newbie questions

[Darkrenown]

Really enjoying first game as Mexico; settled up with Texas and acquired most of their territory. But completely lost trying to build my economy and infrastructure. Can anyone help with these questions?

1. I only have one factory with the manpower to actually work it. When I try to convert pop to craftsmen, I need regular clothes and furniture. I can't seem to buy them on the world market, though I have plenty of cash. Nor can I produce them. What should I do?

2. When researching technology, each category (army, navy, commerce, culture, industry) already has technology pre-selected. Is there any way to change that to a different one?

3. When I convert a pop from soldier to laborer, it just disappears. I thought this might be a way to solve #1 above, but it seems instead to just make my population disappear.

Help? Please?

Mexico might be a bit hard for a first game, but anyway:

1. What year is it? It'll probably be 30 years before there's enough on the market for Mexico to get any. Try setting your orders to buy under 1000. That will put the demand up and prompt the AI to build more factories and will catch any items that go up for sale. You don't actually need a machine parts factory, you start with some machine parts and researching some industry techs will give you more.

What to do is build a fabric, regular clothes and furniture factory in the state with your craftsmen. Put people to work in the fabric factory untill you have a good stock of it (Maybe 50-100 units. Make sure you aren't selling it!) Then switch your workers to reg clothes and use up your fabric. Then put them in the furniture factory. Now promote craftsmen untill you run out of clothes. Now you can have fabric + furniture factories going at once etc. You might want to build another clothes factory in a different state if you don't have the manpower to run them all at once.

2. Nope.

3. It might be merging with another pop or you might be making a labourer in a farming province, in which case it will turn into a farmer and may merge with a farmer pop already there.