Manual in PDF format Download

Strategy Guide

Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Prima Lifestyles
ISBN: 0761510915

This guide includes maps, strategies, hints, tips, and walkthroughs.

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Imp 2

Manual in PDF format Download

Strategy Guide

Imperialism II: The Age of Exploration
Official Strategies & Secrets
The Official Guide for the Perplexed,
by Michael Rymaszewski with David Chong

Paperback, 263 pages
Publisher: Sybex
ISBN: 0782125549

This detailed guide reveals essential strategies and secrets for more than 40 unit types and 100 technologies from 300 years of history. Readers will learn the best techniques for beating each scenario, including the strategic use of pirates and spies. Written with the support of the game’s designers, this invaluable guide reveals secrets found nowhere else. If you want to get the most out of playing the game, this book is a must.

Reader comments
“Superb strategy guide. I’m one of those people who buys every strategy guide for every game I have worth playing. The guide for Imperialism II is one of the very best I’ve read. It contains very helpful advice on sound strategies covering each aspect of the game and has a very helpful section outlining research options. Highly recommended.”
“Best true strategy guide in some time. I was pleasantly surprised by the information content, analysis, and true strategic content in the strategy guide. At a time when few strategy guides for war and strategy games are worth buying, this is a strong exception.”

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Trade Empires

There was/is no official guide to Trade Empires — but Steve King has put together a comprehensive guide.

Download PDF.

This game has probably stolen more time from my life than any other game I’ve played. That is saying a lot considering that the other games I play often like pool, chess, etcetera, are, for me at least, very time consuming. Grades did suffer. I blame it (the game) that my grammar am bad, and my spelling is less then stellar.

This game has gotten (from what I’ve seen) zero recognition despite being a thoroughly well programmed game. This guide is basically meant to be one last nod, an epitaph perhaps, as it drifts into oblivion. As for the guide, a lot of the information can be found in the manual I think.

Some background information for first time players –

This game is meant to be played using the European scenarios, but you should probably do a random map on the introductory difficulty for your first game. The computer players are incompetent, to say the least, but they have a habit of ganging up on humans; new players, as a result of their slow start, are especially at risk.

The manual is your best crutch when you don’t know the game mechanics. If you don’t have yours, you’re screwed. My best advice is to expand the lumber mill early, as wood is used for EVERYTHING early on. Don’t be afraid to place bids for lumber instead of trees; two trees produce one lumber, so buying lumber will save you valuable shipping space. As an added bonus, this will improve your relations with other great powers. More on this later.

Here is the plan for building up a decent country.

1. Get an engineer to build a port or depot over in a big forest. Ports cost more, but get you wood faster as you don’t have to build connecting rail from your capital like you must do with depots. They also get you more food that will be valuable later one, though not so valuable now.

2. Expand all of your industries. I once thought that you should only expand the industries that your country is strong in, i.e. if your country has lots of timber you should concentrate on the lumber yard/furniture expansion, but the early expansions cost so little that it really is no trouble to expand them.

3. Expand the merchant marine/build a navy & trade. This is tough, because the cheap ship, the frigate, is worthless, yet it takes 5 guns to build the useful ship of the line. Not only that, but building them expends wood that you need for expanding the merchant marine. The navy takes precedence over the merchant marine, however your country will suck without an initial expansion of the merchant marine. Don’t bother selling commodities the first few turns; the price will get driven up due to low supply in a year or two. Two or so ship of the lines should keep other powers from gang-raping you before you’re on your feet.

4. Always expand labor. Period. Even if you have nothing for them to do, you should still be hiring new workers as well as training them. You should also recruit some regular soldiers and invade some nearby minor nation with resources that you need. This will familiarize yourself with the battle system and battle books while giving your army some needed experience and giving you control of a market (you have to take the capitol to control the market) so you can sell commodities you produce every turn.

Those are the only vital things that come to mind. Don’t be confused by the numbering; these can be done in any order. I’ve numbered it so I can quickly filter through it.

Don’t forget diplomacy, either. It is often much easier to build a trade consulate and grant subsidies to control a market rather than invading. Subsidies also let you buy raw materials, taking pressure off of your transportation network. Speaking of which, don’t worry too much about the network. It is easy to expand the network, and it isn’t under much pressure early on. In fact, don’t worry much about anything. Even if your workers have nothing to do because you didn’t import any raw materials, you will have plenty of time to catch up to the computer. Just worry about finding out the game mechanics.

Now, on with the real guide.

Trade Markets
This game is all about gaining control of trade markets. The best indicator of the strength of a great power is the number of trade markets they control. All attributes on the statistics screen such as military might, diplomatic strength, and even minor things like transportation either affect the number of trade markets one controls or are effected by the number of trade markets one controls.

There are basically two ways to control a trade market: declare war on and take the capital of a minor nation (I don’t think great power capitols will buy goods, though I tend to leave great powers standing as they may be future allies against the dominant great power later, so I wouldn’t know), or simply establish a trade consulate in a minor nation. Diplomacy is faster, although in my opinion somewhat less effective than the sword (just like in real life, but not).

There are advantages to both. The advantages and disadvantages of a military coup are rather extreme, so I’ll explain that first.
With a military takeover, you risk loosing troops, which isn’t a big deal, but you also loose respect among other minor nations, making them less likely to trade with you, which is a big deal. That is probably the biggest disadvantage to a hostile takeover, as being ostracized by the other minor nations kills you twice by forcing you to subsidize trade more to retain control of minor nation markets and by limiting your ability to sell finished goods to get money (yes, this is actually redundant, but I must emphasize this). Also, the markets you take by force will only buy goods at their starting rate i.e. 900 for furniture et cetera instead of the usually inflated price of goods. Taking a market by force takes time to do as well. It takes a couple turns to build the attacking force. The bare minimum attacking force (there can be quite a bit of variation) would be along the lines of two infantry, one light cavalry, one light artillery, and one heavy artillery since you start with it. This is quite a lot early on in terms of lost labor, and even this force needs experience to have a 50/50 chance against a minor nation capitol even at lower difficulty settings, and you will have to personally command them to keep them from loosing. Having extra light artillery works wonders, though.

The advantages of a hostile takeover are tremendous, however. Despite what I said about loosing trade, the hostile takeover is extremely cost effective. You put some money and resources up front for the takeover and building of depots, rail and transportation and you get the resources of the minor nations land permanently. Another great thing about taking a minor nation is that they develop factories. This is not obvious because no extra buildings develop in the town, but you will notice the change in the transportation screen. Since the factories don’t show up on the map, it makes the resource rich provinces less of a target to other great powers (humans only, of course). It is kind of funny when you ship in four or five units of furniture from a province just to sell it back to their original capitol. (It still buys goods after being taken. Very nice.) Obviously getting furniture for free is a lot better than having to pay for mere trees. Another big advantage that isn’t obvious until the end of the game is that you get the food of a province after you fight for it. It doesn’t seem like much, but I have kicked myself after getting a colony and realizing I didn’t have enough food to expand my work force. It pays in the end when you have 600 expert workers and are trying to build up masses of (un)trained workers in anticipation of new military technology. A cool incentive to military takeover is the fact that taking a minor nation’s capitol (either directly from the minor nation or from another great power) lets you recruit soldiers with a starting experience of 1 medal (out of four). This is nice at the end of the game when the turnover rate for soldiers is, to say the least, extreme.

Taking control of a minor nation by diplomacy is much easier and much faster. You simply establish a trade consulate and raise subsidies until you are the minor nation’s most favored trade partner. This is uberschnell, which is the claim to fame for this method of taking markets; one turn and five hundred dollars later, you have a market. Doing diplomacy, as opposed to military coups, keeps your relationships with other minor nations high, and also improves your diplomatic strength, which is important if you are trying to “steal” a council of governor victory early on, as diplomatic strength translates to minor nation votes. The relationship with the market you control will improve significantly due to your dominant trade status with them, allowing you to invite them into your empire as a colony. This gives you the guard troops of the former country, which can be obscenely large for the random worlds at higher difficulty settings. The first country to capitulate to you gives you two clipper ships as well.
The only disadvantage to a colony is you have to use up merchant marine and money to get the resources, but this is can also be an advantage if you are low on transportation. Merchant marine is cheaper than transportation in terms of resources early on anyway, so this isn’t a big deal.

Both methods have practically identical ends; you get to move troops through the provinces and get free resources. Because of this, it really doesn’t matter which way you take a country. Just make sure you get the capitol so you have a place to sell your finished goods. Also note that while there aren’t any critical disadvantages to diplomatic absorption of markets, there aren’t many incentives to diplomatic takeovers either. Two clippers’ Pathetic. I wish you could declare war on colonies.
A side note for both of these methods: You probably won’t be able to take over trade markets with your military in the higher difficulties in random worlds. You probably don’t want to anyway. You see, the brilliant strategy behind the computer’s declarations of war involves randomly selecting a trade market and declaring war on whoever controls it. If you control a bunch of markets, declarations of war will swamp you. This gets exacerbated by not having a lot of arms (which is common on higher difficulty levels). I’ve lost games because of it.

As for diplomacy, I often get a minor nation liking a rival great power and me. For some reason, they tend not to join either of us, and we have a form of dual ownership of the country. It is really cool to see, although it is kind of annoying when the other great power doesn’t develop the minor nations resources they control in a timely fashion.

Civilians & Specialists

What I used to do is build only one miner, one engineer, et cetera. This is stupid. Go all out and keep building these things even if there is only a slight demand for them. You can never go overboard with these guys since you can send them back into the work force. Once I had 30+ prospectors sweeping Africa for oil. I always have at least 5 to 10 foresters and ranchers for the European scenarios. If you have a large labor pool, hiring lots of them can’t hurt you, as their cost is practically nothing when compared to the cost of getting the expert laborer in the first place. Two paper is not that bad, and after your country gets underway, the money is chump change.

You have to balance your civilians with your labor, though. If you have civilians sitting around doing nothing and have a labor shortage, send them back into the labor pool, even if it is clear you will need them in the near future. An experienced worker makes 4 units of work a turn. In one turn, they can repay the paper cost for their recruiting. In two more turns, they can more than repay the monetary cost for their recruiting. Often I disband civilians only to rehire them a couple turns later. The experienced worker is often far more valuable than the specialist is. The perfect example of this is you have an engineer who can’t build a port because you are poor. Also, you have a labor shortage but can’t bring in a new worker because you can’t spare the shirt and chair. Just disband him. Building the new port wouldn’t help since you don’t have the labor to take advantage of the resources. The extra labor will accelerate your growth and ultimately let you get the port out quicker and have a stronger country for it.

Military strategy/tactics

You should get a good navy off the bat. Even if you have an unbeatable army, you will still lose wars because of crap navies. Every time I have lost this game it was because of my ignorant snubbing of navies. They take precedence over everything. Getting taken off the sea early on is brutal, and pumping arms into ships to increase your diplomatic strength is cheaper than making a land army. You should build whatever ship has the greatest range of the era. Later in the game you will need an army, but remember the navy comes first. There is no real strategy for navies. Usually naval wars are just an arms race with ships. Spread your ships everywhere. This lets you capture merchants from your opponents quickly even if you are forced into war. Instead of having to send your ships all the way over to the other country’s port to blockade, you can intercept next to the various ports they are trading with. If someone blockades your harbor, then do not send all your ships back home; the opponents grouped navy will destroy them. Blockade their harbor and they should send their navy in piecemeal against your grouped navy. If they don’t, you are at least even. If you get blockaded heavily, you may want to consider not offering goods or bids to save your merchant marine. Also, if one of the seas around one of your trade partners is heavily patrolled, don’t trade with them. You lose access to resources but save merchant marine. I know it’s obvious, but I find myself ignoring this all the time. For some reason I think that even though the last 5 shipments of wool or whatever have been sunk, maybe the next one will make it. That is a waste of ships. You have to know when to give it up.

One thing that is hard to deal with is having the ports that your engineers built become blockaded. Once again, I’d just blockade the other countries main port. That is more damaging than just losing some resources.

A problem with spreading out your ships is they get killed by groups of ships roaming about. This shouldn’t happen unless you are fighting the computer or are for some reason not blockading their harbor, though, so it isn’t an issue.

Another sea strategy is to keep your ships grouped at all times. You will generally not lose many ships because of their tremendous group firepower, but you will not be able to guard your resources as well or attack as quickly. If all you care about is keeping your ships alive, then you might want to keep them grouped, although the resources lost through blockades will probably outweigh the saved ships. Also, it takes forever to attack a port on the other side of the map from your ships.
If you haven’t noticed, tactics in land battle are pretty simple. However, strategies build around the tactics, so they are actually kind of important.

All of the units have a damage rate (ranged and melee), absorb rate (I personally think the value on the chart is misleading), movement rate, and most importantly, a priority level.

The damage rate is about the same for all units. Yes, this is a lie, but damage seems pretty irrelevant in my experience. The other factors are all more important.

The most important factor is priority. Because defending artillery gets extra range, the attackers must get hit before even being in range to hit enemies. Priority lets you send light cavalry (high priority) in front of cannon to draw fire from your light artillery (high priority, but not as high as light cavalry), which can then shoot up the opposing artillery unmolested. The big advantage to high priority armies is that they get to reinforce/attack before low priority armies. In other words, an army of 2 light cavalry and 3 light artillery can attack a province before the reinforcements of 6 heavy artillery arrive. The artillery will still reinforce, but it occurs in a different battle in which the light units are defending. From experience I can tell you that despite the superior numbers of the heavy artillery, they will get cut to pieces by the light cavalry alone. Remember, in fights, the defenders move first, so the cavalry and light artillery will run up and dice the slow units before they even fire a shot.

This leads to one of the few strategic elements of war in imperialism: DO NOT ATTACK WITH HEAVY INFANTRY/HEAVY ARTILLERY.

That’s it. Those units are great on defense, though, so do make some. The idea is to make death squads of light units so you can run rings around enemy units. With light units, you can attack a province before it is reinforced, which lets you not only have an easier battle taking the province but nets you loads of free kills on the reinforcements since your fast units move at the beginning of the battle. Heavy units with support from light units are more dynamic on offence, although I never find myself needing them.
Also, don’t take provinces you don’t need when attacking a great power. It just spreads your soldiers thin. The only times I ever take a province is to get much needed resources or to take control over a key province. Think Alsace/Lorraine; if you take a province that reduces your border size, you get more soldiers in each province. This also makes it cheaper to build forts. Speaking of which, don’t ignore the forts. They let you win battles you shouldn’t win. Build them on the border with great powers that you can’t invade and in your rich provinces on the sea. Eventually you will want them everywhere.

This information is pretty pathetic, and probably self evident, but hopefully I have got you thinking about army construction as opposed to mindlessly cranking off 20 heavy artillery.

A very effective trick once you have unlimited resources and some experience with the game is to build up units in anticipation of a technology upgrade. For example, the Bessemer converter lets you recruit and upgrade awesome sharpshooters and worthless scouts. If you build up 40 or so light infantry before the technology is introduced, you can upgrade them all on the turn that you get the technology while everyone else is recruiting them. You will get them one turn early! If you remember to declare war early, you can wreak havoc for one turn! The most effective upgrade is to level 3 artillery. If you are loaded on gas and arms, the upgrades will make your military invincible for a turn. I fought thirty or so battles once after pulling this trick with level three light artillery and won them all.

Alliances, public relations, and some economics

Be careful who you ally yourself with, as you don’t want to get dragged into a war. Good allies are countries that share borders with a country that is a threat. That way, if you get dragged into war, the dangerous border countries will be tied up fighting your allies. Prussia and Italy can gang up on France for example. Or France can ally with A-H if the Huns have a solid alliance with the Russians. An Italy-Turkey alliance blows.

Also, an alliance is worthless in my opinion if it isn’t put to use. Get a couple of nations together and beat down on the less popular, weaker nations. It kind of reminds me of high school. My favorite target is France.

You’ll notice that the computer players have different strategies. I Didn’t notice this until I started playing as Italy every game. Try playing as one of the wannabe Great Powers (Italy and the Ottoman Empire) and just watch the computer go at it. I think Britain is the best computer player; its diplomacy is awesome. If you’re playing against the computer, you should take their strategies into account when making alliances (i.e. ally with Britain fool!).

An alliance is usually built on good relations. To get these you need to trade with a great power. This means you’ll actually want to subsidize great powers. Normally a great power only sells crap like clothes. But if you put out a bid for steel for several turns, great powers will start offering you steel. These subsidies let you get first dibs on the steel, since once there is steel up for bid other great powers will want it. Also, if you are not a great power, like Italy, you shouldn’t act like one. Put your raw materials up for sale if you can’t process them. It gets you cash and improves relations. Subsidies I think help computer great powers buy from you. Alliances will naturally stem out of trade relations.

©Ed Randtke 2002
ed_randtke@hotmail.com if my strategies don’t work (very likely)