So, I've been playing the classic Colonization from GOG.com and really been enjoying the trip down memory lane. The game is tougher than I remember and really fleshed out details of creating consumer goods (raw materials to manufacturing to export) that some of the other Civ games of the era didn't get into.

As many probably already know the purpose of the game is to build up your colonies so that they can become self-sufficient and eventually defeat the Royal Expeditionary Force after declaring independence. Basically the REF is a huge force that is statistically superior to anything you can produce and therein lies the challenge of the game. You can spend a lot of time and energy on producing consumer goods to create income but at the end of the day the game is basically about industrialization, population, and access to timber and ore to produce weapons.

The thing is in the game you can settle anywhere in the Americas, not just in North America. You can have settlements in swamps and rainforests in South America. This is a really amazing idea for speculative fiction. What if during the American Revolution the rebellion had occurred in South America instead of North America?

North America basically resembles Europe in terms of its weather and terrain so the Redcoats knew how to fight in this terrain. But what if they had attempted to conduct warfare in the jungles of South America?

I'm living in a jungle setting right now and have ruins of Japanese fortifications to inspire me. Imagine trying to carry European artillery through jungles and swamps if you don't have aircraft and you don't have motor vehicles. Imperial Japan was able to get only a few artillery pieces to certain hill tops operating in the 20th century; if anything it would have been harder to accomplish anything like that in the 1700s.

In North America, you can still find historical guns from a hundred years ago. Here, they are exceedingly rare and none are in working condition. They flake away to nothing. The muskets of the day would have started to rust and deteriorate crazy fast in a jungle environment, especially after having been fired with black powder which is corrosive. I am not sure that even greasing the muskets with lard or suet would have been able to hold the amazing corrosion I witness at bay because even stuff I try to protect with 3-in-1 bubbles under the paint and rusts.

The European tactics which relied on line infantry projecting firepower and being supplemented by cavalry charges seems like it would have failed in jungle environment. Flanking parties would get tangled in the growth. Visibility would be very short range. Horses would not have safe places to gallop. These same issues came up in some Vietnam War memoirs, but it would have been worse in the blackpowder era which were more reliant on infantry being in perfect lines firing at the same target to be effective.

Humidity gets into everything. You sweat hard when walking through jungle to the point that your sweat drenches your clothes and soaks into your pack. I don't see how it would be possible to keep black powder dry especially for a guy wearing a felt coat and leggings.

Furthermore, since iodine tabs or chlorine tabs didn't exist, nor any way to prevent mosquito bites, the redcoats would be susceptible to various tropical diseases as they went inland and started drinking from the streams. Leptospirosis, dengue fever, and malaria to name a few. I expect there would be a lot of death and disability in an era when there was no effective medicine for these conditions. Also, considering the military rations (i.e. hard tack and lard) of the time didn't contain enough vitamins, I would also expect a lot more problems caused by illness compared to, say, what was seen in the Vietnam War in the 20th century where the military rations were superior.

And, of course, hypothetically there's be no reason that rebel colonists couldn't create some of the low-tech booby traps we associate with 'Nam, such as punji stakes, or they couldn't create some simple tunnel systems underground.

Thinking about all this, it makes you wonder how the Spanish were able to accomplish their military successes against the Aztecs, as these same factors would have been working against them historically. I guess they were lucky the Aztecs didn't behave like the Viet Cong.

The Spanish didn't have to travel through tropical forests for most of their way to the Aztec capital. A lot of the terrain there is dry as a bone.

Several disparate factors contributed to Cortez's victory over the Aztecs. In order of importance (my opinion, of course):

1) European diseases

2) Every neighbour of the Aztecs hated them and Cortez got thousands of allies to fight alongside his few hundred Spaniards

3) The Spaniards were quicker to understand the differences between their culture and that of the Mesoamericans' than the locals were

4) Superior Spanish technology

You are right about tropical rainforest being tough on the Europeans of the time. Both the Maya, dispersed kingdoms in Mesoamerican forests, and Amazon tribes with weapons like poison darts were devilishly difficult to defeat.

Isn't that the game where you can fund the American Revolution by wholesaling guns by the galleon back to the old world, and somehow it doesn't come back to bite you in the ass?

If the army of the mother country is unadapted to the conditions of the conflict, then the colonists would have been unadapted as well, and probably wouldn't have colonized that place.

Bear in mind that we saw specific this exercise, in the rebellion of the Spanish colonies of central and south America against the Spanish under Simon Bolivar. I visited several of the forts in Venezuela, and they looked pretty similar (albeit, shorter, because they were on mountains) to the ones I see in the US.

Also bear in mind that malaria was active in the US, and is believed to have played a major role in the war.

So in the end, I do agree that this would have had some positive impact for the colonists (as we see Bolivar won by a wider margin than Washington did, with fewer resources spent, although part of that is also the Spanish). But it would not have made as huge a difference as you perhaps suppose.

I do not understand how you can come to that conclusion. I mean that by dint of the colonist having colonised the place, the colonists are adapted to the local conditions. But the exp force to comes along would likely not be, unless they ship the force in from some place that is similar. For the English, that might not be very difficult. Afterall, at the height of her power, the sun doesn't set on the Empire.

It still hasn't, technically, but only thanks to Pitcairn Island.

What I mean is that if the colonists have the choice between nice farmlands similar to what they know and a dangerous jungle, they'll opt for the nice farmlands.
If they only have the dangerous jungle, the colonization attempt might simply not work at all.

Examples like Jamestown in Virginia contradict this assumption. It took several attempts, with warfare, annihilation of a tribe, abandonment of the colony and other troubles along the way until the colony took hold.

It never will as the British Empire no longer exists.

So, reflecting on Colonization, I think that the North America default map should have been a lot bigger. Your small colonies take up huge geographical areas. It would have made the game even more interesting if there were more expanse of land to explore and colonize.

How would the colonists adapt to water-borne disease, Malaria, malnutrition, equipment failure and so and and so forth in a way their countrymen cannot?

Also, Ronin seems to suffer from WAR! disease: Not all of South America is jungle, far from it. And the places which really looked like Ronin describes were unpopular with colonists for a good reason...just ask the Scots.