get yourself in trouble.

Your score is based on several things to be found on the Colonization Score report, but one thing not mentioned is to do with when you get independence, and the order in which each country gets independence. I think from every year prior to a certain date (1766?), you get one extra point. Obviously though, if you're producing more than 1000 gold per year via trade profits, it's better for your score to declare independence later. Balancing this though is the fact that your enemy powers are also working towards independence and will in fact do so (but they don't have to fight a WoI, they just get independence). I can't remember the bonuses you get, but basically, if you're the last nation to become independent, you get your basic score. As you go up the placings, you get a multiplier bonus, which is obviously very good if you're first.

They're the basics. I hope they help. If you want a far more detailed version where I break things down even more, e-mail me at shorbe@rocketmail.com

Nice work, and all stuff I'd go along with, though you didn't mention missionarries (very important if you're nice to the natives) and it is in fact possible for criminals/servants to become standard colonists simply by working, in the same way that a normal colonist can gain expertise in an area by working at the same job for a long time (though it's slightly more efficient to train them if I remember).

On Founding Fathers, the 2 you mention who deal with immigrants from the home country are even more useful if you play as england (since they get more colonists), and Pocahontas can be handy for tactical reasons (particularly as the spanish) - you can destoy irritating native villages and take their land, then have pocahontas reset all their attitudes to neutral so you don't need to destroy a whole nation/tribe. The FF who makes them give up their land for free is also handy if you end up coexisting with them closely.

BeefontheBone: If you can believe it, I've never used missionaries. I always thought they caused Indians to convert and join colonies and I have never wanted that.

As for colonists gaining experience in the field (if you'll pardon the pun), I've found this to be an incredibly inefficient means of training them. Having an expert in a school or college is much faster (although of course you lose that expert's production capabilities in the meantime...).

Yes, if you play as England, William Brewster is crucial ASAP as otherwise you'll get completely flooded by petty criminals and indentured servants. The other religious FFs I don't like. William Penn just causes way too many people to appear on the docks (especially if you're playing as the English). Juan de Spulveda and Bartome de las Casas I don't like either. I can't remember the fifth.

Pocahontas is really good, but I don't play an aggressive sort of game, so I use her mainly before I get Sieur De La Salle (who gives a free stockade to your colonies once they reach a population of three I think). With a stockade and a fortified dragoon in each colony, the Indians won't be able to do any harm, so it doesn't worry me too much if I generate alarm with the Indians (which happens fairly slowly). You're right though that she is good if you have to wipe out a village or two (which I inevitably end up doing -- if I play in NA, I almost always have to wipe out most of the Cherokee villages and a couple of Iroquois too perhaps).

Peter Minuit (the guy who gets you free Indian land) is actually not so good I believe. The land is free, but the natives still get upset if you take the land, so in effect, you may as well just take the land without him and get a different FF.

Someone else I don't like at all is the FF (Franklin?) who supposedly stops European wars from having any effect in the New World. This has never actually worked for me because 1) I've never been dragged into any war I didn't start, 2) at some point in the game, one of my rivals ends up pulling out of the New World due to the Treaty of Utrecht. In a way, I don't really care, but this means that the power pulling out (usually the Spanish) ends up ceding its colonies to another power (usually France) which then makes that power stronger (in terms of being slightly closer to independence).

Anyhow, there's heaps of stuff over at this page, which is where I learnt a lot of this from (although some things I disagree with the author on or they don't suit my playing style). I can't get any of the sub-pages to load though for some reason, which is really annoying.

Don't know if this has been mentioned before, but:

-what to do against other nations gaining independence first?

You lose points if you're not the first colony to gain independence. It's even worse if there's two nations before you.

My only solution for this: colonial war! Get their colonies and colonists before they start thinking of becoming independent. I guess you also do it more peacefully by watching your own percentage of Sons Of Liberty: once they're more than 30 %, other nations will start longing for independence too.

Once your SoL reach 50 %, the most miserable of your enemies will pull out of the New World and cede its belongings to another colonial power.

And indentured workers can be turned into full colonists by letting them get trained by the natives. Criminals they will not train however. But if you use them as scout they can still become expert scouts.

It shouldn't matter what nation you choose at the start. What matters is the way you play. Play like the French!

Microprose Veteran: I think it's a bad idea to capture enemy colonies, for reasons I already listed. The only exception is a hit and run mission whereby your opponent has enough forces in the vicinity to retake the colony -- capture it, loot it of units or cargo (having a ship or two nearby is handy), clear the specialties of all colonists you can't take with you, and then get out of there, leaving the colony extremely backward and dashing your enemy's plans for independence.

However, I'm all for capturing their colonists outside their colonies. In fact, this is good for two reasons. One is that you get more colonists, the other is that you can arm your criminals and servants and send them into combat. They can be upgraded one level (criminals to servants, servants to free colonists, free colonists to veteran dragoons) if they win a fight. George Washington in your Continental Congress makes this automatic every time they win a fight.

Of course it matters which nation you start as! Play is most important, but starting nation does affect things a lot. The English get more colonists (so more and bigger colonies or fighting forces faster), the Dutch have a better ship (which makes transporting cargo a more efficient process) and get better prices on the European market. The French get a hardy pioneer (development of resource squares and building roads occurs faster) and better Indian relations. The Spanish have better fighting abilities against the natives.

If one does indeed play like the French, then the Spanish have no special abilities. Both the French and Dutch have distinct starting differences to all other players that give them a slight leg up early on which can be exploited and maintained. The French relations with the Indians become irrelevant after the early stages of the game, whereas the advantages of both the English and Dutch really make a huge difference across the course of a game. Having 50% more colonists has to make a difference. Likewise, having more money (even if it's only 10% more) means you can buy more things and make developments your opponents can't, and sooner, and this compounds to the point where you can use it as extreme leverage on an opponent. For instance, the most extreme example is if you get Henry Hudson and flood the market with furs (not to mention filling your warehouses pretty quickly), you can be making twice as much money as your opponents, and you can still scrape a modest profit out. If you were playing with anyone else and got Hudson, your fur industry would become a huge waste of time. This is particularly true if you're playing against the Dutch and they start flooding the market; it can tear the rear end out of your economy and put you at a major disadvantage.

Shorbe: thanks for your detailed reply.

Here's why I still think my way is also good, if not better. :D

I play this game like a strategic warfare game, meaning the advantages etc. really shouldn't play a big role.

Let's see why the Spanish and English have no real advantages:

-Spanish get advantages in fighting natives, but you still need to build your military
-English get more colonists, but they're useless if you can't defend them (strong military)

If you're playing the French or Dutch, getting more colonists is just a matter of capturing them.

The advantages of the French may lessen, but if you got Jean De Brebeuf those expert missions sure will repay your investment! I play without hitting [Esc] when choosing Founding Fathers so if you play as French then Brebeuf will appear earlier.

Capturing colonies is a viable strategy, as long as you make sure they're within reach of your fleet and military of course. At the start, if you're lucky and captured an enemy's main colonies, you can increase your military and wait till they build a new colony again - then capture it.

The main thing in this game is military. It's also a fault in the design I guess, because military units don't require any support once build!

You will understand that for me the economics is just a side issue. I play mainly to wage war. Especially at the start, I stockload on muskets before they become too expensive. Don't forget to supply the natives with horses and muskets though. They'll wage war on your enemies and leave you alone as long as you respect them.

After I have built lumber mills in a few towns, I let them produce artilleries to be used in my colonial warfare. You can buy the first 6 or 7 cannon in Europe.

Microprose Veteran: I guess we just have a different approach. I'm not really into the military side of it. I build up my military towards the end (only building enough to defend each colony from attack before then), but only once my colonies are very well established. I'm all about the development of colonies and micromanagement of my economy. I like to end up with about a dozen colonies of size fifteen at least (excluding any fortified military units). These bring in several thousand gold each turn in trade. Ultimately, victory points can be gained from a lot of different sources, so I go for both quantity and quality of colonists, plus a lot of gold (I usually pass the 200K mark long before I declare independence).

I'm still curious about the effects of missions, as I don't normally build them. What do they do exactly?