Here's an example:
This strategy guide is 250 pages long, and explains in tiresome detail what all the individual game concepts are. It contains useful tips such as "Always look for opportunities for promotion of your military units", and occasional design note snippets such as "Rival military units will deliberately move next to your colonies, especially when they can occupy good defensive terrain (Hills and Mountains)".
It's as twee looking at it now as it was back then.
The actual best strategy for winning Colonization is never mentioned in this guide: do very little, so you have a tiny army when the end-game revolutionary war begins. The game uses dynamic difficulty adjustment to determine the size of the forces sent against you, and your army, tiny though it is, will be able to swat them aside like bugs.