One of the few common complaints about the otherwise excellent Civilization series is that, unlike in most other turn based strategy games, every culture in the game has exactly the same advantages and disadvantages. In Civilization Revolution Firaxis responded to these complaints by giving different advantages to each of the 16 unique cultures. This feature makes the play experience different for each culture and subsequently each culture requires different strategies to succeed. The following tips will help you win Civilization Revolution when playing as the Americans.
Early Game – Your early game American strategy is often dependent on your luck of the draw with your starting Great Person. If it is a great builder, great humanitarian, or great leader, you have hit gold. A great builder is always useful and you can take advantage of the latter two by either focusing your city on growth or upgrading you units, respectively. If you get a great explorer, you will eventually want to make your starting city a gold city, but wait until your city is a little more robust. If you get a great scientist, the same is true except you will want to turn your starting city into a science city. If you get a Great Thinker, the only real reward you will get is a new Great Person will arrive in your civilization sooner than one usually does.
No matter what Great Person you have, you will want to build warriors and explore as quickly as possible. Your goal in this exploration is to discover natural terrain or to defeat barbarian cities. The first is assured to get you gold in your treasury and the second has a high probability of doing so. If you don’t get lucky in roughly the first 10 turns, have your starting city produce gold until you have at least 50 gold. This will allow you to take advantage of your gold interest and should start you towards the free settlers you get when you obtain 100 gold pieces. The jump start to free settlers should give you a leg up on other civilizations.
Mid Game – The American bonuses give your civilization a jumpstart on getting free settlers and jumpstart your infrastructure in another way as well. With this advantage, you should have a second city before most other civilizations. To best use this advantage and your medieval bonus, you should begin to build up your combat forces. Since rushing costs you half as much, you should easily be able to build armies, while your opponents are still relying on single units. If you have researched either legions or horsemen, use these armies to harass and possibly conquer a nearby civilization. If you have archers, instead use the armies to create roadblocks to the expansion of your opponents, thus making more room for you to expand. This will prove especially effective in the industrial era when your cities are rapidly growing due to your increased food production from plains.
End Game – Despite the significant bonuses Americans get in regards to gold, the easiest victory for Americans to obtain is a military victory. The modern era bonus for factories, combined with ½ cost rushing and the interest on gold reserves, makes Americans great at producing troops. If you are lucky enough to have a great leader, try to produce the majority of your offensive armies in whatever city that great leader settled in. Also, create spies. Between spies, bomber armies, and tank armies you should be able to easily conquer any of your neighbors. You only need to conquer the capitals to win, so also build fleets to strategically move your tanks around.
If a military victory seems out of reach, either due to aggressive civilizations like the Germans or well defended enemy capitals, a cultural victory is your next best choice. Use your massive production capabilities to build wonders quickly. You already have a slight advantage of starting with a Great Person and if that Great Person happened to be a great thinker, you probably started about two steps ahead of your opponents. Your military machine will still serve you by turning your cities into defensive super fortresses. So, as long as no enemy can conquer your cities, you simply need to churn out production and culture as fast as you can.
