James Kuyper

There were about 60,000 non-native inhabitants of the Louisiana Purchase when it was purchased, half of them slaves. Most of them stayed where they were, and became a significant minority speaking a dialect of French in a contrary that was mostly English-speaking.

There's no need to change the game mechanics. We can already turn hammers into gold by reassigning Carpenters to do other work that turns a profit. If your lack of need for Hammers is a long-term thing, remove their profession and educate them in a more profitable one.

I've downloaded freecol-1.1.0-installer.jar, but I can't find anything that tells me what I should do with it to install the program. This shouldn't be a problem - I've downloaded and successfully installed several previous versions, but I cannot remember what I'm supposed to do, and none of the places I've thought of to check contain instructions.

You're right, the first two things you lose in combat are your horses and your muskets, in that order, but I'm fairly certain I've also seen units take damage by going through the list given for combat promotions, in the opposite order: Colonial Regular > Veteran > Free Colonist > Indentured Servant > Petty Criminal. I try to avoid sending non-military specialists into combat, so I've had fewer chances to notice, but I seem to recall seeing a non-military specialist lose his specialization due to...

I believe that it means that, with respect to missionary activity, Petty Criminal Missionaries become just as good a Jesuit Missionaries. Missionary work includes: Improving native's attitude toward your colonists, making them less likely to attack and more likely to give gifts, and more willing to trade. Generating Indian Converts. Providing information about what's going on in the vicinity of the mission. Denouncing missions of other countries as heretical. Inciting natives to attack other countries....

Frankly, I don't care about the purely decorative parts of the game. I'm much more concerned with game play.

A "feature request" is the right way to bring something to the attention of the developers. Mentioning it to one of them only helps if they don't happen to forget about your conversation. if the only record of such a suggestion resides in the memory of one developer, that information might effectively disappear if that developer stops working on this project. The feature request documents the issue, so they will sooner or later address it, even if only by responding with an explanation of why they...

It would probably help if you could attach a savegame to your next message. Other people can take a look at it and say "Oh, this is perfectly normal, because ..." or "It shouldn't do that, we'll try to fix it ASAP".