Fellow imperialists!

Since I have spent way too much time to find the perfect random map in Imperialism, I thought I could put my insights up for discussion.

First of all, let's set out the rules and consider what a perfect random map would be.

1. We will play at highest difficulty.

(Because, after all, we want the challenge.)

2. Our country must border another great power.

This is because the starting army on Nigh-on-Impossible (2 regulars, 1 artillery) is strong enough to capture enemy provinces that are undefended. If you manage to evade the enemy army, it will be possible to conquer the whole country except the capital with the starting army. Once you have a province that borders the enemy capital, the enemy army will retreat and leave the rest of the country open for conquest.

However, in order to avoid the enemy army, you need at least two provinces in range from your border (otherwise the enemy will concentrate his army in the only province through which you can attack).

If your capital borders the enemy country, the enemy might attack it if it only has Minutemen defending. This is good since four Minutemen can usually repulse an enemy attack and may allow you to capture his army off guard, destroying it in the field, which means that you will have to build much less units to capture his capital (see attached save game).

Practise to conquer provinces defended by 4 Minutemen with your starting army. It should be possible to win with your Regulars only receiving 1–3 hits from the Minutemen and your Artillery unscathed. This is important because you don't want to have to wait for your army to recover.

Since one neighbouring country can easily be conquered, their resources are likewise relevant for judging your country!

3. The country needs to be suitable for rapid town development. This is the most important aspect.

As others will tell you, town development is the crucial factor for success in this game. In essence, we need as many of our provinces to produce goods on their own as soon as possible.

Therefore: Do not trust people who count iron, coal and gold when they describe a map. Resource placement within provinces is crucial. In short: How many provinces will produce goods? How long does it take to connect the towns to the capital? This is much more important than availability of resources.

Since we need level 4 factories for raw materials and level 8 factories for goods and the starting resources are limited, we will focus on one type of factory to push to level 8 as soon as possible. The obvious choice for this is lumber, because:
• Cloth and Wool are not as likely to be concentrated within a single province as forests and scrubs are, they tend to be spread all over your country.
• Lumber is essential for expanding factories, while cloth is not.
• Steel and Hardware are useful, but developing these resources requires miners and is slower.

Furthermore, we want to connect the towns as fast as possible, therefore we will use ports instead of railways.

Therefore, we want a map that has as many provinces with 4 or more forests/scrubs that have their capitals close to the coast or a river.

Furthermore, we want provinces that will be able to produce clothing once we upgrade to level 8 factories. Because we want this to happen before the Ranchers are available, we need provinces with either 4 fertile hills, 2 fertile hills and one plantation, or 2 plantations. Farmers will be able to upgrade plantations once cotton gin is available, usually within the first few turns.

Also, we want provinces that will produce steel and eventually hardware. These are provinces that have both coal and iron. Ideally, we want provinces that have 2 coal and 2 iron such that they can produce hardware before square set timbering becomes available. Also, ideally, these resources can be connected without having to wait for the technology that allows you to build through hills.

Generally, we also want provinces that have raw materials close to the towns, such that we need only one port to connect the town plus some resources.

So, for example, one of my favourite maps (Ambacks, green country) has the following provinces:

Dunmore: 4 forests: produce lumber+chair, town connectible by port
Dunlap: 3 forests, 4 scrubs: will produce lumber+chair, town connectible by port
Dunbar: 4 forests, 6 scrubs: will produce lumber+chair, town connectible by port
Dunham: 3 forests, 1 scrub, 1 coal, 1 iron (both in accessible mountains): will produce lumber+chair, steel (hardware w. square set timbering), town not connectible by port
Dundee: 2 fertile hills, 1 plantation, 1 coal, 2 iron (1 of which not in accessable mountain): will produce cloth (+clothing with cotton gin), steel (+ hardware with square set timbering), town connectible by port
Oban: 2 coal, 2 iron (1 of each accessible), 1 plantation, 1 fertile hill. Will produce cloth (+clothing with feed grassses), steel+hardware (before square set timbering).
Brigadune: 1 horse ranch, otherwise useless province.

Furthemore, neighbour Kem also has some lovey bordering provinces, two of which are noteworthy:
Narvik: 2 forests, 1 coal, 2 iron, 1 fertile hills
Koryak: 4 iron, 1 coal, 1 gold. However town is surrounded by hills.

4. Capital placement

Since the province with the capital will not produce goods, select a province for the capital that does not take anything valuable away. Bonus if it borders the neighbouring country (see above), also bonus if it is connected to a lot of food (such that you won't have to import canned food), further bonus if it is somewhat close to those interesting province towns that can't be connected via ports.

5. Trade

As others have pointed out, it is much more efficient to buy Lumber, Steel and Fabric instead of coal, iron, timber, cotton and/or wool. There are two main reasons:

Clothing/Furniture/Hardware cost about 950, Steel/Lumber/Fabric about 330 and coal/iron/timber/wool/cotton about 110. Thus, turning 2 Steel/Lumber/Fabric to 1 Clothing/Furniture/Hardware yields about 290 added value, while turning 2 coal/iron/timber/wool/cotton to 1 Steel/Lumber/Fabric yields only about 110 added value.

If you buy Steel/Lumber/Fabric and sell Clothing/Furniture/Hardware, you will need less trade ship capacity, fewer workers and need to construct fewer factories in your capital to achieve the same thing.

5. Strategy

In the first turn:
• Declare war on your neighbouring country
• Move your army into a bordering province that borders two enemy provinces
• Move your engineer to a build a port next to a lumber province town.
• Buy a second Engineer
• Buy a second Indiaman
• Build a furniture factory, a clothing factory, and a metal work (do not bother about processing raw materials)

In the subsequent turns:
• Expand the furniture factory until level 4 (you can skip this once in the first three moves. But the furniture factory should be at level 4 when the first port is finished).
• Use 5-6 of your merchant capacity to buy Steel, Fabric and/or Lumber. Sell 2–3 of Clothing/Furniture/Hardware.
• Produce 1–3 of Clothing/Furniture/Hardware.
• Make enough profits to finance further ports. If you run out of money for ports, use the engineer to build railway links to the interesting towns that cannot be connected via ports. Do not bother about connecting resources, only towns. Ideally, this also connects some resources.
• Whenever your workforce is idle, upgrade workers.

# next steps:
• In the turn the railway station is upgraded the first time, expand the furniture factory to level 8.
• Build a miner and develop those provinces that will produce steel+hardware.
• Expand the metalworks to level 4 in the same turn the town and 2 mines (iron+coal) will be completed, and to level 8 in order to get hardware once 2iron+2coal are developed.
• Build a lumber mill and a steel mill once you receive timber and/or iron+coal. Use the lumber mill to produce paper.
• Build a farmer and develop those provinces that will produce fabric+clothing.
• The textile mill is lowest priority and usually not worth the effort. I often don't even build it until 1830. If you have good provinces, the fabric that is produced in the towns will suffice. However, make sure to upgrade the Clothing Factory in time.
• Do not bother about trade missions.
• Once you get furniture from your provinces, shift production to arms instead of hardware.
• Build a ship-of-line and blockade your enemy capital; capturing ships is more efficient than building them yourself.

# general economic strategy
• everything is scarce and every resource should always be used.
• You should be almost in shortage of everything. If you have an abundance of anything, this means that you have mad a mistake in the past moves.

For a newbie player, I'd suggest the map called Key, and play as Deneb (yellow).

You don't have a neighbouring Major Nation. Instead, you share a continent with 5 minor nations. Declare war on all of those on turn 1 so that your rivals can't get their claws into them. Conquer them at leisure - but avoid alliances until you control your continent.

It will take a little longer to develop the nation, as there are a few land-locked provinces which make railroads a necessity. Having said that, 5 MNs means 5 capitals, granting 5 depots, ports and L1 forts saving you $50,000 on developing your nation.

There are several provinces with 2 iron and 2 coal for early steel industrialisation, several provinces with plenty of wood and more than a few provinces with good wool/cotton supplies.


Indeed, I would go as far as to say that 'Key' is a great tool for teaching the power of industrialisation.



One other thing, I recommend defending all coastal provinces with 1-2 Heavy Artillery and Forts as soon as possible. This will be more than sufficient top beat off weak attacks by any AIs that take offence to you.

Thanks for sharing your strategy it will be useful for me as I very rarely win a game, so I am testing it.

So at the beginning of the game in addition to my basic army I add 4 heavy artillery I take pleasure in capturing the provinces, then when my troops in my army have earned at least two experience medals there I can capture the Capitals of the Small Countries.

So for the moment everything is going well, I have captured 3 Capitals and not the whole continent, why is that? for several reasons:

-I need to increase the strength of my army for possible invasions

- I am afraid that if I capture too many small countries, the AI will declare war on me as I would be potentially "too powerful".

- Even with three engineers it takes a long time to connect the whole country by rail, which slows down my economy, and I don't even talk about the problems of transporting my troops, like I have to go through all the provinces one by one.

I just hope that this time I will be able to defend my country properly in case of an invasion, which I usually fail at.

Hope it's going well for you.

My first play through of Key, I did get dragged into a world war around the time I conquered the entire continent (me vs. everyone!), did get invaded a few times due to not having expanded my defences and having too low a level of steel/weapons production but I still managed to invade Kem (red) and conquer most of that continent (as well as regaining all of my starting continent) by the time peace was declared.

I certainly encourage experimentation with units to find out what works well. My current preference for the opening phases of the game is to convert the starting apprentices (grey civilians) to light cavalry and the journeymen (light blue) to light artillery. I find that light cavalry, by moving first, can be used to trigger any defensive artillery units - and seem to take little damage in the process. I then swarm the enemy with my light artillery units (which are capable of moving and firing) before the enemy can fire at something more valuable.

As you can see from the attached screenshots, I'm now in the end phase. I won't quite say more materials than I need, but I do have a very comfortable surplus.

Well played you master the game, if only I had your talent, well, I lost two more games.

I set as a strategy to conquer two whole Minor Nations, which I did without too many problems and I had about 19 provinces.

I had as so-called "allies" three Great Powers, I was at the top of the ranking in terms of Military Force, but I obviously didn't have enough men to protect my most important provinces, i.e. the ones with ore and some that border the sea.

I had generally as defense for my provinces Infantry: two to three "Regulars" and a Heavy Artillery.

And of course this dear AI that I love, started to declare war on me because I wanted to defend a Minor Nation.

At the beginning everything was fine, the AI didn't dare to make a bridgehead because of my defenses, but it ended up finding an undefended province

Anyway, two Great Powers ended up capturing two important provinces and brought their little buddies there the next turn, making those two provinces uncapturable.

And anyway my Capital's defense was limited to three unfortunate Heavy Artilleries... so I was good to quit and start a new game.


I'm going to try another strategy that I hadn't tested yet, and that I had read on the official guide or on another topic :

Have a maximum of arms in my warehouse and thus a maximum of unskilled and skilled workers available, and create your army only when the AI declares war on you.

I think in this way to calm down a little the warlike ardors of the AI.