United States (13 colonies)

[Monk]

The United States is one of the 12 major factions available for play.

Just a quick clarification. To play as the thirteen colonies you need to complete chapters 1 through 3 in the "Road to Independence" campaign. The fourth chapter is a clone of the grand campaign except you can't choose which nation to play and instead get to play as the thirteen colonies.

Some clarification tips:

• All infrastructure built in chapter 3 is lost at the start of 4. Whatever you build in 3 has no bearing over what you'll have in the next chapter.
  
• Same goes for armies and navies.
  
• Chapter 4 starts at approx 1780, it is intended to be a much shorter "grand campaign" game.

further clarification provided by Zim.

[Alsn]

Just a quick clarification. To play as the thirteen colonies you need to complete chapters 1 through 3 in the "Road to Independence" campaign. The fourth chapter is a clone of the grand campaign except you can't choose which nation to play and instead get to play as the thirteen colonies.

[Zim]

The United States have an interesting mix of advantages and disadvantages. They start off with an ocean between them and the core territories of any of the major nations, a couple of weak minor faction neighbors, and a lot of provinces. However, many of those provinces are sparsely inhabited and poorly developed. The large, easily affordable armies from the RTI campaign are gone, and maintaining a couple of decent stacks will be a challenge. They also have victory conditions requiring them to gain North American provinces from Great Britain, Spain, and France.

The first thing I did was set my one school to research a military technology, queue up some troops (Boston and Philadelphia are the best recruiting centers), and hunt for trade routes and allies. I was able to set up a trade route to India without much trouble, and an alliance with the United Provinces.

In my game Spain declared war on the Cherokee. I would suggest beating them to it. You have one smallish army in the southern colonies that can be bulked up enough to take both Cherokee provinces in a couple turns. I sieged their capital and let them attack me. The free garrison units they get for sieges don't have a ranged attack, and even militia can shoot them up pretty badly before they reach for melee, provided they are not outnumbered.

The Iroquois would be my next target, and in my game they attacked me. Nathaniel Green has a smallish army in the north that can be used as a core for an army. I'd suggest not overstretching and counting on militia or skirmishers to hold a line against a larger army of Native American troops. I learned the hard way.

England constantly harassed me for Maine, trying to trade techs for it (and one time trying to trade Gibraltar ). I'm not sure what the best way to deal with that is, other than praying they don't attack you for refusing too many times...

[Feanaro]

If I might offer a few tips for the final stage of the Road to Independence campaign, go north before you go south. Otherwise, the British will constantly annoy you with stacks and small raiding parties. If you can take Montreal and Quebec, that will cripple their fighting ability in the north. They send the odd group towards Quebec but it's easy to slap a fort down on the mountain pass to the east. They don't seem to care about going over the mountains.

It helps if you can cripple the Brit's navy. Then you can pirate their trade routes and trade with other countries unmolested. This will give you the economic power to smash GB. Otherwise, many of those trade routes go to waste due to piracy.

The Indians will declare war on you eventually. Nothing you can do about it... except convert them to Christianity! It makes occupying cities easier and gives them plenty of domestic troubles. So don't be afraid to build a few churches.

I'll give the main campaign a go soon.

[Maladin]

Feanaro is right. The North is easy picking if well prepared and it will make you roll in money. After a few turns, I could continuously spam eight Line Infantries per turn from Boston and Québec and still start the turn with over ten thousands gold. And all that with only one trade agreement with France and one trade port blockaded.

A little tip: dragoons are your best friends. Since you are protestant like the British, there will not be much unrest. I often assaulted a town, removed the conquering army towards new targets and secured the town with two dragons. Maybe even only one is necessary. God I love those guys.

[Warhammer3025]

I usually swipe british land in the north during my initial war with the huron (GB will honor alliance). Since their colonial possessions are underdefended its easy pickings if you move fast enough. After i secure the north, by killing the huron and jacking all the GB lands except for the northernmost 2 i peace out and try to finagle out some tech.

Money comes tough in the early game. Is there anyway to establish trade routes in the first war or should i juts ground my fleet in port til i can build up a credible navy for a later push when i'm more developed?

It really sucks how everyone else has a massive tech edge over you. What i end up doing alot is trading away land for tech then backstabbing later while the AI is spread thin. I did this to both GB (Maine) and Spain (Cherokee lands and Georgia) for a net 3-4 techs.

[Graphic]

I don't want to break my alliances with France and Spain so I'd rather buy territory like the adviser suggests at the start of the campaign. But it's never enough. I just offered Spain almost 18,000 for Florida and was rejected outright. What's the deal here?

Update: 38,000 refused for Lower Louisiana.

:/

[oz_wwjd]

By the time I had built up my army enough to take out the Cherokee,they had taken Florida from Spain,so I never had to deal with that ugly situation,in fact I had "friendly"realtions with also everone,bar GB and was forging a mini-United Nations of alliances,so if GB did go to war with me, I could call in everyone against them..

[Fwapper]

The achievement for finishing the RTI campaign seems to be bugged, but there is a solution here.

[Kulgan]

The 13 colonies played with the latest patch ( the number is 1.02? )

The first two chapters are hardly worth mentionning if you have any experience playing ETW, or any total war games at all for that matter. Just build a few units, attack whatever target is givven to you and fight the battle. Auto resolve if you want, to take the last city in chapter II simply go by sea while the french army is stuck on the landbridge. Really this is only a warm up!

Chapter III is a tiny bit of a challenge however. You start with a small army ( be sure to win Bunker hill - again this is not impossible ) and only one city. Disband the fleet, don't upgrade anything that can get raided by enemy troops. Now the key to victory is still the same : attack England fast and attack the north first! First or second turn shoud give you the region above your capital and before the 5th you should get the next region north of that one. This will both cripple the UK economically and double up your income. Now you have to build two armies, one to fend off the ever invading english to the south and the other one that goes north and takes all the UK possesions in nowadays Canada. Be sure to keep attacking the enemies raiding small stacks with your larger forces. In the beginning minutemen are great. They provide a lot of firepower! don't get them to do melee though.

Once you get fire by rank minutemen probably loose their efficiency but by that time you would have or won the game or have several units of experienced minutemen which still have their usage on any battlefield. Fire by rank gives rank and file infantry even more firepower ( on paper it's the same but not when you are actually doing battles ) and they're far superior in melee too.

Going north takes away half the english forces and gives you enough cash to invade the south with a stack or even two stacks sometimes.

Once you are getting the upperhand you will get in touch with the various indians who will attack you. Now you can take them out and take their regions, but this will only get you in touch with the next tribe and make you want to take out those as well. Before you know it you're approaching the pacific killing every indian tribe in sight while your objective is south carolina. Right. So if you want the short cut to Chapter III :

Blitz the small towns above your starting region ( fast!! )

Go North and take Canada

Ignore indians ( defend against their raiders with small stacks, or preemptive strike their towns and then withdraw again )

Then turn south, once you take Philadelphia the english are down to militia and indian side forces.
Continue south and you're done.

Chapter IV

Now this is really just the grand campaign. The one cool thing about it is that you start way later with several technologies already in place. I found this great since I hated waiting to fight battles untill I had second level bayonets, having to press end turn 50 times before you had a proper army ( line infantry with fire by rank, horse artillery, heavy cavalry, specialist light infantry... ) that is actually fun to fight with.

Iroquois and cherokee will attack you. So be prepared. In my game they attacked me very early when I build no forces ( even disbanded the light infantry and some others ). In my second game they attacked me about 5-6 turns into the game. This time I also abandoned some initial forces but replaced them with better ones ( longriflemen, more on this later )

Trade is the key to making good money as always. First order of business: build a trade port and start building indiamen wherever possbile. Send trading, first ships go to madagascar and ivory coast... it's the same as for any trading nation in any grand campaign. I will not elaborate on this here.

First buildings are also the same in any campaign:

1 - farms have priority -growth is good always
2 - lower levels have priority - better procentual revenues from lower level buildings
3 - you don't need pleasure palaces etc - abandon and build schools/money buildings
4 - seminars are also not needed. I prefer money buildings but this is a personal preference.

Get trade agreements with the european/indian major powers. what's nice here is that you won't be invading europe/india anytime soon so these trade partners will last really long. Don't take on alliances with foreign powers, you simply conquer the US for you.

Combat

The US has longriflemen way before any other nation has acces to them, which is great! Longriflemen are not spoken off much in these fora while I find them to rule the battlefield with grace. Some observations:

- Their long range and accuracy make them perfect cavalry killers. Use two/threeunits to approach an enemy unit of cavalry, fire off two volleys ( cavalry usually won't move fast enough ) and they're dead and routing without you even taking a single casualty.

- Their long range gives you the initiative. Start firing at their battle line and they are forced to move, where you can exploit their need to act.

- Protect them at all costs! they are too expensive to die, line infantry is here to take casualties. If the enemy moves their ranged forces toward your longriflemen simply withdraw them to behind your line. this way if the enemy still wants to enange your longriflemen you can have your line infantry unleash upon them. combined fire of a line infantry and a longriflem will kill/rout any unit in no time.

- Handy to have your cavalry reserve close to the longriflemen, in case their cavalry makes a massive charge. Also the general's unit makes a fine back up in this role. Ususally the longriflemen can do just fine, but just in case.

- If used the way described above, your longriflemen will quickly become experienced which is always nice :)

- I fought several battles with a stack containing about 4-6 longriflemen and they take almoast no casualties, they kill up to 60-100 enemies per battle ( givven the enemy lasts long enough )

- Using them in force is the key. right now I use two squads of 3 longriflemen each. This volume of fire seems to be right enough to rout enemy units with a single or two volleys which you always get due to range superiority.

- Other cool benefits which are actually not even needed to make them a good unit : cover in woods and plant stakes. These speak for themselves but I hardly use these abilities, plain old shooting the enemy works wonders.



I hope this helped the reader somehow and wish to thank you for reading my article. Also since I'm not a native speaker I would apreciate any tips/do's/don't concerning the language which was used.


Kulgan

[Bilgediver]

I agree about long rifelmen. What I did was focus Nathaniel Green's army south and kept him in the carolinas, so that he was my "buffer" against Spain and the cherokee early on, then I spammed line infantry and a few rifleman and focused North/East. I upgraded my dockyard early on so that I could bring out some second rates (two second rates with a few frigates and I didn't worry about the Brit Navy at all), by doing that, I was able to keep the Brits from blockading Boston/New York (which they seemed to LOVE to do). Having played unsuccessfuly once before, I knew the Brits are your biggest worry, so i immediately went North/East, and took out the Canadian Provinces within a few turns of each other. The problem was that Fighting the British meant declaring war on the Iriquois as well, so I had to start moving to take them out as well (they were my 2nd major conquest). Apparently knocking out the British's main provinces knocked out their money because they never garrisoned any more troops in their northern and eastern most provinces, so just a few colonial infantry and they were easy pickings.

The Spanish and the Cherokee had a spat, so the Cherokee took Florida, and I immediately captured Florida from the Cherokee (so I could keep my trading rights with Spain, love it!). What I used as my "indian" attacking army is a party of 3 howitzers and the rest long rifleman (the only gunpowder units that do well against bowmen). howitzers with explosive shell and long rifleman and they rout like crazy.

So its 1800 already, I own every territory east of the Mississippi (including the northern Canada ones), and probably going to continue East to conquer from "sea to shining sea"

Then maybe move against the Caribbean (but for hecks sake, I might decide to land a raiding party in the UK!)