Didn't take me a lot of hours to win the game again, but it felt nice getting back in time when this was best of the turn based strategies :D . I'll put some spoiler here: easiest path is to create one colony and then declare independence, because all of your defenses will be focused. Also - while silver mines might seem as the best choice in the beginning - keep in mind that they run dry at some point. And no Indians village will be buying silver (unlike, for example, cigars, rum, coats, etc.). Back in the days, it was possible to manually edit text files (haven't checked if that is still the case), so brother and I translated everything to Serbian - it was possible even to rewrite/translate who made the game on the loading screen. So it was very funny when we ran the game and friends thought we created the game :D .