Hello,

I try to improve my skills on Imp 1, in order to win a game and alas, as most certainly many players think, this is far from easy.

Here are my questions:

Military units and budget :

I create enough varied units: light artillery, foot soldiers, heavy artillery, and heavy cavalry, because once I made the mistake of doing only heavy artillery to protect each of my province (3 artillery in each province and I sent another one in reinforcement), but although in the first years the computer ended up abandoning each time (its units fled) it ended up conquering my provinces thanks to the Of his generals who forced his units to fight

So have you any advice/tactics to wich unit I can use effectively ?


I have a hard time managing my military budget, as I create a good pack of units, about 8 units in each province, with forts in each province, to protect me from an enemy invasion, (since the computer loves to invade countries badly armed and that I myself was eliminated every time ...) the latter increases so much that towards the end of the game it easily reaches the $ 3000 which is very difficult to manage.

My question, how to manage this budget, do you have any advice?

I feel that investing in minor countries with my investor is a waste of time and a waste of money.

Diplomacy :

On the other hand, as far as minor nations are concerned, is it worth the effort to invade them? Since the computer does it every time, I ask myself the question then certainly we can get our hands on gold and diamonds, but apart from that, what is the real interest of invading these minor countries?

Another question: I often receive a message from my minister, that I have lost my diplomatic advantage over another minor nation, I do not understand what this message means and how to solve this problem, By offering them commercial agreements and high percentage, I still get this message, anyone has an idea of the problem and if possible a solution please?

Thank you in advance,if any Imperialism 1 veteran can help me.

I thank you very much for taking the time to answer me, these tactics are very interesting, I will test them, thank you again.

Quick Note
There's trick to setting subsidies for trade policies. If hold down CTRL while setting subsidies, the game will automatically match the highest competing subsidy for that Minor nation.
That quick trick was put on this Board some time ago, but I couldn't find the post, so I reprinted it.
Saves time and frustration.

Ok I did not know this method, thank you very much for sharing.

Of wow, that's very useful to know. Played this game for years but never knew about that!

For military, if you have no qualms about abusing the AI and don't mind long, tedious fights that you'll eventually win, you can successfully attack forts without artillery as long as you have a sapper unit. Tunnel the sapper up the fort wall and blow up every wall segment. The AI will never send any unit out to kill the sapper.

It just takes a LONG time to cycle through all your units every turn to get the sapper one space closer every time.

For economy, the single most important thing you can do is set up your villages to produce finished goods. This is even more important than setting up rail lines to your capital. When choosing a start location, you want countries with territories that will produce 4 or more of a certain raw material (4 timber is usually the most common). That is the magic number that if you build a depot on/next to a village and expand your finished goods building (furniture factory for timber) to a certain size, it will start producing materials (lumber) and eventually manufactured goods (furniture) on its own without the need for labor or internal transport. It is HUGE and makes all the difference.

This means that you DON'T want your capital in such a territory because it won't get the village upgrade bonus. Stick your capital in a spot that gives you a lot of food instead. First priority is using your engineer to build depots next to villages with at least 4 raw materials of the same type in the territory, then expand the corresponding finished goods building. Only after that do you bother building a rail network to transport raw materials to your capital.

The warning sign that you need military is when the AI nations start making alliances. Build one ship of the line and that should make you good for a while. The goal is simply to never be last place on the military strength rating (status bar screen) because that poor sap is going to get dog piled. Eventually build a 2nd or even 3rd ship of the line to keep from falling to the bottom (sotl are the most efficient way to raise your military rating for this purpose).

You want to pick about two minor nations as your eventual targets for annexation and development. Pick the ones with the most mountains/hills because they're usually flush with gold and gems. Make sure you stay their most favored trade partner and buy all their stuff. As soon as you can afford it, build embassies there. Immediately offer a non-aggression pact to raise your relations. Offer each a $1000/turn grant. You should get a developer. Immediately buy up any improvable tile (wool/timber/cotton) and send out prospectors to search the hills/mountains and buy all that up. Get your workers to improve all these tiles.

Offer to join your empire as soon as they turn dark green on the relations screen. The annoying thing is they might refuse and say "the minor nation is too far under the sway of another great power for us to have any effect". I swear this is some bug because the nation is max relations, I was their most favored trading partner all game, AND I own every improvement in their country so how the hell is some other country blowing me out of the water for relations? If this happens your entire investment in that country is gone.

You should be making enough money by now to build forts in all your home territories (unfortunately it won't let you build forts on colonies) and start constructing a military to take on a major power. If you fight a major power, try attacking its colonies. This will draw out its army to a spot with no fort. Try to inflict as many losses as possible this way while blockading their home port. When the attacks on you die down, move your army to invade its home territories. These will all have forts so that's why it's good to soften up his army on unfortified colony spaces first.

Eventually you should be able to roll up all the major nations this way.

I admitted I never tested it, BUT:

If you develop everything and you do NOT buy up those goods as well, that might be the tripping point. Don't forget, if they can now sell like 20 of everything and you only buy like 8 of those, those other 12 goods might sway them away. IIRC most preferable trading partner is a mix of price and units, but for empire joining only the units count (as I said IIRC and see below ;) ).

But nevertheless, I think there is a bug as well ;)

As even with just stuff I needed (only) developed, I wasn't able to persuade them. And no other nation really owned anything.

Just my 2 cents ;)

It's great to see that the topic is still alive, I should write all these strategies and apply them because yes I am the type to launch myself in a game without following a general strategy and I struggle to set a strategy . x)

A big thank you to all of you for your advice.

You know, sometimes it is funny, you play a game for years, come to forums and still learn something new ;)

The good thing about strategy games is, that most do offer different ways to approach and not every idea/way is known or has been tried ;)

Like fahbs said with the Sapper unit, I completely forgotten that they existed :D (not part of my normal play-style)

The single factor that improved my game the most was learning how town development worked (villages begin producing goods on their own). It's counter intuitive as all hell. Your instinct is to build depots next to all the resources then connect them by rail to your capital. But the way town development works is you just build a depot next to or on a town in a province that WOULD produce at least 4 of a resource. So if there's at least 4 timber spaces in a territory, it will produce lumber and furniture as long as there's a depot next to the village (and the furniture factory is at a certain size). Or 2 timber spaces developed to level 1. You do not need to connect the resources; all that matters is the depot next to the village and your factory size (though you CAN connect the resources for even more materials). With steel, I'm not sure how it works exactly. You might need 2 iron + 2 coal or maybe just 4 iron or just 4 coal?

But anyway, concentrate on setting up that town development very first thing and watch your performance skyrocket.

(my mistake: the town produced goods still need internal transport, but you do not need rail, labor, raw materials, or factory space for them)