Is it just me, or...

[Guynemer]

...is this way harder than the original? Primarily due to the massive army the mother country builds up? I mean, on the easiest setting, they have 60 dragoons and 60 soldiers and 20 cannons, not to mention the 15 man-o-wars blockading me.

Seriously... holy ****! No way I can survive this.



Also, it appears that you can not educate a free colonist to veteran soldier status, or have I missed something?

[Dale]

Yes, you need to seriously consider facing a massive army. One guy at CFC rated the game "F" cuz he faced an army of 500.

Seriously, don't consider WoI unless you have 100+ soldiers, 50+ dragoons.

Keep checking the revolution screen to see the REF buildup.

[snoopy369]

According to Dale's research, you cannot train a veteran soldier.

This is definitely harder, particularly in that you can't use several exploits (like custom houses). The particular annoyance for me: Native cities. Way too many, especially when they build more. They need to be less densely packed on smaller maps... seems like there are the same amount of camps on every map size, which is silly on normal compared to Huge.

[Dale]

Well, they get the same amount of AdvancedStart points on whichever map.

That can probably be labelled a bug.

[Bkeela]

The original was never overwhelming, even on the greatest difficulty. You had plenty of time to wipe out the Indians, find that obscure tobacco planter (hopefully before you wiped out the Indians), totally colonise both north and south America if you wanted, mess around harassing other colonies with privateers.

There was lots of time to breath.

From what I understand now, you have to be a miser just to survive. From the get go you have to think about the end, and each turn closer to the end you start to sweat bullets.

[Dale]

Not really. There's strategies to help all through the game.

[ParticleHustler]

Originally posted by snoopy369
This is definitely harder, particularly in that you can't use several exploits (like custom houses). The particular annoyance for me: Native cities. Way too many, especially when they build more. They need to be less densely packed on smaller maps... seems like there are the same amount of camps on every map size, which is silly on normal compared to Huge.

Totally agree. I cannot believe they scrapped the custom houses. I realize we can automate trade, but it's a pain in the butt without having the ability to trade without shipping everything back. I don't like that at all.

And yeah, way too many settlements on the standard map. I'm almost through with my first game on the easiest setting, and there were so many of them I decided to only found 3 settlements because I didn't want to war with them over the land, and they impacted nearly every decent 9-square plot on the map. I've now had 5 settlements turned over to me thanks to my borders expanding, but I'm at the point where I don't want to found any more cities as I'm preparing for independence and don't want straggler settlements as weak spots.


This first game is definitely a learning experience, but I'll start on a bigger map next time. And hope they do something about custom houses! I'm producing so much of some things that it's hard to sell it all. Seems like the time to travel back and forth to Europe is greatly increased, too. One thing I'm going to look into for the next game is trading with indians and other countries for raw goods I don't have and just have a specialist making those things in my settlements. I've got such a surplus of tools, for example, that I could trade them to indians for sugar (which I don't have) and probably have enough to support a distiller without having any access to sugar. That's definitely a change (for me) from the original.

Still, this game has me immersed. I played 4 hours last night and had to force myself to turn it off to get some sleep.