What advantages did the patriot recruitment have ? What challenges did the patriot recruitment have to face? My cousin and I are obsessed with...

By the time the shooting war with Great Britain started, the colonial cause was much strengthened simply because they fought a defensive war.  If people had been on the fence about taking on the British Empire, once they or their neighbors had been attacked or killed colonial motivation to fight would have peaked.  Those colonials who were indifferent or pro-British would have swung to the anti-British side. The most famous case is of Benjamin Franklin.  Although not involved in the actual fight, he remained pro-British until 1774, and only went against the empire after he was publicly humiliated in London after attempting to resolve the crisis brought on by the Boston Tea Party and the closing of the port of Boston.

The reverse case applied to the British -- most of those doing the fighting were sent from overseas, where in the pay of a professional army, and fought because they were required to, not because all that they cherished was at stake.  In fact, to maintain its global empire, Britain, like all empires, had to recruit soldiers from wherever they could be had -- so Germans (Hessians) were fighting in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. Clearly they did not have the same motivation as the colonials.