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Hispaniola: Spain Strategy
You start the first turn with the message "Land Ho!" So, you must first find some place to settle.
I recommend putting all of your units from your "big" ship next to a native village (with the exception of the missionary unit), sign a peace treaty with them, then trade them your "bible" tech for something, anything.
The next turn, demand tribute from them, they will declare war, then you can annihilate them with your positioned units.
As a matter of personal preference, I always destroy the native cities and then build my own, instead of occuping them.
Now, you must found your first city, it should have access to the sea, and it should be built on grassland, have a settler convert jungle to grassland if necessary.
The object of this scenario is just to increase your gold revenue and survive. To prevent you from signing peace treaties for very long, you have a horrible reputation, every civ will be at war with you eventually.
The easiest civ's to annihilate at first are the French and the English, they start right in the middle and if your lucky, won't found more than one city. Remember, all you have to do is occupy their only cities and/or destroy any settlers they have to get rid of them. One time I destroyed the English civ by destroying the boat they had all their settlers on.
The Dutch are difficult opponents because they are colonizing Puerto Rico, you may just want to eliminate any prescence they have on Hispaniola and then make peace with them.
The portuguese, though they start out with the least amount of units, will rival with you for control of hispaniola, they start out isolated on the far west side of it with lots of time to develop, and are allied with you at the start. If you can destroy the 2 or 3 good units they have, then conquering them should be no problem, otherwise, beware.
This game has two bugs that really stand out:
1. It is impossible to manually irrigate tobacco squares, to get around this, automate the settler and hope it irrigates it. When it's done, just put it back in manual mode.
2. The city status screen... instead of telling you the net amount of food, will instead have a label like "this unit is invisible except outside city", and if you try to bring up the food details, the game crashes.
Just ignore this, and try to calculate food and science in your head.
Where to found cities:
At first, you'll want a lot with access to the sea, and very soon after that, you'll want cities that are next to gold and silver mines, these will give you the most trade and shield production.
Never found a new city without having another unit to protect it, as if you don't do this, the natives will probably grab it before you can build an Armed Colonist.
At regular intervals, the game will take money away from you. This is to symbolize "paying taxes" to the homeland. The games events usually say "I need 100 Gold!" but usually they will actually take a lot more than that, you may want to correct the message so you know just how much you're losing (I don't think this counts as cheating because it doesn't change the game in anyway).
This point cannot be stressed enough: try not to lose any of your unique units, with the exception of the trader and the missionary (The trader should be used to start a trade route with the first city you build, the missionary should bribe indians until you think you have enough and then should steal a tech, you'll be able to make more missionarys with the "Indulgence" tech anyway).
The mercenaries and arquebusier are useful for taking out native cities, you can make them travel through the jungle, and the natives won't be able to use any cannons they might have against you. The pikemen for accompanying settlers and making sure they don't get killed. Christopher Columbus should not be used to found a new city.
One last thing: If you see any native canoes, destroy them! For no explicable reason, the natives will pile the native chiefs in there and sometimes you can kill four of them at once!
That's about it, I'll probably write up a more formal tactic later.
I recommend putting all of your units from your "big" ship next to a native village (with the exception of the missionary unit), sign a peace treaty with them, then trade them your "bible" tech for something, anything.
The next turn, demand tribute from them, they will declare war, then you can annihilate them with your positioned units.
As a matter of personal preference, I always destroy the native cities and then build my own, instead of occuping them.
Now, you must found your first city, it should have access to the sea, and it should be built on grassland, have a settler convert jungle to grassland if necessary.
The object of this scenario is just to increase your gold revenue and survive. To prevent you from signing peace treaties for very long, you have a horrible reputation, every civ will be at war with you eventually.
The easiest civ's to annihilate at first are the French and the English, they start right in the middle and if your lucky, won't found more than one city. Remember, all you have to do is occupy their only cities and/or destroy any settlers they have to get rid of them. One time I destroyed the English civ by destroying the boat they had all their settlers on.
The Dutch are difficult opponents because they are colonizing Puerto Rico, you may just want to eliminate any prescence they have on Hispaniola and then make peace with them.
The portuguese, though they start out with the least amount of units, will rival with you for control of hispaniola, they start out isolated on the far west side of it with lots of time to develop, and are allied with you at the start. If you can destroy the 2 or 3 good units they have, then conquering them should be no problem, otherwise, beware.
This game has two bugs that really stand out:
1. It is impossible to manually irrigate tobacco squares, to get around this, automate the settler and hope it irrigates it. When it's done, just put it back in manual mode.
2. The city status screen... instead of telling you the net amount of food, will instead have a label like "this unit is invisible except outside city", and if you try to bring up the food details, the game crashes.
Just ignore this, and try to calculate food and science in your head.Where to found cities:
At first, you'll want a lot with access to the sea, and very soon after that, you'll want cities that are next to gold and silver mines, these will give you the most trade and shield production.
Never found a new city without having another unit to protect it, as if you don't do this, the natives will probably grab it before you can build an Armed Colonist.
At regular intervals, the game will take money away from you. This is to symbolize "paying taxes" to the homeland. The games events usually say "I need 100 Gold!" but usually they will actually take a lot more than that, you may want to correct the message so you know just how much you're losing (I don't think this counts as cheating because it doesn't change the game in anyway).
This point cannot be stressed enough: try not to lose any of your unique units, with the exception of the trader and the missionary (The trader should be used to start a trade route with the first city you build, the missionary should bribe indians until you think you have enough and then should steal a tech, you'll be able to make more missionarys with the "Indulgence" tech anyway).
The mercenaries and arquebusier are useful for taking out native cities, you can make them travel through the jungle, and the natives won't be able to use any cannons they might have against you. The pikemen for accompanying settlers and making sure they don't get killed. Christopher Columbus should not be used to found a new city.
One last thing: If you see any native canoes, destroy them! For no explicable reason, the natives will pile the native chiefs in there and sometimes you can kill four of them at once!
That's about it, I'll probably write up a more formal tactic later.
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