i think i generally used as many explorers as possible for the begining few turns(until turn 20 or so) then disbanded them after i discovered everything. Last time i seriously played imp2 i could regularly beat the normal settings(iirc the one where you don't get bonuses and neither does the ai supposedly). it's like the ai gets bonuses the worse it does, but the player will have a much harder time the worse he plays. related to the power curve it seems like the ai has a very hard time losing, while i don't, if that makes any sense. I also suspect the game/ai cheats somehow because i normally have a hard time finding very good resources but at least a few ai's seem to find them right away. the game has a bad power curve where if you start to lose you'll have an even harder time clawing your way out of that hole. if you find some very good stuff you'll have a shot at winning but if you don't you are practically doomed to lose. the gameplay isn't very balanced - it's almost entirely dependent on how lucky you are. I long war with France for the diamond colonies left my empire drained. Instead while I tried to round out my colonial frontier by grabbing worthless provinces from Spain, France seized the Portugese colonies, and France was much stronger than Portugal. I could have gotten the gems and diamonds IF i had quickly made peace with Spain, and turned on Portugal which held them. There I didnt play optimal early game, i ended up with spice provinces and later silver and gold provinces instead of diamonds and gems.

OTOH, i came close to winning as England (real old world map, which i like) execpt for above mentioned strategic mistakes, so maybe I'll go back and try them again. If you play it too easy ealry on by the time you start to have problems with the other powerful nations its usually too late to do anything about it Next game I'll try 3 explorers instead of two. So churn out as many explorers as you can and get finding resources(as this is probably the key to the game). I've never played a game through to the winning stage, but one thing i notice is that even if the early game seems quite relaxed and you have all the time in the world - you dont!

Imperialism 2 ottomans