Am I the only one who think Spain is the most fun, rewarding and probably easiest country to play with? (I always play on the two highest settings) Play very agressive, kill all the indians and buy one army early for defence/attacking other countries and one army that wipes out all the indians on the entire map while earning you so much money that you will never have to sell or trade anything until endgame? Just don't seem common to play the game my way :p

I don't think I played Spain much in any Col game I played (have played original, freecol and civ4col). Holland is porbably my favorite due to bigger ship at start and more stable market prices. I tend to try to coexist peacefully with indians as long as they're not in my way or force my hand. I don't tend to be as forgiving toward other europeans thought and I raid their shipping as much as possible and take any colony I can.

Can I begin by saying I love you for posting in this forum?

Generally speaking you can mop up the game with whatever you choose. If your play style leans to militaristic, Spain is certainly the better of the three. And I say three as there really is only a competition for second place. The Dutch are hands down, far and away, the best nation to play with. But thats a min/max point thing speaking. As mentioned, any nation can be lead to victory, so much the better if they match your style.

Personally I like the Dutch most due t the larger ship, forget about the market stability. I find that a huge advantage. Followed by the French because I like the blue hue. My least favorite is the English as I find them somewhat boring, dont know why specifically.

When playing the Spanish, I do find them most dependent on the Continental Congress of all the nations. Getting Cortez is just about a must to make Native culling worth it. And no combination of style and nations get more benefit out of Washington, but you can do without him.

England was always my favorite. Loads and loads of settlers to fill my many cities, that's the way I liked to go. I loved building a massive colonial empire, even when it always became unwieldy and annoying at the end. War? That was for the other guys.

Heh...I always liked France best. I made a fortune trading tobacco and other goods to the friendly natives. Give me a native capital near a tobacco-producing colony and I'm all set!

I also liked England, but didn't care much for Holland and I didn't like Spain at all.

In my youth I used to play as France because of their hardy pioneer on any difficulty which considerably speed up colony building, but as I became better at the game and began to play almost exclusively for high score, I switched to the Dutch because they're the best nation to crank up high scores. I almost never played as England or Spain.

Oh yeah, the hardy pioneer too!

I don't like to fight the inidians if I don't have to, so I usually play more often with any country but Spain. And I'm Spanish.. :P

I always felt the hardy pioneer that early slowed me down. I usually used him to make improvements instead of found a second colony which normally resulted in a slower start. Although the early 100 tools is nice.

All nations starts with a pioneer. It's just that France's pioneer is an hardy one and works twice as fast.

It's quite interesting to hear about founding two city with your two colonists, typically I put all my colonists in the same city until I get happiness issues, then I found the second one. But now that I think about it, the city square produce resources and food to support one colonist, so you can get both of your colonists to produce resources too, and you get double gifts from the natives, all of which makes recruiting the next colonists much easier. It's a pretty good tip actually.

Yes, first thing I would do is plant a second colony. Just make sure it is also coastal so that your ship can bring back the raw goods from there as well. No hard and fast rules of course but it does result in quicker money generation.

As far as I remember my games with the original DOS version of Colonization there was a maximum number of colonists (255?) that could not be surpassed and meant that having more than a dozen cities was useless. Has that limit been lifted in the GOG version?

No. Its more than 255 I believe, I thought it was in the 300s. There is also a cap on colonies, something like 30 you can plant but can steal another 10 or so from the other Europeans. You can certainly exceed 12 colonies however and many Viceroy strats rely on it. Myself i like to go with 8-10 and keep it small, otherwise the end game management gets crazy.

I knew the limit on the number of colonies. It´s mentioned here too:
http://www.colonizationfans.com/strategy/faq.html#3

However due to the limit on colonists I never had more than a dozen colonies as I rather like to have those citiies with 3 colonists in all buildings using every square of city instead of lots of small cities with just a few colonists.

There are no limit on colonist, there's a limit on units, IE boats, soldiers, wagons, cannons, scouts, natives, and colonists that are outside a colony. Every colony can house up to 31 colonists, colonists that are in colonies are not considered units until you put them outside the stockade, so as long you can cram your colonists in your colonies, you can have more than thirty colonies with thirty colonists each if you want.

-edit-
In that one game I had 379 colonists
http://s123.photobucket.com/user/blueskirt_bucket/media/BestScoreEver.png.html
And the high score holder had over 650 skilled colonists.
http://www.colonization.biz/hi_score.htm