Quest Conquer 1 Colony

So I have attempted a couple times to conquer a colony. But my troops seem woefully inadequate. I have three marshals, i fill them with troops send them to the colony to be conquered, return two to get more troops. However I am able to run through 400 to 500 troops with out conquering more than one bandit camp.... what am I missing? I use mostly tier two troops. It then takes me a long time to rebuild that many troops. I feel like this is unrealistically hard for a first colony that is a fairly low level colony. Help, what am i missing?

It sounds like you are using Heavy Units (Tier 2?) against the opponents, which would result in you losing left and right.

Attack Units are the ones you want to attack a camp following rock/paper/scissor mechanics. Archers > Infantry > Cavalry > Archers. Not that Bosses follow the same pattern.
Heavy Units are for blocking camps, meaning (similar to regular adventures) you are keeping a camp in the way occupied long enough for your attack Marshall to pass through and attack another camp/leader.

From the sounds of it, I'd recommend currently for you to focus on only using Attack units (Infantry/Archer/Cavalry) and proceed to attack camps with them keeping the rock/paper/scissor thing in mind. Ignore using Heavy Units until you have a better grasp of the mechanics. On the wiki you shoul find some general numbers to take down certain camps, especially if they have more than 1 type of enemy and/or have a boss unit waiting. You may need to 2 wave certain map bosses.

http://settlersonlinewiki.eu/en/expeditions/

this is a good topic to read when trying to learn how to run pvp: https://forum.thesettlersonline.net/...-for-Beginners

and wiki did an excellent job by listing all bandits camps and what to use against them: http://settlersonlinewiki.eu/en/expe...k-of-colonies/

This is a handy little calculator.
https://en.tsomaps.com/tools/exp-calc/
If you use it, you can plan out pretty precisely exactly how many troops you will need to send. Also invest in the expedition supplier and the fourth Marshal. They'll make your life easier.

When you first look at the new island to conquer, play around with the little "ghost" camp tool. It will help you to find efficient paths so you only fight the camps that are really necessary. On some maps there are some sneaky little paths you can find where you'll only have to fight three or four camps in order to conquer the whole Island. And if you weren't aware, if you conquer the leader's camp for a sub-zone, all the other camps in that zone will disappear.

Also, whatever the maximum troop allowance is for the type of island you intend to conquer, I would suggest making sure you have at least half that number for each troop type. So if the maximum troop allowance is 500, try to have at least 250 attack bowmen, 250 attack infantry, and 250 attack cavalry all ready to go before you send your explorers out looking. "Heavy" units are really best only used for blocking. You can probably get by without using any.

I've only started the colony part of the game since the summer event ended, and it does take a little while to get things built up to get started. But have some patience with it. You'll gradually figure it all out and start to get into a rhythm. Good luck, and feel free to add me in game, if you like.