Recently I found a "bug". For some reason Peter Minuit wasn't available during the early part of the game. Due to bad luck I was always presented with other economic Founding Fathers. This was very frustrating to me so I decided to fix this for future games.

Open the file "NAMES.TXT" and scroll all the way down to the Founding Father part. There you will see the list of the 25 Founding Fathers. Each has 4 numbers. In Peter Minuit's line, change the 4th number from 0 to 1. This will give you the option of recruiting him in the later part of the game. You may want to do the same with Henry Hudson.

But why would anyone want to get Peter Minuit later in the game rather than early on? Once you add him to your Continental Congress the natives don't charge for their land. I would prefer getting him and Benjamin Franklin as soon as possible after beginning a new game.

You would indeed want him early but in v3.0 you can no longer use [ESC] if you don't like the Founding Fathers available.

In all the years I have played Colonization (and I've played hundreds if not thousands of games), I never knew I could use [ESC] if I did not like the Founding Fathers that were randomly offered. I always just picked one of those that was offered. You learn something every day.

I second that. Can't believe it actually, will have to install the game and try it ;)

It´s clearly described in the readme.txt of the version 3 patch for Colonization:
"
8. Escaping from the Founding Father's screen will no
longer bring up different choices.
"