The Bluecoats: North & South

In simple terms, beat the game three times in a row on Hard difficulty. If you play and/or beat a game on any difficulty other than Hard, your progress resets.

I like to mention one important detail that occurred during my attempt at this achievement. On my 3rd game straight on Hard mode, the game crashed at the end of a battle. I reloaded the game and beat it, but the achievement never unlocked.

Another TA gamer, Dingadilly stated this in a comment on a different North & South achievement that leads me to believe that exactly what happened to me was the same problem. Ding's statement: I had to play Hard mode another three straight times without crashing before I got the achievement. I like to give credit to Dingadilly for confirming my thought on my experience on getting this achievement.

You need to win three games on hard difficulty mode but can change other settings as desired. Personally, I played with the south (switch factions is the topmost, often overlooked option), with no raids by Indians or Mexicans and without the Storm. I left reinforcement on and played all battles. The latter is important as you don't want to leave it up to chance.

For the most part, train and fort battles are easy FPS sections that you shouldn't struggle too much with as they are rather easy, even on hard. What was really hard for me were the top-down strategy mini-games with your troops, the field battles. However, once you figure out a few details, you are set. Firstly, use your cannons from the start and target the enemy infantry. Often they will either not move and die or move them forward so that you can line up a follow-up shot as infantry often moves in a straight line. Learn to judge distances and you can easily take out their infantry. To take out their cannon(s), move your cavalry forward while avoiding their cannon fire by cycling units and moving yours a bit as they fire their cannons. The most dangerous units are their cavalry. I tried to keep my cannon with my infantry as some nicely line up shots can cripple their cavalry, either cannon or infantry shots. But it is all a bit luck-dependent unfortunately. However, when they charge early on, it isn't a bad idea to counter them with your own cavalry. Take out most of their cavalry with your infantry men and finish up the rest with your cavalry. If you kept your troops in the back moving, their cannon shouldn't be a problem.

As far as the board goes, I tend to chose the battles in '63 as playing the South gave me an advantage. Keep the port (right-hand side) safe and you will get reinforced on your second turn for free. The AI should either bolster the east coast or their centre. If they bolster the east coast, you just need to hold off their first attack as they will not reinforce and attack a second time. You will get reinforced so no worries here. If they bolstered the centre, just match their units while taking land west. Your goal is to take a tile between the forts on the top, respectively top as you can then intercept the train and starve them of cash. Do this and you can easily wipe out the enemy as they can't reinforce. Move up in the centre and take more railways in case you loose a tile. As long as you get their cash, you can loose a unit or two.

To end the game, destroy their units and capture the fort on the top left-hand side. Once they have no means of generating cash and no troops, you win.

Alternatively, you can take a third fort in the west as they will try and get it back. But since the fort defence game is also quite easy, they should never succeed. You can bind their troops while securing the railway and slowly overpowering them.