This is probably going to be an ongoing topic. I'm playing this for the first time, some things aren't making sense to me.

First, how do crosses and liberty bells work? They don't seem to accumulate like resources do. For awhile, my first town had one liberty bell. Then when the game warned me that my town was getting inefficient and I needed more "sons of liberty," I put a free colonist in the town house. Now I have four liberty bells, but my SOL count hasn't changed. I built a printing press too, but the liberty bell count didn't change, and neither did the SOL count. A few turns later, and this hasn't changed, and my food reserves are dwindling due to inefficiency.

Similarly with crosses, are these a non-cumulative thing? It just looks to me like more churches + more preachers = more crosses. And it's not really clear to me what crosses do. The game and manual tell me that this encourages emigration, but it's not clear to me what the relation is. Colonists just seem to appear at the docks of London when they do.

Also, how does teaching work? I put an expert fisherman in the schoolhouse, and after several turns, a free colonist who was fishing became an expert too. But that seems to happen over time anyway. Does having a teacher accelerate this process, and if so, how can I tell by how much? I had multiple free colonists fishing, they had been fishing constantly since I assigned an expert as a teacher, and they didn't graduate all at once.

Why do some ocean squares (without fisheries) produce less food than others? Some are producing 3 food, some producing 1.

On a related note, when you select a profession, some resources are displayed as two numbers. For instance, on the ocean squares producing 1 fish, it says "1/3 food" on the fisherman profession. I get that the left number refers to how many resources I actually get, but what does the right number mean? And what causes them to be different?

Liberty bells ARE produced like any other resource, by the town hall later replaced by ....can't remember. The corresponding bonus Person is the statesman, dressed in red and hard to come by.

What is different is, it is a resource combined with another factor, your town population.
Let's assume you reached 50% sons of liberty with a population of 10. Now you ADD one person INTO town (so not standing in front of the gates but IN town. This means that you now have only 45,45% sons of liberty (5 / 11). Any new person drops the sons of liberty by one. And FYI for certain percentages you get bonuses of production. IIRC 50% and 100%. WORTHWHILE!

Crosses, different story, produced as described above, but with priests. Main use, each turn you have enough crosses you get a settler in Europe free of charge. One of the overviews you can see how many crosses you have and how many more you need. And even if you only have part of the crosses, makes settlers on the bay, not out of the 'sub-menus' cheaper (so buying before full crosses, but price WILL increase every time you use) ;)

Teachers: Teachers do REALLY speed up this process. And some professions can only be taught with teaches, check in game encyclopedia.

Ocean squares, see above (IIRC right-click or shift right click) will bring you to the corresponding page of each field, you WILL need this anyway fr getting info about the wooded hexes and their underlying terrain ;)
Or go to the encyclopedia and see terrain ;)

Not sure what you mean? Only thing I can think off, is untrained against trained profession. If you put an untrained person onto a job, this person will produce less than a trained person.

the bells/crosses are gained in the shown amounts each turn
SOL % builds up slowly. Every x amount of bells = 1% increase, (in addition to going to founding fathers)
note: adding new colonists (even ones gained by food hiting max storage)
will lower your SOL % since all "new" colonists are assumed to be lowal to the crown

about the ocen square production, the values i think are set
2 food normal
4 food for a corner (land on 2 sides of ocean square)
and however many for fishery

the last item you mentioned is kinda an efficiency check
if i recall correctly to show if the sapce you were using is good for that profession
its displayed as what you get on the current space/highest earning space

Thanks! Some observations, and further questions,

The relation between liberty bells, rebel%, and SOLs is still confusing. It seems that SOL count is simply determined by rebel% of the town, multiplied by the population, rounding to the nearest integer (rounding down on n+0.5). But if rebel% drives the SOL count, then adding a new colonist isn't as simple as just adding another tory, because that would mean recursive logic. Also, I tried removing colonists from my capital until there were nine left. My rebel% was exactly 50%, with 4 SOLs. I added one back, he became an SOL, and my rebel% decreased to 46%, even though the SOL count increased from 4/9 to 5/10. So it looks like adding new colonists decreases the rebel% by an unknown and rather complicated formula, and removing them increases it by the reverse formula.

Also, am I correct to assume that liberty bells drive the rebel% in the town where they are produced, and nowhere else? And that this effect is cumulative (either that, or each liberty bell increases rebel% by a fraction of a percent)? Do "cargo parties" increase rebel% just at the town where they happen, or everywhere? If I start a new town with a flood of immigrants, and it hits the Tory limit pretty quickly, is the best solution to send them an elder statesman and wait for the SOL count to increase?

Why are crosses a waste of time? The game would have me believe that after nationally accumulating a certain number, I get a free immigrant, and you didn't say otherwise. Is that inaccurate? If not, why is that a bad thing? I'm not sure what you mean when you say they are detrimental to immigration.

Ocean production is kind of confusing, and the Colonizopedia seems to be completely wrong. Basic ocean gets two food, not four, and expert fishermen get +2, not +3. And rivers and coasts seem to work completely differently from how the colonizopedia claims.

This is what *seems* to be the rules:
Base food: 2 (4 for experts)
Bordered by two or more land squares: +2
Minor river: +1
Major river: +2
Fishery: +3 (+6 for experts)

Fisheries can have coasts, but not rivers. So the best square for fish is a fishery with two coasts. Nonexperts get 2+2+3 = 7. Experts get 4+2+6 = 12.

On coasts, having one coast seems to do nothing, and having three or four coasts seems to yield the same as two. It's also not clear what counts as a coast. For example, one square is bordered by mountains, forest, ocean, and ocean, but it only yields 2 food, so it appears that mountains don't count as coasts.

Some other questions -

What do missionaries do, exactly? I moved some expert missionaries into a nearby camp, but nothing has happened for ages, except that there's a cross icon near the camp. I know this is supposed to recruit Indians, but so far that hasn't happened, and I'm not sure if there was something else I was supposed to do. I'm also not sure if I want Indians if they can't be trained.

Some Dutch and Spanish military units moved onto my turf. They're blocking my pioneers. Can I ask them to move? Or do I have to show them the business end of some artillery (which I'll have to buy)?

I built some colonies near silver deposits while the price was 19 per unit. I haven't gotten around to doing serious mining yet, but the price has already dropped to a pathetic 3. Even cotton is worth more than that. What drives this? Is it random? Have foreign colonies been flooding the market? Silver prices shouldn't be this volatile!

I might be able to answer the natives&missionary one, and hopefully someone can corroborate/correct me. When a missionary establishes a mission in a village it gives a big relationship boost, which can help you get natives that volunteer to work for you. Other than that the missionaries can also incite the Indians to attack/hate other colonial powers.

The Indian converts that come to work for you can't be educated no, but they are very good at outdoor jobs. Better than a free colonists, but worse than an expert&farmers. And there is a religious founding father, Bartolome de las Casas, that will turn all your current Indian converts into free colonists.

Here is a simple way to look at it. Every new colonist starts as a tory. It takes a certain (fixed) amount of liberty bells to convert a colonist who works in a colony to a rebel. Bringing a fresh colonist from Europe to a colony reduces average rebel sentiment (because the new guy is a tory and there were no liberty bells spent on him yet), while having colonists work as statesmen accelerates the conversion to rebels, because more bells are produced per turn. Crosses are not a waste of time, in fact it is possible to have a sensible strategy organized around migration from Europe. However, every new migrant takes an ever increasing amount of crosses to bring, so eventually the rate of migration stalls. However, increasing the production of crosses is completely optional, as there are many other ways to increase the population. Missionaries establish missions in Indian villages. This results in less hostility and free Indian converts. For best results either Jesuit missionaries or petty criminals (who can be converted to missionaries in Europe or in a town with a cathedral) should be used. It can take many turns before converts pop up. I think it's best to establish missions either in the capitals or in nearby villages. If I remember right it is possible to request this during negotiations with their leaders. But in general they will be a source of constant annoyance, so one should have plenty of dragoons and simply declare a war and capture such units. Declaring quick wars and making peace is not that infrequent in this game. The price of all goods is affected by the amount sold vs amount purchased. Prices may fluctuate randomly and recover slowly, but in general one should try to diversify production. It is possible to flood the market completely like in this case with silver. So one should watch production levels of all goods to keep it balanced. The Dutch have an advantage here.

I've partly figured how rebel% works, by examining the save game file and doing some rigorous testing and regression analysis.

Each colony has an invisible number value that we'll call "B." Early on, this number is equal to the number of liberty bells ever generated at that particular colony. I don't know if other events can affect it or not. But let's call this value 'B'.

Rebel% = B/[number of colonists + n]

Unfortunately, I do not know how 'n' is determined. It does not seem to be affected by colony size. And if it's dependent on B, then my whole formula is messed up. For a new colony, it seems to be approximately 1. For the capital during my current game, on about 1634 AD, it's about 3.25.

So for instance, right now, Jamestown's B is 613, and it's n is about 3.25. The formula for rebel% is:
613/[C+3.25]

More colonists means more SOL, but less rebel%.

With 13 colonists, this gives rebel% of about 38%, or 5 SOLs rounding up.
Add a new colonist, and the rebel% shrinks to 36%, 5 SOLS.
Add another one, and the rebel% shrinks to 33.5%, 5 SOLS rounding down. But that leaves ten tories.


It is actually possible to lose an SOL by adding a new colonist, thanks to a quirk in how the game does rounding. For example, my Roanoke has a B value of 64, and an apparent n value of 1.66.

With nine colonists, the rebel% is:
64/[9+1.66] = 64/10.66 =~ 6

6% of nine is 0.54, which rounds up to 1 SOL.

If I add a tenth colonist, the rebel% is:
64/[10+1.66] = 64/11.66 =~ 5.49

Hypothetically, 5.49% of ten would be about 0.55, which should still round up to 1 SOL.
But that's not what happens. Before calculating SOLs, the rebel% rounds down to 5%. And 5% of ten is 0.5, which rounds down to zero. So I now have zero SOLs and ten tories, effectively losing an SOL.

Liberty sentiment:

I understand the feeling that if something is worth doing it is worth analyzing to death, but I don't think it's that important to get the formula down, for proper colony management at least. Having a high rebel sentiment for a particular colony (differently than for the whole soon to be nation, which can be a pain if you neglected it just until before the end game) is both easy in the medium run and extremely desirable, so trying to have just the right amount of rebels to stay below 10 tories or just to get above 50% for the bonuses should never be neccessary.

What I mean by this is that colonies which you intend to keep smallish (just for production of a particular good for example) should never need to worry about tory inefficiency, and a colony destined to be a big city should have colonists producing bells from early on, and will not have to worry about it at all. If you want to convert a production town into a big city, then the best way is to stop the production, get three statesmen and the newspaper there (paying if neccesary) and start churning out bells.

If you are really adamant about finding out how it works, take a look here:

https://tinyurl.com/wc2aaue
[edited on 2020-02-24 to fix the URL just in case someone was curious about it. The forum keeps breaking old posted URLs from time to time, and I knew it from other posts in the past]

Apparently, the basic formula is bells/(population+1), but I recall having conversations back in the day about bells having some "decay" over time. It's too freaking complicated for me to want to dig into it any more.

Crosses:

While maintaining a large production throught the game can be considered useless, having a moderate production early on can be very beneficial. The colonists you won't have to pay to get are worth the food/occupation limit that two or three preachers take up in your colonies.

Missionaries:

In addition to what the previous posts say, I have come to believe that the better relation you have with the natives, the faster the converts will appear. Even a tribe that does not like you will send a convert, but seldomly. Give them goods if they ask for them, try not to bargain so much that they will end the trade, and even if you get Minuit, try not to overextend into their territories.

One of the founding fathers, Juan de Sepulveda, will increase the conversion rate.

If you have a capital near one of your colonies, send a Jesuit missionary, trade with them often and keep military units as far away as you can. If you can, make a road between the capital and the colony, which will allow the natives to reach it faster to give you the converts.

The easiest way to get converts is with the Inca capital. You can also keep trading trade goods with them, which are only good for the earliest trades with any other native city, tobacco and tools, giving you enough gold to make a treasure hoard at the Viceroy's home. In exchange you can buy silver at ridiculously cheap prices without even bargaining, 50 gold per 100 units, meaning you can still sell in Europe at a profit even when the price drops to 1/2. All of this makes a South American strategy the best for novice players. At some point, you will have so many converts that you will want to create new colonies to take advantage of their production, or disband them in the latest stages of the game.

Silver:

Its price is the most volatile of all and will drop fastly even without you selling any. Having more than one colonist producing silver is almost useless (with the Dutch maybe two), and if you are getting it from the Incas, even one is too many.

Foreign military:

Unless you are ready to fight all the way to their colonies, fastly and without many casualties on your side, do not attack them. Especially don't attack with artillery, keep those for defense only or you will lose them eventually.

If you just want to improve the tiles they are standing on, get some gold together, send a scout to one of their colonies (or wait for them to contact you, but that could take a long time) and pay them off to leave. Make sure to occupy the tiles you want to improve quickly after that, because they will be back.

If your neighbors start to lounge next to your colonies with many units, you might want to trim their numbers a bit, but make sure to take the fight back to them; do not let them attack your colonies, even if you have good defenses set up. The loss of some petty criminal dragoons while attacking their colonies is acceptable, but the loss of production from enemy occupied squares or the occupation of one of your colonies is not. They might even send some of the captured colonists out of the city and you will have to hunt them down.

Pretty sure everyone gave you the answers you are looking for but a few other details...

Scouts can initiate a conversation with other Europeans by entering one of the colonies. If you have Franklin in your CC he will always get you a positive result.

Silver does not fluctuate at all, it only goes down and does so rapidly. Once crashed it will never recover naturally. The best bet if you plan on doing something with silver is to pack as much as possible in a galleon and sell all at once. Not always viable in a game of course.

Regarding crosses there are a number of reasons its a waste and ultimately a detriment. But before getting into it, you can play any way you like, I am not selling right or wrong here. There are a number of ways to win (in fact you have to try to lose on most difficulties) This is strictly a min/max kind of thing. So quickly... Crosses are not naturally produced requiring resources to get started and dedicated colonist time to build. Any production building upgrade will massively out weigh the benefit of crosses almost immediately (Cost to buy vs cost in cross). It also requires a colonist to generate crosses once established (barring the single from the building of course) taking a space better utilized to either generate cash to buy your own immigrant or produce the far more useful bells. The expert colonist is also expensive to get started, deepening the cost. Finally the staggering rate at which the requirement goes up invalidates a long term immigration strategy vs simply using that colonist to produce a cash generating product.

Colonists could do any number of things that would be better than crosses. You could stick one out in the wilderness in a 1-pop colony, creating a resource or making more bells. Or they could be in a growing town, making bells or building a college there. Either one would be more effective than the church. Kind of a shame because it's a good concept.