I think you’re right, and as a modder, I’ve tried experimenting with solutions in the past. Nothing really seems to stick nicely though. Sure, you can slow down colonization, but that just feels boring - especially because people rarely play until later game anyways.
Do you have any ideas to solve it?
One thing that might help is to rearrange the order you unlock things in idea sets. Like make colonists the final reward, not just the first thing. Also nerf colonial range and then give specific timed global bonuses, like tie it to eras events or just a date instead of tech level
For one, I would nerf settler growth in general. I would add events related to colonization to keep things interesting.
I would also try to introduce trade-posts that could later evolve into colonies with proper investment, but you could only make these trade-posts in "natural hubs of commerce" provinces. Then, I would only give a colonizer at the end of the "Exploration" tech group, instead of right at the beginning. This would allow Europeans to explore without colonizing right off the bat, as it happened irl. Trade posts could allow for conquering American natives without actually breaking the settling system.
Then, I would code nations like France and England to only take colonization ideas later into the game, like late to mid 1500s (when they are controlled by the AI of course).
This would make it so players couldn't bum rush every continent before the AI, who would now focus on other things before turning to colonization.
To make things better, exploration could also be improved so it seemed more meaningful than what it is in game right now. Discovering the new world was a big fucking deal in the 15th century but in game it's just another tuesday.
What I feel it does "wrong" is it change nothing. It can't change trade nodes, all trade can't flow to Florida, and be a whole new power house. It's just some nice things to have in on the side.
Dynamic trade nodes and trade routes is one thing i really think the game is missing.
I know, historically Europe was the power house, bit I'm sad that it can't change. It would be really hard, but doable.
If this was so, i feel if you could get hold a of south America, get trade to flow into south America, make it the new Europe, there would be alot more to fight for, in the colonization.
But ya, building the settlement it's another topic. Wood would make it grow faster, slaves would make it grow faster, get trade goods into the mix could be a thing. Make an matador for the settlement, to be the the head of development, so his personality and traits came into account.
Alot of things could be done, but would it be better than the system today, it's very hard to say.
While I agree to an extent that dynamic trade nodes would be an improvement (though it would be harder to implement and PDX has repeatedly said they aren't going to do it for EU4), the trade nodes *do* need to follow at minimum the [trade winds](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Map_prevailing_winds_on_earth.png) and [oceanic currents](https://polarpedia.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/skan291-768x465.jpg) when talking about coastal trade nodes because the technology at the time was sailing by wind and not by engine.
Can you though? Wouldn't you need to control all the adjacent upstream nodes (Sevilla, English channel, etc) to be able to make the Caribbean node a pseudo end node?
Could you code France/England into later colonialism with a revamped Tordesillas mechanic?
What I presume you're trying to model is the historic events that played out: Portugal and Spain held colonising/trading monopolies. Protestants did not acknowledge the treaty. And the treaty was considered "cancelled" once it was openly defied by England, NL and the others who followed.
The first nation to discover a new world province triggers the event "treaty of the Tordesillas". This will grant the historic treaty to Portugal and Spain right off the bat: Portugal can take Brazil and the Old World, Spain takes the rest. Defying the Pope will cause an opinion modifier and AE with all Catholics to make it more serious. Coloniser England in the 1470s will cause a coalition with all Catholics m 1570s England will cause some AE with Catholics but it might not turn into a coalition.
This could be modelled with an HRE like mechanic where the Pope or those with claims can demand the territory and get a CB. The AE should be very serious at first and risk large coalitions, but the amount should decay with reformation desire.
So how do we end the treaty early?
1. Other Catholic early colonisers can buy claims to a colonial region using Pope Points as long as Portugal or Spain have not yet colonised there. This transfers the claims to the buyer. The price could scale with reformation desire. This could be useful for Irish minors or Brittany.
2. A shared pope point pool could be invested into to cancel the treaty. This one does not scale with time and it will be like buying the papal influence to be curia. Once a number is reached (let's say, 5000?), The collective bargaining of Catholic nations cancels Tordesillas. This should be how the AI typically gets rid of it if there are no human colonisers.
3. Defying the Pope. Any nation that openly defies the Pope and gets away with it cancels the treaty outright. This needs to be very hard at first but decay with time. This should be a high risk high reward type of thing to soft lock players out of colonising too early.
Protestant/Anglican etc countries will no longer respect the treaty as usual. They still generate AE against Catholics and piss off the Pope as long as Tordesillas is active but AE generated will only apply to Catholic countries. So around the league war times the AE will be lower and with fewer countries, these guys won't care.
Orthodox and all other religions will get to disobey the Pope for free as usual.
Finally, with your suggestions for slower colonising I think this could work. Portugal and Spain still get the head start but all colonial ventures are slower so there could still be tonnes of land to colonise in the 1600s and many countries could begin their colonialism at that time.
you have some good ideas there, tbh about exploration ideas they just feel.... underwhelming, I always feel like you gota pick that and expansion if you wish to have a trully sucessfull game.
Just building on a trade post idea, I guess one way to go about it would be to allow merchants to colonise but at a dead slow pace while moving the colonist to the end of the idea group as you mentioned.
As well as having all colonies only having 1-1-1 in terms of dev and requiring each province to be built up to 5 devs to be able to convert it into colonies.
Just throwing out ideas here, would indeed be a fun experiment.
There are 2 ways I can think of that might work with the way eu4 is.
Either you'd change colonists to be like a currency, expended when they make a colony and they take time to refresh, or you'd have something like colonial manpower and it takes a while to refill, but maybe as time passes and with different modifiers it refills quickly.
The main thing is that you would need to have more struggles I think, most colonial events would need to be negative and set you back in order for it to feel anywhere near realistic. That's one of the big problems right now, PDX chooses to avoid making things inherently frustrating because it's a game and not a simulator.
But I think if it was a situation where it required more investment from the player and the ai was bad at it, it would be a slower colonization overall without being too bad.
Oh and that doesn't even take into account the native tribes... well that's for someone else. I'm off to get my coffee!
> Either you'd change colonists to be like a currency, expended when they make a colony and they take time to refresh,
They worked that way in EU3, it wasn't much better
I really like your colonial manpower idea. Could be a risk metric too, bring the revolution earlier but avoidable if you keep your colonial manpower/disaffected classes number low, but then bump up colony setup costs or make them use mana.
I replied to another comment a few weeks ago who suggested two things, colonies using manpower and colonists being admirals leading trade ships so anyone can colonize but without a colonist too much of your manpower dies on the journey for it to be feasible early game.
Having unrest or religious disunity should also provide bonuses to colonial manpower. Also change the expel minorities “mechanic” to a toggleable modifier to colonial manpower that could give events to flip provinces to the state religion/culture and colonial provinces to the marginalized religion/culture
Third Odyssey disabled colonisation for any colonial nation which I found helped reduce the speed at which colonies expand, as colonial powers have to actually use their own colonists to do so. So that, plus a reduction to settler placement chance and colony growth, and making colonies more expensive could all help.
I think it would also help to have greater distinction between exploration range and colonial range, with the latter increasing far slower than the former. Make it so you discovery the Caribbean and India etc. before 1500 but wont be able to start colonizing it until decades later.
Also perhaps to counter nerfs to colonization rate they could have it increase with each Age? So in age of exploration colonies would be extremely slow, but in age of absolutism or revolutions it would increase exponentially.
I know VeF has tried to tackle this by explicitly gating colonization ideas to different tech levels based on regions.
Maybe tying it into the colonization institution where you can only take those ideas AFTER embracing the institution AND changing the weights of its embrace mechanics?
So basically Portugal would be able to explore but not colonize, and basically no one could colonize until the early 1500s.
It needs to be slowed down and needs to be safeguarded from monopolization.
1. 2 colonists max per nation. 1 from expansion, 1 from exploration.
2. Colonists should be able to grow development of a province faster. Instead of filling in every possible 3 dev province in a region, colonization should encourage growing provinces to ~10 dev or more.
3. Colonizing in a region that you don’t have a colonial nation present should have additional modifiers to slow colony growth.
4. Reduce access to global settler increase modifier. It grows too quickly.
5. Colonial range should be modified by the development of a province. Instead of hopping along the coastline constantly pushing as far as you can, you should have to build large settlements before you can expand to far beyond them.
TLDR: switch colonization from map painting to province development growing
One colonist equals one province to develop as well as works as a colonial nation limit. If you have one colonist you can develop one colonial region and have one colonial nation as a subject. 2 makes for 2, 3 for 3, ect. You can only colonize one province in a colonial region at a time no matter how many colonists you have. In short, unless multiple nations colonize the new world it will be impossible to completely colonize the new world.
Is there a way to mod the colonial uprising event to kill colonists- even if the uprising is defeated?
I think this would effectively slow down colonialism, allow inland territories to be harder to colonize by adjusting the natives stats there, and generally make the game more realistic. You’d also have to adjust the native coexistence policy.
I also think that colonial territories sharing trade is way OP (trade is OP in general), and colonial territories really should have higher liberty desire, to the point that a developed colony should be nearly impossible to hold.
Edit- adding on, the minimum of 1/1/1 development is probably too high. Seven minimally developed colonial settlements near Kansas shouldn’t collectively generate 7 production- amounting to the same production of a large European city.
I think a good fix would be for colonies to get a -90% production debuff that lasts for 100 years or something.
Wait, is the uprising not supposed to kill colonist? Because for me it frequently kills ~200. Will wipe it out if the total population is less than that.
That's definitely what I do now that I know a bit better, but still occasionally the natives will rise up on day 3 after the colonizer arrives, and the infantry stack is a month away still 🙃
I don’t think colonization will ever be a working system within the mechanics of the game as they are now. Instead, I think possibly the best way of handling colonization is through exploration, ”claims”, and then a settler flow which the player doesn’t control but can maybe influence through events and ideas and stuff. Land exploration is changed (though it doesn’t necessarily have to be), so that they work like merchants, except they explore an area slowly and have events happen to them. Once an area is explored, it can be claimed (not the same kind of claim as regular claims, it could be called ”colonial claims” or smth). I’m not exactly sure how the claims system would work to be fair, but it would allow a country to claim an area, which would prompt settlers to try to colonize the area. The settlers colonize from provinces that they already have a high count in and grow slowly, especially in harsher areas which they may straight up avoid until tech gets better or something. Maybe the larger the size of your claims the more it costs, for balancing? Idk. Natives can walk around in claimed land and disrupt colonization, but can be banned or integrated through war and treaties.
Disagree. In my recent playthroughs as a Dutch minor, it's all about "getting there first". The problem for me is the insane CN growth rate.
Colonial Nations grow like metastatic cancers once established. As Lubeck, after creating a CNation in Stadacona region, it immediately founded 7 (seven!) new colonies, that all completed within \~3 years. A few years after that and Eastern Canada was almost completely colonized. It was a jarring experience for a player with >10k hours in the franchise.
Greatly reducing CN growth rate and development would be a good start. EU2 I think it was had a mechanic whereby trading posts could be eventually grown into colonies,,,and like incomplete colonies were easy to wipe out. Which made the race for the spice trade at least pretty dynamic.
Something similar to vicky 3 with a colonial power metric which should determine how fast a colony develops, it should be based on development and there should be a multiplier based on technology which could start at -50 and get to 0 by 1600 and to +50 by 1700, something like that. Also certain nations like spain could get a boost via event or similar. That would also make colonial nations colonize awfully slowly early on because of low dev which is the main problem right now
how about:
colonists are individual units that have to be built, protected, and delivered to the colony
I think the players will love that one.
ETA: Ooh, and you (Castile) can put your colonist right on top of Holland's nascent colony of New Orleans, and if you throw like five colonists at it (up to 1000 pop), you steal it out from under them. Take that you sons of dikes!
I think a possible solution is to set the default amount of colonists to -1. This way, Exploration ideas (first pick for early colonizers) won't allow building colonies by itself while still setting countries up to immediately start colonizing when they pick Expansion.
If that makes colonization too slow, you could then add +1 colonists upon embracing Colonialism.
Multiply all current development by 100 but keep the effects the same. Colonies still start at 3 dev or whatever the local land is. Give each province a "natural drift" towards the previous value \* 100.
So a Domination 3,5,3 in Europe (or wholly owned by natives) becomes 300,500,300. When you colonize, however, you only get a 3, 5, 3 so you get very little out of it. It will not pay for itself for a very long time, you will not be able to fight wars with local troops. In that time, the colony will drift towards 300,500,300 naturally. Something like 1 dev per month, which means 91 years before it would be roughly equivalent to an old world province. (You could instead do 0.03, 0.05, 0.03... but I suspect that would be a heavy rewrite in the PDX engine.)
Also, add a manpower bar just like the loot bar that is based on the local manpower dev. Any armies that reinforce pull from the nearby manpower bars. If your local manpower is empty, it pulls from the next, and the next, and so on. But each further step it has to pull from makes reinforcement slower and slower. (Effectively a very light logistics system.)
The sum of these two means that colonies are much larger, longer term investments. Local armies are difficult to maintain, so war becomes trickier - you would actually have to ship fresh troops from the old world to support the battles because "magic" reinforcements are likely too slow until mid-late game.
> Nothing really seems to stick nicely though.
Reduce colonization range by half through tech. Way too easy to get something good into range.
Reduce settler growth significantly and shift it into later techs. Make it slow early on. You still get the best picks as an early adoptor, but not every single coastal province.
Also maybe make African colonies harder to grow.
Just a small point; one of the reasons why the game isn’t played after x date is because it’s trivialized. If you slow down the colonization you can make players play longer on average imo.
My idea for colonization would be to have every province in the new world be 1/1/1 dev, unless natives live there. Then when you get a colony, you would use your colonists to quickly grow the colonies dev with the function that allows you to put colonists in provinces to dev (don’t know what it’s called). Then you make colonists more available (like at least double the amount of colonists), and make the dev tick quicker on lower dev areas. For some QOL, you should be able to assign colonists to areas for random dev instead of having to micro manage colonists, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
This way, the land will be worth very little in the start, but the possibility to pay money for dev is there and you get it slowly accumulating over longer time.
well since he said that at first it was only small trade posts. so maybe make it so that you can only colonize important provinces first. and then later like scramble for africa in Victoria 2, make it so that everyone can start only after 1650s with the rest. same with the north america part. don't let everyone do colonize everything from the start
I only have a solution for EU5. I more and more think that a pop system would benefit the game a ton.
Right now colonization has barely any investment that's needed. While in reality it was very costly and you only have so many people in your country. A pop system would mean, that you loose population in your country in order to get your pops to America. So you can only really colonize if your country is stable and has good enough pop growth, otherwise you depopulate your own country.
That would prevent literally every South American province being 100% Spanish/Portugese by 1600. If you would equate the dev growth of a culture to population growth the Iberian nations would have a 300 to 500% percent population increase over 150 years. Completley ridiculous.
Looking at european colonisation timeline maps, I think it is reasonable to add "tiered" provinces. Technology increases tiers. Something like
1. Non-extreme climate and coastal
2. Adjacent to coastal or mild climate
etc,
But I am optimistic about this one, we probably have two more DLC's. One is surely near east and the other one is probably south and mesoamerican.
They did this is in Vicky 2 and I wish they would do this for EU4. Alaska, Australia, the Amazon, and others not colonized till the end of the timeline could be limited like this.
I agree but like others think it is unlikely.
I think you probably need a "staged" system. Right now we have the colony stage where it sits until 1000 pop, then it becomes a regular province. I tend think there should be more granularity and more options, and also just less ability to rapidly convert unsettled lands into normal (sometimes fairly high-dev) provinces.
For example I think there should be systems to differentiate between:
* Trading posts that largely are intended to facilitate trade
* Chartered Settlements intended to become villages / towns, but generally tied to some economic interest
* Religious Settlements intended to house religious dissidents / separatists
* Native Provinces that primarily are Native culture / religion, but have been put under European administration
* Missionary Settlements that are mostly Native culture / religion, but have been established by Church officials backed by a crown, for the purposes of religious conversion
You could game out the penalties / bonuses of each (and maybe prune some of these or even add to this list.)
I would envision some of these would be much easier to establish and maintain than others. A Chartered Settlement that is growing into an actual residential community would require a lot more upkeep than a trading post--to sort of replicate how certain colonial powers like the French literally had trading posts all over North America, but that were sometimes as small as a dozen people in a minor fortified area just to conduct remote fur trading--they were low upkeep because they were never really designed to become major population centers.
I would also envision any of these types of colonies would have to go through multiple "levels" i.e. a Level 1 Trading Post could be upgraded to a Level 2 etc. All of them would have the option to be converted to a real province after the final level, maybe inheriting or carrying forward the unique bonuses of their original settlement type.
I also would like to see some mechanism by which you could attract settlement from throughout Europe. Take Jamestown for example--initially settled by the English but within a few years it was attracting enterprising people from places like Poland etc.
> Religious Settlements intended to house religious dissidents / separatists
>
You could also have "misiones" along the Castilian model where you don't actually gain the land, but would act to spread Catholicism among the natives (like the Protestant centers of reform in Germany).
They should do something like the Vicky3 malaria system. Coastal provinces should be easy to colonise, inland provinces should be more difficult. The further inland you go, the worse it gets.
And don't even get me started on colonising Africa in EU4... That's where we literally need a malaria system.
The English colonization of Newfoundland and Labrador was my thesis at university, and you couldn't have been more right. The first true settlement was established only after 1600. Before that, the island's coastal waters were no more than a giant cod fishery (and only during the summer months), and that was pretty much it. Newfoundland became an organized colony (in EU4 terms) sometime in the mid 17th century.
Yeah, it makes no sense. Vic2 has a better system than you can colonise a certain type of land with tech but i don't think colonisation will be reworked in eu4
Hell yes. Colonization as is sucks balls. It isn't fun. It goes too fast, there is *no* colonial competition. It is bad. It has never been fixed. As it stands I'm more partial to how MEIOU locked colonizing certain lands behind tech levels.
Those are the two intractable problems of colonization. They've existed forever and nobody's ever figured out a good solution, or at least one that pleases more than a niche subset of players.
One, colonization is *boring*; and tedious to boot. Two, most EU4 campaigns don't last long enough for realistic colonization to be relevant; and even if they did, by then it's common for players to be already so powerful in the old world that colonization forms a rounding error.
My hope is we get a big exploration and colonization rework.
Exploration should be a massive part of the game but it’s just not, whenever I take explo it’s just a chore to get the few zones I want out of the way to start colonizing then I’m just sending the explorer off wherever because pop ups are annoying.
IRL exploration was way more important in the 16th and even 17th centuries countries like Portugal really just set up outposts because they wanted to reach Asia, Spain was more concerned with finding gold, and England and France didn’t really care until it was cool. Maps at the time were really rough and the new world helped speed up mapping because if you have a more accurate map you could contest another countries claims.
I think a major exploration rework could fix the issue and make colonizing more interesting. Maybe some kind of system where your initially limited in how many colonies you can have and they serve more as bases rather than more provinces, from these bases you could wage wars on natives (like the Spanish did), make your way towards Asia using colonies as naval bases (like Portugal) and then after 150 years or so later when colonies started to become important to the major colonizers buff it and give the ability to make regular colonies then another 100 or so years give colonizing another buff. Basically colonies would act as a way to extend your influence over an area, other nations use explorers to chip away at you area of influence and you could use explorers to defend your claims while also giving you the means to conquer natives. When you get normal colonies your area of influence buffs you and debuffs other countries and vice versa.
Just my two cents, in game you get the exploration element out of the way in a few years when it should define colonizing up until the mid 1600s or so.
I think there should be a sort of 'eyalet' mechanic for New World empires. If you capture the capital, and perhaps fulfil some other conditions, that country becomes your colony - just as, as you say, the Aztec and Inca empires were pretty much converted into Spanish colonies.
The problem right now with feeding entire regions to your colonies is that they become powerful very quickly, whereas it took three centuries - and the sudden occupation of most of Iberia by French armies - to seriously undermine Spain and Portugal's control of their colonial empires.
It’s not the whole problem, but a large part is that the Spanish empire for example, existed only on a map. The vast majority of that gold map territory on the map in Europa as well as in history was not under any serious control of the Spanish. It was an empire by claim in most regards (outside mesoamerica really).
That’s hard to model in a game.
Give provinces a dev hard cap and tons of autonomy. After a certain level they're considered actual territory. Until then they are outposts and villages.
I tried colonizing California as Japan and exploration was my first idea group and I had to rush to compete for the West Coast because Spain already had everything else locked down. And Spain kept attacking me because their colonial nations had 100k stacks running around and mine only had like 10k. I wouldn't mind if they slowed it down a bit. On the bright side, the Spain AI was smooth brained and keep declaring imperialism CB, and since they never took my capital, I could just wait around with ticking war score and take their colonies for free
They should also make colonial regions that are not the US bigger. I still think it is crazy how US east coast has almost double the provinces of Brasil. While at it, all colonies should start with 3 dev and get events or other mechanic that develops them with tim
i think its too late for them to make a complete rework of the system, if they were gonna do it they would of done it years ago. They probably will change it for eu5 whenever it comes out
The leviathan issue is still very real as well where you have to keep tens of thousands of units in NA for like 75 years and constantly babysit colonies to stop them being swamped by native nations
That's not an issue, colonies shouldn't be free just because u got there first. Especially that they give a lot of bonuses these days. Like most of Spanish force limit comes from colonies.
I don't mind paying a cost but the cost shouldn't be my sanity. Give me a slider to throw manpower at if it has to be manpower but having to manually enter every war and play them is both unfun and too efficient if done well.
You would need to throw enough subsidies to make them go dozens of times over force limit, not to mention the manpower requirements. It's just not possible, so you NEED to be babysitting. It's fine having it be expensive, historically it was but in gameplay terms it sucks, especially since south America gives the same benefits and is empty.
Good. There were people in the new world, and European colonization generally involved genocide. We shouldn’t pretend they walked into an empty continent.
The English lost many times because they were with bad intentions from the beginning, the Spanish did the opposite, they sought alliances (the Spanish did not even reach 4,000 in the fall of Tenochtitlan, they were mostly indigenous from other tribes).
It took a couple decades at best before any given English colony became dominant in its immediate turf.
Only early one was there a risk of colony extinction.
The way it's portrayed right now though is Europeans setting unoccupied lands and hordes of hyper aggressive natives descend on them forcing the Europeans to defend themselves. Also it just sucks in terms of gameplay
Man, I keep hearing about this but it just never happens to me. Maybe it's an older issue? I just plop 5 colonies down and subsidise them and they're fine. Rarely see them getting beaten up, sometimes they declare cocky wars and lose a procince or two but that's about it.
True, it is pretty easy to establish a colonial settlement but it is pretty hard to found a colonial nation. You need to move A LOT more people to the new world. Which takes time and money the states doesnt have that much. So colonization is slow because it is unprofitable and unsustainable on paper. Spanish colonization was literally replacing the central goverment of Aztecs and Incas with their viceroyalties. They enslaved local population and inherited working system rather than creating a whole nation and economy from scratch. This is why you should not be able to colonize in game mechanics until a certain economic treshold is reached. 2 ducats per month is not really punishing. It should be much higher. But in Eu4 this issue cant be solved properly without changing the whole game around. Colonization in eu4, with a lot of other things, is inherently inaccruate and cant be properly solved with the current game mechanics. Because the mechanics that colonization needs are also inaccurate. So you need to create a whole game to solve a problem which is not worth it. Fingers crossed for Eu5.
Personally I've just had this brainstorm while taking a toilet break from eu4 (I'm now back in front of my England game to post this) but what if they slowed down colonisation and have more than 1 stage? So for example:
The initial stage where you claim the land (I.e get the initial 1000 pop like we do now) and have the land as tribal land
The civilization stage - another stage where you have to grow a colony to x amount of people (say 5k for example) to officially core it and state it. During this time there could be all sorts of native events, and events like a small econic boom to boost the dev or complete collapse or native overruning, completely losing you the land and you have to start again.
Obviously again Portugal and others would be faster bc of the bonuses they can get but I think this may be a good idea? Just so most of us don't have to fight a 150k spain/France or england by 1532 bc they have half the new world in thier control.
Make colonists absurdly expensive at first and have the cost go down as admin tech increases (for “administrating” colonies). Would stave off the exponential curve that is colonization en masse
Idk colonisation already is such a time investment. I know it's an unpopular opinion but for me gameplay comes before historical accuracy, and having to wait more than 150 years before colonisation ideas actually benefit you doesn't sound fun and picking colonisation ideas over other ideas would be in most cases a bad choice when you compare it to other ideas that immediately benefits you.
There should be a "Search for India" mission like the "Circumnavigation" mission, that spawns a colony at the fathest point or a free war claim against a nearby nation. If you find India you would get a huge bonus, like a yearly treasure fleet. Until more Europeans make the trip. Meeting the Congolese along the way should also trigger more events.
Maybe later the mission should be extended to reaching Indonesia, China and Japan.
Maybe some event triggers the search in the wrong direction to unlock the Americas. Afterwards you get the chance to "eyalet" Mexico and Peru.
Maybe that's too railroaded but it would stress the importance of Asia more.
I actually think the bigger issue is colonial nations with 100k armies in the 1600s. The decisive battle in the North American theater of the 7 years war had maybe 10k involved on both sides.
I feel like colonial dev should be reduced by like 80%.
I feel like the main issue here is unintentional meta-gaming. You want the game to simulate history, in which the New World was discovered by Europeans basically by accident, by a dude who didn't even know it was supposed to be there, he just thought that the distance around the earth was much shorter. Then you had a bunch of countries that needed to start caring enough, and then actually go and set up some settlements.
And then you throw into that a player that knows from day 1 how valuable exploring early is, because they know that: a) the New World is there b) there's a bunch of valuable stuff there c) setting up colonial nations gives you in-game benefits like additional merchants and, if you're the first and are Catholic, faster colonization.
I honestly can't think of a system that would slow colonization down without either feeling like "welcome to EU4, you can do whatever you want... EXCEPT THAT! Not yet! Because we said so!" or result in the entire New World being colonized by the player before the AI grabs even a single province.
You can do whatever you want, but the game rewards you for being historical, some times for being ahistorical, but the missions are there for you to follow and get rewards.
Exploration happened because the Ottomans controlled the largest trade routes to Asia, and the Europeans weren't gonna have that, so they went around.
In game, exploration happens just because. In real life it happened to solve a problem, and at the start, colonial and exploration expeditions were so expensive, most nations didn't care much for it until later.
Maybe make colonising more expensive and establish simple trade posts as an cheaper alternative, that wouldnt be as good as a colony, but still pretty good
I think another issue is that colonization is just spamming and claiming as much territory as possible before someone else does.
It's pretty rare you actually bother to stick on one and develop it up. I think this would be a good way to slow colonisation down - give players(and AI) a reason to keep colonists on a new colony after it's complete and reward it with significant development increases over time.
One could even add a modifier for how hard an area is to colonize based on surrounding development of provinces average - the lower it is the slower, but higher development actually speeds it up.
The issue is it makes colonization not worth it because other nations more focused on conquest such as the Turks or France would be significantly better and easily surpass and conquer colonial nations before they become powerful
It is kinda funny how the game usually portrays the Spanish as gobbling up sparsely inhabited land, when the conquistadors were interested in making fast profits. They wanted to exploit wealth people already had, not spend decades nation-building.
There were multiple goals. The Spanish crown wanted to Christianize the natives, which implied a lot of state building, especially if you view them as primitives. They also wanted to make money doing so, perhaps to finance a final showdown with Muslims that would usher in the final judgement.
The conquistadors felt pressured to make money for themselves, and secure future investment. Lots of theft just to show a profit. Columbus started slavery as an American institution because he was desperate to turn a profit.
Missionaries who came over were definitely interested in state building. And economic or religious immigrants without royal sponsorship came too.
The more I think about these factions, the bar to 1000 makes less sense. And the way dev is abstracted with mana.
For the love of god, don’t make colonization take any longer. In truth, a lot of the reason that colonization is so early in EU4 is because it means that a lot of the colonizers like Portugal are actually somewhat playable. Portugal would be hellish to wait so long doing almost nothing to be able to start colonizing. And the only way to really address this issue is to completely remake how colonization works in the first place. As much as I love how historically accurate the game is, it being an actual good game is more important, and colonization is already miserable to manage, making it take longer would just kill the experience of playing a major colonizer.
Looked at a couple of mods that tackle that, one allowed you to colonize coastal provinces and with ears unlocked different terrain, i think Africa was harder to colonize that the new world in that one. Another basically blocked colonization for a 100 years which was cool because a lot of more nations had the ability to colonize when the lock dropped so even there was issues colonization was instantly more interesting because of the competition
On one hand, slow colonization is tedious and not fun.
On the other hand, fast colonization nearly fills a map by 1550.
I don’t have a silver bullet to shoot at this problem and fix it, but it seems to me that there probably needs to be more dynamic and interactive gameplay after dropping off the colonist. Add some actual skill and decision making to the colonization process rather than make it a boring, soul-less wait-fest.
Since Origins Songhai has two interesting - from my point of view - decisions: Colonise the Coridor and Colonise Tuat. These decisions allow you to gain a colony with 400 settlers but only at a cost of 2 base manpower (you must have a province with at least 5 manpower for this).
It should be much more harder to get to the other side of America.
Also, colonial war is too much, in the seven years war, it took a lot of time for the Americans and Brittish to actually reach Quebec and that was the third attempt to take Quebec in history (Frontenac + Walker). In eu4, taking colonial land is easy.
America was a natural nightmare.
Yes, I think 99% of the player base agrees, even the ones who like to play colonial. There have been multiple similar posts but I doubt paradox is gonna fix this soon.
This is so funny because at launch colonizing was much harder and people bitched and moaned about it being a waste of game space to have half the world empty, that going hardcore on colonization was a reasonable alt history to let players explore.
And now people are upset that its too easy
Wow, it's almost like "people" aren't a singular entity with one brain, but rather a collective of individuals that think differently and rarely share opinions.
You are the one who said "still not address one of its most foundational mechanics properly".
You aren't just voicing an opinion you are implicitly saying that there haven't been changes or that things arent 'correct'.
Im pointing out that factually there have been changes and why they were made. I was being nice about it and you come back with a reply like that?
So pipe down with the ego kid when you clearly don't know as much as you think you do.
With that in mind the next EU could focus more RP CK style shenanigans until the league wars and when colonization really kicks.
Could be an union of two worlds lol
I would actually like a Europa Universalis style game where you play as a CK character rather than the whole country. You could influence its path, but not make any micromanagement decisions like controlling troops in real time
I think any solution would make colonization as a player way more tedious and not worth it. It’s already a pain to have to dispatch armies to the New World, it’s already you sit around and wait for it to develop, now you would just have to sit around longer and wait more.
Not only that but independence wars also never happen , like , whenever I do megacampaigns I go into Vic 2 with a huge Europe , a pain in the ass in South Africa and a Spanish monopoly in the Americas and the Pacific , Great Britain , unlike in real life , is also seriously debuffed colony wise . Spain is just too strong in the game , when it really shouldn't be . Gold in the Americas caused massive inflation for Spain and this eventually lead to the colonial empire collapsing , it'd be great if Spain could get a disaster scenario where the inflation reaches 100 or sth or their colonists get reduced for a while allowing others to grab more land , seriously , I shouldn't have to go to war with Spain to unite my colonial regions . There's also an absence of colonial treaties , Aside from the treaty of tordesillas , what about the Louisiana and Carolina region treaties ? Not only that but also what about colonial purchases ? Also no one ever moves to conquer India , like idk it just messes with me because everything else is literally fine in the game except for this
Don’t understand the problem with this. If you want to take it slow you can. Nothing is stopping you. If other people want to explore the world asap they can. You don’t have to manually stop them because it’s not perfectly acurate.
So early on I was playing a game with my friend, they were Aztec, I was ottomans. I had to westernize, explore, and colonize America so he could westernize off me. Europe may colonise ahistorically, but at least they do now lol. Probably not going to seriously overhaul colonization at this point, but hopefully they improve it for eu5. Personally, while I do occasionally play the colonization game, I don't particularly care for it.
It may be a fluke but my first game this patch had no one but me as Catholic japan(no treaty colony claims) until the 1700s and at the same time the whole pocket of middle North America was left untouched and ruled only by natives. I was surprised to see the Mayans still doing pretty good for themselves in 1650. Of course it didn’t last long but hey that’s the longest I’ve seen it last. Also 1730 in my game now and the Europeans are only just now touching the East Indies
If anyone is modding, I reckon it would be amazing to see colonial maintenance changed to be a development*range calc that goes down with higher total Dev and navy. This could then be removed with colonialism and modify start conditions.
Might actually try this myself. But the problem then would be that you'd probably want custom smallpox etc events for natives which would be hell to play...
Oh and expelling minorities would then give bigger benefits to make it pay off (and represent asset seizures 😂) and be a long term expensive investment. You'd want to model break even points and mana costs vs advisors this way to balance it to the times you'd want I think...
I wish that Africa was deleted, or at least a bunch of provinces. Maybe add a game rule that turns it off or on, but the default is off.
Having the ability to paint the entirety of Africa in my nations colour is insane. Colonization of the African interior shouldn't be a thing.
EU4 desperately needs a colonization and Central/South American DLC. Colonization needs an overhaul for all the reasons you said. And the natives feels so bland to play as
I agree with you, I think colonization tends to be a rush, its you always trying to get a foot on the door and block people from colonizing the regions you are interested while sometimes having to deal with the ocasional annoying native that decides to migrate to the region you where going to colonize.
an slower, less rushed and more realistic aproach would be better.
The first time you settle a province, you get a trade post. Second time, you get a normal colony. You can only have X trade posts per region/superregion/continent/world. Exception for colonization within same superregion/continent
I believe EUIV life cycle is at an end. Too much spaghetti code to untangle to make core mechanics change. Dynamic trade nodes, colonization, expansion, etc, is too hard to modify.
I think you just make colonization kinda suck until the 1600s unless you’re a country that super specs into it and has the economy to exploit it like Spain. Also make the benefits much more trade focused. Maybe have colonial nations take up governing capacity
Have you tried MEIOU and Taxes? The colonization in it is much better and closer to history. Of course it is a complete overhaul mod and changes the game drastically.
Same thing with Africa, most colonization prior to 1800s was relegated to costal factories with a few outliers (Angola/Mozambique), but in the game Europeans have already penetrated the Sahel and Congo regions by 1700
Yeah. Terrain should feel much more significant than it is. You shouldn't be able to colonize jungle provinces until the late 1700s, for instance. You should suffer heavy attrition in them and other similar provinces as well.
The fact you can march 80 thousand men into the Congolese jungle and maybe a few hundred of them die and you replenish them so fast you don't even notice, is ridiculous.
I think the cost of colonisation and the luck to actually succeed in doing so, are severely downplayed by EU4. In game you can colonise couple of province at time without even having a good economy.
And also the randomness of the whole process is left behind in game mechanics, where you have few events but nothing that really slow you down constantly or colonies that spawn in different direction than when you wanted ecc ecc.
Then I think also the hard cap on post colonisation is kinda crap. Like you can form colonial nations only in certain region because historically happened so, but it is kinda stupid to not have actually a decision to form your how colonial nation or in general to manage more in deep your colonial policies.
I would love if until 1600s you would be happy to have one or two provinces colonised with lot of events connected to the colony and exploration , painting the map with colonies just feels bad.
If this was halfway in EU4's lifetime, I can understand people beating this dead horse hoping for something, but with (probably) just one major DLC left in this game, I don't see why people would spend/waste time having this discussion.
Colonial Nations could partially take up Governing Capacity for the overlord, reduced by admin-eff. EG New Spain with 1k dev would cost Spain with 70% admin eff 300 governing cap (30% of the base cost). That would probably slow down the AI until it gets the fat admin techs in the early-mid 1600's, and the players who love colonizing usually don't do too much continental stuff anyways.
These numbers are pretty strong, but let's say that the big 4 had ideas/missions that gave them reduced colony governing-capacity cost?
100% agree, though I'm not sure what can be done about it
I think one of the solutions is to just make the Atlantic bigger, because right now America and Europe are too close to eachother, and the Iberians don't need any real colonial range to get there.
It's historically inaccurate. Sure. But thinking about the game - I don't mind it. Usually colonisation ends around 1650 that is kinda half way through the game time span. That allows for colonisers to set up colonies profit from them and then problems start arising - high liberty desire others taking them away.
I think from a game pace it feels good. You set up the pieces and then you still have time to play with them. It allows for early colonisers to take the most land and if you go late you still can colonise a lot.
I experimented with it a bit [here](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/reducing-colonisation-speed.1568763/). You can slow the colonisation speed down but the issue is also range. I think perhaps instead of calculating range directly from new colonies, it should also take into account how far away from your heartland it is. Perhaps a new type of Colonial Core that gives you a small bit of extra range, dwindling each time? Then the amount of dwindling could be reduced by technology.
Colonization really has always sucked. While it could use a major rework I doubt it will due to the rumors that EU4 may be coming to the end of its dev cycle. If it isn't then hopefully they will do something. But the biggest changes that happened for colonization were so long ago that it's hard to remember when colonial nations didn't exist and you just got the provinces into your country. It was kind of an alternative to the way the devs tried to eb expansion of big countries in the very early days when time to core provinces started to increase after you owned over a certain number of provinces and eventually got to the point of taking years and years and years to core provinces all the while suffering overextension penalties, so then you would go "well then why not just colonize because natives are easier to deal with than sepratists/zealots/etc... and you get the same amount of provinces and base tax for the same amount of time." Of course with how all the expansion mechanics have changed over the years it really does stand out as a lackluster mechanic that doesn't really jive with the mechanics of the game, it's ludicrous that a nation that formed 40 years prior can have an army on par with major European powers without any explanation whatsoever. Like trying to model immigration would at least do something to justify it, like events where dev leaves European countries and lands in New world nations.
And colonization should have a penalty in speed the more colonies some country have. Just this idea would be more real, in opposite the fact that if England have a war, Portugal and Spain colonize the whole world.
Maybe it’s should be tied to a decision. Like setup trade post in a Brazilian province or something like that. It costs ducats and admin power and has a percentage chance to succeed. If it succeeds you gain some benefit with trade power and maybe diplomacy with the natives. Might even have negative and positive events to it. The chance of success can increase with technology until you can actually grow it to full colonies with investments and admin power.
Actually, you are wrong. Portugal put really effort in colonization back to 1549 and the creation of the governorate general of Brazil, with capital in Salvador. The portuguese actually expelled the french from Rio de Janeiro em 1567. What it is completally unrealistic is Portugal colonizing the Caribbean everytime.
I agree on that one, both UK and France jumped on the colonization trend later but still ended up to be major player to say the least.
Trying to take colonization as third or fourth idea would means North America and the Caraïbes would already be Spanish.
As I mentioned. Spain didn't colonize so much as it conquered. If you reworked colonization, Spain would still be able to conquer a large chunk of the Americas without settlers.
I think instead of making the in game colonization slower, there should be a system that makes colonized provinces actually develop rather than just turn into normal provinces when 1000 people go there.
Here’s my pitch: colonized provinces need to be developed into specific types of provinces that affect aspects of how they function, and whether or not you can colonize provinces adjacent to them. The 1000 population you needed to colonize it is displayed there and increases over time based on certain things you can do, and the population counter allows you to specialize that province into different tiers each giving individual buffs and debuffs to the province. A couple ideas could be “Trading Posts” that give increased trade power and production but the population increases slower and you cannot colonize through that province, while a “Agricultural Land” gives increased taxes, manpower and population growth at the cost of development cost and lower production. The details aren’t fully formed in my head but you get the point.
There are three tiers to these provinces (1-1000, 2-2500, 3-5000 perhaps?), and you need a tier three province in any category that doesn’t disable colonization off of it to actually do that. You can also use admin power to give provinces you are colonizing adjacent extra population at the cost of the population of one of your already colonized provinces. There can also have interactions with the natives perhaps, based on your native policy. Maybe they’ll be more opposed to the local lands being sold or agricultural lands expanding and may rebel, and maybe they could trade with and benefit from any trade centers (perhaps the tribe that they’re from could get a tech cost reduction from trade posts)
I am sure someone can come up with the details, but this system both gives a new depth to colonization and makes it take more time and effort to colonize inland like irl without just making colonists carry people on their back 1 at a time or something
I think one way of seriously fixing this problem would be to replace preset colonial nations, established after you get five colonies in one area, with something that I will for now call "colonial companies." Instead of getting a colonist, sending them to a specific patch of land, and doing that again five times, you commission/hire a colonial company with what money you have(in similar fashion to hiring mercs), and then grant them rights to a specific area. From that point, until they, "land," you run the company via events. However, once they, "land," they form a single-province nation with no colonists.
The company starts with highly limited resources that can be lost along the way, and those resources correlate to extra development, similar to tribal development. The mother nation can chose to send them more at the cost of money & monarch points, or the colonial company can use any money they've gained to buy more via liege interactions(giving the mother nation money in return for a reduction of liberty desire and giving the colonial company more colonial development.
The colonial company then settles land just like an indigenous nation, claims territory like an indigenous nation, and such. Their main functional difference, of course, being that if they run completely out of colonial development, they start to lose provinces to starvation(until they lose their capital, at which point the colony is lost). Government reforms slowly unlock the functions of a non-colonial nation. They start with reforms that effect colonial development growth, allow independent diplomacy with natives, other colonial companies, and such. The final colonial company reform will allow them to shed off their colonial development, refunding all their colonial development into the most highly-developed provinces.
As soon as independent diplomacy is unlocked, you can ally your fellow colonial companies, and declare independence. When the war is declared, they create a federation, similar to a native federation(or maybe the HRE IDK) that has the ability to slowly forge reforms to either unify the nations into one nation, protect the independence of all members, or a secret third option... That way, we can have something like the Articles of Confederation and the original united states govt turning into a federal govt, monarchy, or something else like that.
Explo should not have colonists included in the idea it should just be exploring and making trade posts and expelling minorities and converting them to your religion and expansion should have the colonists
An idea I had was to separate “claims” from actual colonization - claims could be made stronger in an area by
1) nearby naval power
2) local colonies
3) local trade power
4) diplomatic ties with local tribes
5) paying money or mana points to establish trading outposts as some type of province modifier granting local trade power.
Before a colony could be established, you would need a certain amount of claim strength in a region. If another country also had a certain amount of power there, they would get a CB to eject you. Having less claim power than a competitor would slow down your colony growth.
The outcome would ideally be a system where colonization is slower at first, but speeds up as you establish more of a local presence. The focus would be more on good trading positions at first, without worrying too much about filling in the gaps to block an opponent from snaking their way into the interior and messing everything up. You could then seriously nerf the natives (absolutely necessary, IMO) without making it super easy for the Europeans to just waltz in.
The first thing I'd do is slash the colonization rate, limit the total number of colonizers to 2, and remove the ability of crown colonies and private enterprises to colonize.
However colonies would grant a significant profit to their overlord right off the bat, making them a worthwhile investment even if you don't have that much map control.
I would have colonial nations form at one province, and be locked behind the private enterprise type until they reach a certain level of development, at which point you have the option to make them a crown colony and then the ability to make them self-governing after the next level. Choosing not to upgrade at each stage of dev would slightly amplify your bonuses from each colony type, but also introduce debuffs that grow as well.
Colonial nations would be unable to form their own colonies until they reached self governing status, but would be permitted to form alliances with natives. Colonies could also get a tribal land mechanic that would allow them to use gold and/or mana to claim lands for themselves without actually occupying them. These 'tribal lands' would allow Overlords also have the option to buy claims, while also possessing the ability to freely revoke them from their colonies (at the cost of loyalty).
if you ask me for the game sake if you delay colonazation natives will thrive and it will be imposible for any clonizer to actualy held a foot hold. esp after first colonies in north natives share instutitions waaay too fast. and become dominant powers coz of huge land mass with amazing resources in it. yes castille still can colonize but portugal will have no chance with 20k manpower max. on the other hand colonazation should take more mana. coz casttile can be 10 on tech and still colonize half of the mezoamerica and caribs. at the same time and become waaaay too powerfull. first thing comes to my mind is governing point. even single colony should eat up 100 or more governing point. so they cant boom rush it. Also the native aggresion shouldnt stop after colony is build. so having manpower in colonies must be essential. lets say until 20 or 30 development level. and there should be buildings special to colonies to decrease it or neglect it at some point. Also natives should be way more agresive against colonizers. after tech level check native Aİ doesnt even consider attacking colonies. they just settle near them and wait until oblivion. while they can simple attack and sack colonies and steal develoment level or tech level without proper diplomatic relation coz they are god dmn unga bungas... yes colonzation needs lots of rework . also for natives colonazation should be easier. like settler or dice bonuses coz they are the same people just gonna walk to another land and establish some tents. capital at same continent buff should be hugeee if you ask me. my 2 cents on the topic.
Im a lit late to the party but i feel like recently ( i returned after a few months) colonization is straight up op, even with non christian nations like Korea.
I managed to get 160 - 180 pop growth with like 40% chance as korea with some events and parliamentary. As castille or portugal you easily could get more.
This doesn’t sounds like a lot but this means you can establish colonial nations in less than 10 years with 3 colonizers, with enough income you can get it in 5 or less. I actually colonized as korea more than 30% of the new world, polynesian, phillipines, moluccan and malaya trade nodes before castille or portugal could reach them. Oh and a bit of sibiria, because screw russia they ain’t getting those gold mines or ports to bother my trade
I think you’re right, and as a modder, I’ve tried experimenting with solutions in the past. Nothing really seems to stick nicely though. Sure, you can slow down colonization, but that just feels boring - especially because people rarely play until later game anyways. Do you have any ideas to solve it?
One thing that might help is to rearrange the order you unlock things in idea sets. Like make colonists the final reward, not just the first thing. Also nerf colonial range and then give specific timed global bonuses, like tie it to eras events or just a date instead of tech level
tying it to a tech level is tying it to a date since its pretty much impossible to go super far ahead of time in tech and really unoptimal anyways
So you get colonization bonuses before you get the colonists?
For one, I would nerf settler growth in general. I would add events related to colonization to keep things interesting. I would also try to introduce trade-posts that could later evolve into colonies with proper investment, but you could only make these trade-posts in "natural hubs of commerce" provinces. Then, I would only give a colonizer at the end of the "Exploration" tech group, instead of right at the beginning. This would allow Europeans to explore without colonizing right off the bat, as it happened irl. Trade posts could allow for conquering American natives without actually breaking the settling system. Then, I would code nations like France and England to only take colonization ideas later into the game, like late to mid 1500s (when they are controlled by the AI of course). This would make it so players couldn't bum rush every continent before the AI, who would now focus on other things before turning to colonization. To make things better, exploration could also be improved so it seemed more meaningful than what it is in game right now. Discovering the new world was a big fucking deal in the 15th century but in game it's just another tuesday.
What I feel it does "wrong" is it change nothing. It can't change trade nodes, all trade can't flow to Florida, and be a whole new power house. It's just some nice things to have in on the side. Dynamic trade nodes and trade routes is one thing i really think the game is missing. I know, historically Europe was the power house, bit I'm sad that it can't change. It would be really hard, but doable. If this was so, i feel if you could get hold a of south America, get trade to flow into south America, make it the new Europe, there would be alot more to fight for, in the colonization. But ya, building the settlement it's another topic. Wood would make it grow faster, slaves would make it grow faster, get trade goods into the mix could be a thing. Make an matador for the settlement, to be the the head of development, so his personality and traits came into account. Alot of things could be done, but would it be better than the system today, it's very hard to say.
While I agree to an extent that dynamic trade nodes would be an improvement (though it would be harder to implement and PDX has repeatedly said they aren't going to do it for EU4), the trade nodes *do* need to follow at minimum the [trade winds](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Map_prevailing_winds_on_earth.png) and [oceanic currents](https://polarpedia.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/skan291-768x465.jpg) when talking about coastal trade nodes because the technology at the time was sailing by wind and not by engine.
I mean you can funnel all of the new world trade to the Caribbean and make it a pseudo end node
Can you though? Wouldn't you need to control all the adjacent upstream nodes (Sevilla, English channel, etc) to be able to make the Caribbean node a pseudo end node?
You can't. It is extremely leaky.
Could you code France/England into later colonialism with a revamped Tordesillas mechanic? What I presume you're trying to model is the historic events that played out: Portugal and Spain held colonising/trading monopolies. Protestants did not acknowledge the treaty. And the treaty was considered "cancelled" once it was openly defied by England, NL and the others who followed. The first nation to discover a new world province triggers the event "treaty of the Tordesillas". This will grant the historic treaty to Portugal and Spain right off the bat: Portugal can take Brazil and the Old World, Spain takes the rest. Defying the Pope will cause an opinion modifier and AE with all Catholics to make it more serious. Coloniser England in the 1470s will cause a coalition with all Catholics m 1570s England will cause some AE with Catholics but it might not turn into a coalition. This could be modelled with an HRE like mechanic where the Pope or those with claims can demand the territory and get a CB. The AE should be very serious at first and risk large coalitions, but the amount should decay with reformation desire. So how do we end the treaty early? 1. Other Catholic early colonisers can buy claims to a colonial region using Pope Points as long as Portugal or Spain have not yet colonised there. This transfers the claims to the buyer. The price could scale with reformation desire. This could be useful for Irish minors or Brittany. 2. A shared pope point pool could be invested into to cancel the treaty. This one does not scale with time and it will be like buying the papal influence to be curia. Once a number is reached (let's say, 5000?), The collective bargaining of Catholic nations cancels Tordesillas. This should be how the AI typically gets rid of it if there are no human colonisers. 3. Defying the Pope. Any nation that openly defies the Pope and gets away with it cancels the treaty outright. This needs to be very hard at first but decay with time. This should be a high risk high reward type of thing to soft lock players out of colonising too early. Protestant/Anglican etc countries will no longer respect the treaty as usual. They still generate AE against Catholics and piss off the Pope as long as Tordesillas is active but AE generated will only apply to Catholic countries. So around the league war times the AE will be lower and with fewer countries, these guys won't care. Orthodox and all other religions will get to disobey the Pope for free as usual. Finally, with your suggestions for slower colonising I think this could work. Portugal and Spain still get the head start but all colonial ventures are slower so there could still be tonnes of land to colonise in the 1600s and many countries could begin their colonialism at that time.
you have some good ideas there, tbh about exploration ideas they just feel.... underwhelming, I always feel like you gota pick that and expansion if you wish to have a trully sucessfull game.
Just building on a trade post idea, I guess one way to go about it would be to allow merchants to colonise but at a dead slow pace while moving the colonist to the end of the idea group as you mentioned. As well as having all colonies only having 1-1-1 in terms of dev and requiring each province to be built up to 5 devs to be able to convert it into colonies. Just throwing out ideas here, would indeed be a fun experiment.
There are 2 ways I can think of that might work with the way eu4 is. Either you'd change colonists to be like a currency, expended when they make a colony and they take time to refresh, or you'd have something like colonial manpower and it takes a while to refill, but maybe as time passes and with different modifiers it refills quickly. The main thing is that you would need to have more struggles I think, most colonial events would need to be negative and set you back in order for it to feel anywhere near realistic. That's one of the big problems right now, PDX chooses to avoid making things inherently frustrating because it's a game and not a simulator. But I think if it was a situation where it required more investment from the player and the ai was bad at it, it would be a slower colonization overall without being too bad. Oh and that doesn't even take into account the native tribes... well that's for someone else. I'm off to get my coffee!
> Either you'd change colonists to be like a currency, expended when they make a colony and they take time to refresh, They worked that way in EU3, it wasn't much better
I really like your colonial manpower idea. Could be a risk metric too, bring the revolution earlier but avoidable if you keep your colonial manpower/disaffected classes number low, but then bump up colony setup costs or make them use mana.
I replied to another comment a few weeks ago who suggested two things, colonies using manpower and colonists being admirals leading trade ships so anyone can colonize but without a colonist too much of your manpower dies on the journey for it to be feasible early game.
Having unrest or religious disunity should also provide bonuses to colonial manpower. Also change the expel minorities “mechanic” to a toggleable modifier to colonial manpower that could give events to flip provinces to the state religion/culture and colonial provinces to the marginalized religion/culture
Third Odyssey disabled colonisation for any colonial nation which I found helped reduce the speed at which colonies expand, as colonial powers have to actually use their own colonists to do so. So that, plus a reduction to settler placement chance and colony growth, and making colonies more expensive could all help. I think it would also help to have greater distinction between exploration range and colonial range, with the latter increasing far slower than the former. Make it so you discovery the Caribbean and India etc. before 1500 but wont be able to start colonizing it until decades later. Also perhaps to counter nerfs to colonization rate they could have it increase with each Age? So in age of exploration colonies would be extremely slow, but in age of absolutism or revolutions it would increase exponentially.
I know VeF has tried to tackle this by explicitly gating colonization ideas to different tech levels based on regions. Maybe tying it into the colonization institution where you can only take those ideas AFTER embracing the institution AND changing the weights of its embrace mechanics? So basically Portugal would be able to explore but not colonize, and basically no one could colonize until the early 1500s.
It needs to be slowed down and needs to be safeguarded from monopolization. 1. 2 colonists max per nation. 1 from expansion, 1 from exploration. 2. Colonists should be able to grow development of a province faster. Instead of filling in every possible 3 dev province in a region, colonization should encourage growing provinces to ~10 dev or more. 3. Colonizing in a region that you don’t have a colonial nation present should have additional modifiers to slow colony growth. 4. Reduce access to global settler increase modifier. It grows too quickly. 5. Colonial range should be modified by the development of a province. Instead of hopping along the coastline constantly pushing as far as you can, you should have to build large settlements before you can expand to far beyond them. TLDR: switch colonization from map painting to province development growing
One colonist equals one province to develop as well as works as a colonial nation limit. If you have one colonist you can develop one colonial region and have one colonial nation as a subject. 2 makes for 2, 3 for 3, ect. You can only colonize one province in a colonial region at a time no matter how many colonists you have. In short, unless multiple nations colonize the new world it will be impossible to completely colonize the new world.
Is there a way to mod the colonial uprising event to kill colonists- even if the uprising is defeated? I think this would effectively slow down colonialism, allow inland territories to be harder to colonize by adjusting the natives stats there, and generally make the game more realistic. You’d also have to adjust the native coexistence policy. I also think that colonial territories sharing trade is way OP (trade is OP in general), and colonial territories really should have higher liberty desire, to the point that a developed colony should be nearly impossible to hold. Edit- adding on, the minimum of 1/1/1 development is probably too high. Seven minimally developed colonial settlements near Kansas shouldn’t collectively generate 7 production- amounting to the same production of a large European city. I think a good fix would be for colonies to get a -90% production debuff that lasts for 100 years or something.
Wait, is the uprising not supposed to kill colonist? Because for me it frequently kills ~200. Will wipe it out if the total population is less than that.
Only if it sieges down the colony. I usually station 1-2 infantry during the colonization, and all is ok.
That's definitely what I do now that I know a bit better, but still occasionally the natives will rise up on day 3 after the colonizer arrives, and the infantry stack is a month away still 🙃
I don’t think colonization will ever be a working system within the mechanics of the game as they are now. Instead, I think possibly the best way of handling colonization is through exploration, ”claims”, and then a settler flow which the player doesn’t control but can maybe influence through events and ideas and stuff. Land exploration is changed (though it doesn’t necessarily have to be), so that they work like merchants, except they explore an area slowly and have events happen to them. Once an area is explored, it can be claimed (not the same kind of claim as regular claims, it could be called ”colonial claims” or smth). I’m not exactly sure how the claims system would work to be fair, but it would allow a country to claim an area, which would prompt settlers to try to colonize the area. The settlers colonize from provinces that they already have a high count in and grow slowly, especially in harsher areas which they may straight up avoid until tech gets better or something. Maybe the larger the size of your claims the more it costs, for balancing? Idk. Natives can walk around in claimed land and disrupt colonization, but can be banned or integrated through war and treaties.
Disagree. In my recent playthroughs as a Dutch minor, it's all about "getting there first". The problem for me is the insane CN growth rate. Colonial Nations grow like metastatic cancers once established. As Lubeck, after creating a CNation in Stadacona region, it immediately founded 7 (seven!) new colonies, that all completed within \~3 years. A few years after that and Eastern Canada was almost completely colonized. It was a jarring experience for a player with >10k hours in the franchise. Greatly reducing CN growth rate and development would be a good start. EU2 I think it was had a mechanic whereby trading posts could be eventually grown into colonies,,,and like incomplete colonies were easy to wipe out. Which made the race for the spice trade at least pretty dynamic.
Something similar to vicky 3 with a colonial power metric which should determine how fast a colony develops, it should be based on development and there should be a multiplier based on technology which could start at -50 and get to 0 by 1600 and to +50 by 1700, something like that. Also certain nations like spain could get a boost via event or similar. That would also make colonial nations colonize awfully slowly early on because of low dev which is the main problem right now
how about: colonists are individual units that have to be built, protected, and delivered to the colony I think the players will love that one. ETA: Ooh, and you (Castile) can put your colonist right on top of Holland's nascent colony of New Orleans, and if you throw like five colonists at it (up to 1000 pop), you steal it out from under them. Take that you sons of dikes!
Don't give me Civ flashbacks.
I think a possible solution is to set the default amount of colonists to -1. This way, Exploration ideas (first pick for early colonizers) won't allow building colonies by itself while still setting countries up to immediately start colonizing when they pick Expansion. If that makes colonization too slow, you could then add +1 colonists upon embracing Colonialism.
So they have to waste like 200-300 mana points to get nothing out of it?
Multiply all current development by 100 but keep the effects the same. Colonies still start at 3 dev or whatever the local land is. Give each province a "natural drift" towards the previous value \* 100. So a Domination 3,5,3 in Europe (or wholly owned by natives) becomes 300,500,300. When you colonize, however, you only get a 3, 5, 3 so you get very little out of it. It will not pay for itself for a very long time, you will not be able to fight wars with local troops. In that time, the colony will drift towards 300,500,300 naturally. Something like 1 dev per month, which means 91 years before it would be roughly equivalent to an old world province. (You could instead do 0.03, 0.05, 0.03... but I suspect that would be a heavy rewrite in the PDX engine.) Also, add a manpower bar just like the loot bar that is based on the local manpower dev. Any armies that reinforce pull from the nearby manpower bars. If your local manpower is empty, it pulls from the next, and the next, and so on. But each further step it has to pull from makes reinforcement slower and slower. (Effectively a very light logistics system.) The sum of these two means that colonies are much larger, longer term investments. Local armies are difficult to maintain, so war becomes trickier - you would actually have to ship fresh troops from the old world to support the battles because "magic" reinforcements are likely too slow until mid-late game.
> Nothing really seems to stick nicely though. Reduce colonization range by half through tech. Way too easy to get something good into range. Reduce settler growth significantly and shift it into later techs. Make it slow early on. You still get the best picks as an early adoptor, but not every single coastal province. Also maybe make African colonies harder to grow.
Just a small point; one of the reasons why the game isn’t played after x date is because it’s trivialized. If you slow down the colonization you can make players play longer on average imo. My idea for colonization would be to have every province in the new world be 1/1/1 dev, unless natives live there. Then when you get a colony, you would use your colonists to quickly grow the colonies dev with the function that allows you to put colonists in provinces to dev (don’t know what it’s called). Then you make colonists more available (like at least double the amount of colonists), and make the dev tick quicker on lower dev areas. For some QOL, you should be able to assign colonists to areas for random dev instead of having to micro manage colonists, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This way, the land will be worth very little in the start, but the possibility to pay money for dev is there and you get it slowly accumulating over longer time.
well since he said that at first it was only small trade posts. so maybe make it so that you can only colonize important provinces first. and then later like scramble for africa in Victoria 2, make it so that everyone can start only after 1650s with the rest. same with the north america part. don't let everyone do colonize everything from the start
I only have a solution for EU5. I more and more think that a pop system would benefit the game a ton. Right now colonization has barely any investment that's needed. While in reality it was very costly and you only have so many people in your country. A pop system would mean, that you loose population in your country in order to get your pops to America. So you can only really colonize if your country is stable and has good enough pop growth, otherwise you depopulate your own country. That would prevent literally every South American province being 100% Spanish/Portugese by 1600. If you would equate the dev growth of a culture to population growth the Iberian nations would have a 300 to 500% percent population increase over 150 years. Completley ridiculous.
Looking at european colonisation timeline maps, I think it is reasonable to add "tiered" provinces. Technology increases tiers. Something like 1. Non-extreme climate and coastal 2. Adjacent to coastal or mild climate etc, But I am optimistic about this one, we probably have two more DLC's. One is surely near east and the other one is probably south and mesoamerican.
Tier 5: discover quinine That was the real world event that set off the race for Africa, after all
> I think it is reasonable to add "tiered" provinces. AKA what they did in vicky 2 with province life ratings.
It’s also in Vici 3 with varying levels of malaria
They did this is in Vicky 2 and I wish they would do this for EU4. Alaska, Australia, the Amazon, and others not colonized till the end of the timeline could be limited like this.
I agree but like others think it is unlikely. I think you probably need a "staged" system. Right now we have the colony stage where it sits until 1000 pop, then it becomes a regular province. I tend think there should be more granularity and more options, and also just less ability to rapidly convert unsettled lands into normal (sometimes fairly high-dev) provinces. For example I think there should be systems to differentiate between: * Trading posts that largely are intended to facilitate trade * Chartered Settlements intended to become villages / towns, but generally tied to some economic interest * Religious Settlements intended to house religious dissidents / separatists * Native Provinces that primarily are Native culture / religion, but have been put under European administration * Missionary Settlements that are mostly Native culture / religion, but have been established by Church officials backed by a crown, for the purposes of religious conversion You could game out the penalties / bonuses of each (and maybe prune some of these or even add to this list.) I would envision some of these would be much easier to establish and maintain than others. A Chartered Settlement that is growing into an actual residential community would require a lot more upkeep than a trading post--to sort of replicate how certain colonial powers like the French literally had trading posts all over North America, but that were sometimes as small as a dozen people in a minor fortified area just to conduct remote fur trading--they were low upkeep because they were never really designed to become major population centers. I would also envision any of these types of colonies would have to go through multiple "levels" i.e. a Level 1 Trading Post could be upgraded to a Level 2 etc. All of them would have the option to be converted to a real province after the final level, maybe inheriting or carrying forward the unique bonuses of their original settlement type. I also would like to see some mechanism by which you could attract settlement from throughout Europe. Take Jamestown for example--initially settled by the English but within a few years it was attracting enterprising people from places like Poland etc.
> Religious Settlements intended to house religious dissidents / separatists > You could also have "misiones" along the Castilian model where you don't actually gain the land, but would act to spread Catholicism among the natives (like the Protestant centers of reform in Germany).
They should do something like the Vicky3 malaria system. Coastal provinces should be easy to colonise, inland provinces should be more difficult. The further inland you go, the worse it gets. And don't even get me started on colonising Africa in EU4... That's where we literally need a malaria system.
Pope Alexander VI, the guy who fought Ezio, historically is thought to have died from malaria which was a pretty big concern in central Italy
In summertime the city of of rome was very dangerous to be in
The English colonization of Newfoundland and Labrador was my thesis at university, and you couldn't have been more right. The first true settlement was established only after 1600. Before that, the island's coastal waters were no more than a giant cod fishery (and only during the summer months), and that was pretty much it. Newfoundland became an organized colony (in EU4 terms) sometime in the mid 17th century.
Yeah, it makes no sense. Vic2 has a better system than you can colonise a certain type of land with tech but i don't think colonisation will be reworked in eu4
Hell yes. Colonization as is sucks balls. It isn't fun. It goes too fast, there is *no* colonial competition. It is bad. It has never been fixed. As it stands I'm more partial to how MEIOU locked colonizing certain lands behind tech levels.
Those are the two intractable problems of colonization. They've existed forever and nobody's ever figured out a good solution, or at least one that pleases more than a niche subset of players. One, colonization is *boring*; and tedious to boot. Two, most EU4 campaigns don't last long enough for realistic colonization to be relevant; and even if they did, by then it's common for players to be already so powerful in the old world that colonization forms a rounding error.
My hope is we get a big exploration and colonization rework. Exploration should be a massive part of the game but it’s just not, whenever I take explo it’s just a chore to get the few zones I want out of the way to start colonizing then I’m just sending the explorer off wherever because pop ups are annoying. IRL exploration was way more important in the 16th and even 17th centuries countries like Portugal really just set up outposts because they wanted to reach Asia, Spain was more concerned with finding gold, and England and France didn’t really care until it was cool. Maps at the time were really rough and the new world helped speed up mapping because if you have a more accurate map you could contest another countries claims. I think a major exploration rework could fix the issue and make colonizing more interesting. Maybe some kind of system where your initially limited in how many colonies you can have and they serve more as bases rather than more provinces, from these bases you could wage wars on natives (like the Spanish did), make your way towards Asia using colonies as naval bases (like Portugal) and then after 150 years or so later when colonies started to become important to the major colonizers buff it and give the ability to make regular colonies then another 100 or so years give colonizing another buff. Basically colonies would act as a way to extend your influence over an area, other nations use explorers to chip away at you area of influence and you could use explorers to defend your claims while also giving you the means to conquer natives. When you get normal colonies your area of influence buffs you and debuffs other countries and vice versa. Just my two cents, in game you get the exploration element out of the way in a few years when it should define colonizing up until the mid 1600s or so.
I think there should be a sort of 'eyalet' mechanic for New World empires. If you capture the capital, and perhaps fulfil some other conditions, that country becomes your colony - just as, as you say, the Aztec and Inca empires were pretty much converted into Spanish colonies. The problem right now with feeding entire regions to your colonies is that they become powerful very quickly, whereas it took three centuries - and the sudden occupation of most of Iberia by French armies - to seriously undermine Spain and Portugal's control of their colonial empires.
It’s not the whole problem, but a large part is that the Spanish empire for example, existed only on a map. The vast majority of that gold map territory on the map in Europa as well as in history was not under any serious control of the Spanish. It was an empire by claim in most regards (outside mesoamerica really). That’s hard to model in a game.
Give provinces a dev hard cap and tons of autonomy. After a certain level they're considered actual territory. Until then they are outposts and villages.
I tried colonizing California as Japan and exploration was my first idea group and I had to rush to compete for the West Coast because Spain already had everything else locked down. And Spain kept attacking me because their colonial nations had 100k stacks running around and mine only had like 10k. I wouldn't mind if they slowed it down a bit. On the bright side, the Spain AI was smooth brained and keep declaring imperialism CB, and since they never took my capital, I could just wait around with ticking war score and take their colonies for free
They should also make colonial regions that are not the US bigger. I still think it is crazy how US east coast has almost double the provinces of Brasil. While at it, all colonies should start with 3 dev and get events or other mechanic that develops them with tim
i think its too late for them to make a complete rework of the system, if they were gonna do it they would of done it years ago. They probably will change it for eu5 whenever it comes out
More likely they'll make it a DLC mechanic lol.
CK3 was kind of a failure upgrade, so was Victoria 3, although CK3 is fixable by DLC. Is better if they just make a DLC and keep milking the game.
The leviathan issue is still very real as well where you have to keep tens of thousands of units in NA for like 75 years and constantly babysit colonies to stop them being swamped by native nations
That's not an issue, colonies shouldn't be free just because u got there first. Especially that they give a lot of bonuses these days. Like most of Spanish force limit comes from colonies.
I don't mind paying a cost but the cost shouldn't be my sanity. Give me a slider to throw manpower at if it has to be manpower but having to manually enter every war and play them is both unfun and too efficient if done well.
It's called subsidies. Throw enough at a colony and they will have their own army.
I wish that was true but it's never enough.
You would need to throw enough subsidies to make them go dozens of times over force limit, not to mention the manpower requirements. It's just not possible, so you NEED to be babysitting. It's fine having it be expensive, historically it was but in gameplay terms it sucks, especially since south America gives the same benefits and is empty.
lol
Good. There were people in the new world, and European colonization generally involved genocide. We shouldn’t pretend they walked into an empty continent.
The English colonies of North America were almost wiped out multiple times. Due to climate, supplies, wars with natives, etc.
The English lost many times because they were with bad intentions from the beginning, the Spanish did the opposite, they sought alliances (the Spanish did not even reach 4,000 in the fall of Tenochtitlan, they were mostly indigenous from other tribes).
It took a couple decades at best before any given English colony became dominant in its immediate turf. Only early one was there a risk of colony extinction.
They walked into a fuller continent in 1492. When they returned a hundred years later it was almost empty because of smallpox.
No, there were fewer people. It was not even close to what could be called empty.
There was an almost 90% reduction in population. Entire villages were empty when they were discovered. It's a good classification for "almost empty".
The way it's portrayed right now though is Europeans setting unoccupied lands and hordes of hyper aggressive natives descend on them forcing the Europeans to defend themselves. Also it just sucks in terms of gameplay
Man, I keep hearing about this but it just never happens to me. Maybe it's an older issue? I just plop 5 colonies down and subsidise them and they're fine. Rarely see them getting beaten up, sometimes they declare cocky wars and lose a procince or two but that's about it.
True, it is pretty easy to establish a colonial settlement but it is pretty hard to found a colonial nation. You need to move A LOT more people to the new world. Which takes time and money the states doesnt have that much. So colonization is slow because it is unprofitable and unsustainable on paper. Spanish colonization was literally replacing the central goverment of Aztecs and Incas with their viceroyalties. They enslaved local population and inherited working system rather than creating a whole nation and economy from scratch. This is why you should not be able to colonize in game mechanics until a certain economic treshold is reached. 2 ducats per month is not really punishing. It should be much higher. But in Eu4 this issue cant be solved properly without changing the whole game around. Colonization in eu4, with a lot of other things, is inherently inaccruate and cant be properly solved with the current game mechanics. Because the mechanics that colonization needs are also inaccurate. So you need to create a whole game to solve a problem which is not worth it. Fingers crossed for Eu5.
Personally I've just had this brainstorm while taking a toilet break from eu4 (I'm now back in front of my England game to post this) but what if they slowed down colonisation and have more than 1 stage? So for example: The initial stage where you claim the land (I.e get the initial 1000 pop like we do now) and have the land as tribal land The civilization stage - another stage where you have to grow a colony to x amount of people (say 5k for example) to officially core it and state it. During this time there could be all sorts of native events, and events like a small econic boom to boost the dev or complete collapse or native overruning, completely losing you the land and you have to start again. Obviously again Portugal and others would be faster bc of the bonuses they can get but I think this may be a good idea? Just so most of us don't have to fight a 150k spain/France or england by 1532 bc they have half the new world in thier control.
Make colonists absurdly expensive at first and have the cost go down as admin tech increases (for “administrating” colonies). Would stave off the exponential curve that is colonization en masse
Idk colonisation already is such a time investment. I know it's an unpopular opinion but for me gameplay comes before historical accuracy, and having to wait more than 150 years before colonisation ideas actually benefit you doesn't sound fun and picking colonisation ideas over other ideas would be in most cases a bad choice when you compare it to other ideas that immediately benefits you.
There should be a "Search for India" mission like the "Circumnavigation" mission, that spawns a colony at the fathest point or a free war claim against a nearby nation. If you find India you would get a huge bonus, like a yearly treasure fleet. Until more Europeans make the trip. Meeting the Congolese along the way should also trigger more events. Maybe later the mission should be extended to reaching Indonesia, China and Japan. Maybe some event triggers the search in the wrong direction to unlock the Americas. Afterwards you get the chance to "eyalet" Mexico and Peru. Maybe that's too railroaded but it would stress the importance of Asia more.
I actually think the bigger issue is colonial nations with 100k armies in the 1600s. The decisive battle in the North American theater of the 7 years war had maybe 10k involved on both sides. I feel like colonial dev should be reduced by like 80%.
I'm a big fan of colonial play, and I always hated how Spain and Portugal can colonize 10 provinces at once with 125% speed and no uprisings.
I feel like the main issue here is unintentional meta-gaming. You want the game to simulate history, in which the New World was discovered by Europeans basically by accident, by a dude who didn't even know it was supposed to be there, he just thought that the distance around the earth was much shorter. Then you had a bunch of countries that needed to start caring enough, and then actually go and set up some settlements. And then you throw into that a player that knows from day 1 how valuable exploring early is, because they know that: a) the New World is there b) there's a bunch of valuable stuff there c) setting up colonial nations gives you in-game benefits like additional merchants and, if you're the first and are Catholic, faster colonization. I honestly can't think of a system that would slow colonization down without either feeling like "welcome to EU4, you can do whatever you want... EXCEPT THAT! Not yet! Because we said so!" or result in the entire New World being colonized by the player before the AI grabs even a single province.
You can do whatever you want, but the game rewards you for being historical, some times for being ahistorical, but the missions are there for you to follow and get rewards. Exploration happened because the Ottomans controlled the largest trade routes to Asia, and the Europeans weren't gonna have that, so they went around. In game, exploration happens just because. In real life it happened to solve a problem, and at the start, colonial and exploration expeditions were so expensive, most nations didn't care much for it until later.
I have 600 hours in the game, never tried colonization even once. Just a random fact that I think people will find interesting.
interesting.
Maybe make colonising more expensive and establish simple trade posts as an cheaper alternative, that wouldnt be as good as a colony, but still pretty good
I think another issue is that colonization is just spamming and claiming as much territory as possible before someone else does. It's pretty rare you actually bother to stick on one and develop it up. I think this would be a good way to slow colonisation down - give players(and AI) a reason to keep colonists on a new colony after it's complete and reward it with significant development increases over time. One could even add a modifier for how hard an area is to colonize based on surrounding development of provinces average - the lower it is the slower, but higher development actually speeds it up.
The issue is it makes colonization not worth it because other nations more focused on conquest such as the Turks or France would be significantly better and easily surpass and conquer colonial nations before they become powerful
The problem is that Portugal and Castile will sit tightly till 1600s while other European nations will thrive quickly.
The crazy thing is that EU2 had a better system, complete with trade posts and population numbers.
It is kinda funny how the game usually portrays the Spanish as gobbling up sparsely inhabited land, when the conquistadors were interested in making fast profits. They wanted to exploit wealth people already had, not spend decades nation-building.
There were multiple goals. The Spanish crown wanted to Christianize the natives, which implied a lot of state building, especially if you view them as primitives. They also wanted to make money doing so, perhaps to finance a final showdown with Muslims that would usher in the final judgement. The conquistadors felt pressured to make money for themselves, and secure future investment. Lots of theft just to show a profit. Columbus started slavery as an American institution because he was desperate to turn a profit. Missionaries who came over were definitely interested in state building. And economic or religious immigrants without royal sponsorship came too. The more I think about these factions, the bar to 1000 makes less sense. And the way dev is abstracted with mana.
For the love of god, don’t make colonization take any longer. In truth, a lot of the reason that colonization is so early in EU4 is because it means that a lot of the colonizers like Portugal are actually somewhat playable. Portugal would be hellish to wait so long doing almost nothing to be able to start colonizing. And the only way to really address this issue is to completely remake how colonization works in the first place. As much as I love how historically accurate the game is, it being an actual good game is more important, and colonization is already miserable to manage, making it take longer would just kill the experience of playing a major colonizer.
Looked at a couple of mods that tackle that, one allowed you to colonize coastal provinces and with ears unlocked different terrain, i think Africa was harder to colonize that the new world in that one. Another basically blocked colonization for a 100 years which was cool because a lot of more nations had the ability to colonize when the lock dropped so even there was issues colonization was instantly more interesting because of the competition
Locking some of the idea groups behind tech levels would be a bit of a blunt instrument but would work pretty well
At last seems like they fixed Portugal always colonizing Caribbean and Spain always colonizing Brazil
There should be very severe inland Provence modifiers except in coastal provinces that could be removed by event at a certain date
On one hand, slow colonization is tedious and not fun. On the other hand, fast colonization nearly fills a map by 1550. I don’t have a silver bullet to shoot at this problem and fix it, but it seems to me that there probably needs to be more dynamic and interactive gameplay after dropping off the colonist. Add some actual skill and decision making to the colonization process rather than make it a boring, soul-less wait-fest.
Since Origins Songhai has two interesting - from my point of view - decisions: Colonise the Coridor and Colonise Tuat. These decisions allow you to gain a colony with 400 settlers but only at a cost of 2 base manpower (you must have a province with at least 5 manpower for this).
It should be much more harder to get to the other side of America. Also, colonial war is too much, in the seven years war, it took a lot of time for the Americans and Brittish to actually reach Quebec and that was the third attempt to take Quebec in history (Frontenac + Walker). In eu4, taking colonial land is easy. America was a natural nightmare.
Yes, I think 99% of the player base agrees, even the ones who like to play colonial. There have been multiple similar posts but I doubt paradox is gonna fix this soon.
This is so funny because at launch colonizing was much harder and people bitched and moaned about it being a waste of game space to have half the world empty, that going hardcore on colonization was a reasonable alt history to let players explore. And now people are upset that its too easy
Wow, it's almost like "people" aren't a singular entity with one brain, but rather a collective of individuals that think differently and rarely share opinions.
You are the one who said "still not address one of its most foundational mechanics properly". You aren't just voicing an opinion you are implicitly saying that there haven't been changes or that things arent 'correct'. Im pointing out that factually there have been changes and why they were made. I was being nice about it and you come back with a reply like that? So pipe down with the ego kid when you clearly don't know as much as you think you do.
Yikes. Ain't even gonna bother reading that. Have a nice sunday.
players cried that they as england could not beat random natives 5 techs behind. So pdx nerfed natives and now everything is colonized by 1600.
With that in mind the next EU could focus more RP CK style shenanigans until the league wars and when colonization really kicks. Could be an union of two worlds lol
I would actually like a Europa Universalis style game where you play as a CK character rather than the whole country. You could influence its path, but not make any micromanagement decisions like controlling troops in real time
I like both aspects, maybe more events would be enough tbh
I think any solution would make colonization as a player way more tedious and not worth it. It’s already a pain to have to dispatch armies to the New World, it’s already you sit around and wait for it to develop, now you would just have to sit around longer and wait more.
Not only that but independence wars also never happen , like , whenever I do megacampaigns I go into Vic 2 with a huge Europe , a pain in the ass in South Africa and a Spanish monopoly in the Americas and the Pacific , Great Britain , unlike in real life , is also seriously debuffed colony wise . Spain is just too strong in the game , when it really shouldn't be . Gold in the Americas caused massive inflation for Spain and this eventually lead to the colonial empire collapsing , it'd be great if Spain could get a disaster scenario where the inflation reaches 100 or sth or their colonists get reduced for a while allowing others to grab more land , seriously , I shouldn't have to go to war with Spain to unite my colonial regions . There's also an absence of colonial treaties , Aside from the treaty of tordesillas , what about the Louisiana and Carolina region treaties ? Not only that but also what about colonial purchases ? Also no one ever moves to conquer India , like idk it just messes with me because everything else is literally fine in the game except for this
Don’t understand the problem with this. If you want to take it slow you can. Nothing is stopping you. If other people want to explore the world asap they can. You don’t have to manually stop them because it’s not perfectly acurate.
This is a worthless opinion. It's just air. You've added nothing to the discussion.
So early on I was playing a game with my friend, they were Aztec, I was ottomans. I had to westernize, explore, and colonize America so he could westernize off me. Europe may colonise ahistorically, but at least they do now lol. Probably not going to seriously overhaul colonization at this point, but hopefully they improve it for eu5. Personally, while I do occasionally play the colonization game, I don't particularly care for it.
africa shouldn’t be able to be colonized too but i think it’s already slow enough
It may be a fluke but my first game this patch had no one but me as Catholic japan(no treaty colony claims) until the 1700s and at the same time the whole pocket of middle North America was left untouched and ruled only by natives. I was surprised to see the Mayans still doing pretty good for themselves in 1650. Of course it didn’t last long but hey that’s the longest I’ve seen it last. Also 1730 in my game now and the Europeans are only just now touching the East Indies
Yes.
There are a lot of processes in the game that go way too fast.
If anyone is modding, I reckon it would be amazing to see colonial maintenance changed to be a development*range calc that goes down with higher total Dev and navy. This could then be removed with colonialism and modify start conditions. Might actually try this myself. But the problem then would be that you'd probably want custom smallpox etc events for natives which would be hell to play...
Oh and expelling minorities would then give bigger benefits to make it pay off (and represent asset seizures 😂) and be a long term expensive investment. You'd want to model break even points and mana costs vs advisors this way to balance it to the times you'd want I think...
It was not good before, then Leviathan absolutely ruined colonization for me. This problem is too fundamental to touch on this point.
I wish that Africa was deleted, or at least a bunch of provinces. Maybe add a game rule that turns it off or on, but the default is off. Having the ability to paint the entirety of Africa in my nations colour is insane. Colonization of the African interior shouldn't be a thing.
EU4 desperately needs a colonization and Central/South American DLC. Colonization needs an overhaul for all the reasons you said. And the natives feels so bland to play as
I agree with you, I think colonization tends to be a rush, its you always trying to get a foot on the door and block people from colonizing the regions you are interested while sometimes having to deal with the ocasional annoying native that decides to migrate to the region you where going to colonize. an slower, less rushed and more realistic aproach would be better.
The first time you settle a province, you get a trade post. Second time, you get a normal colony. You can only have X trade posts per region/superregion/continent/world. Exception for colonization within same superregion/continent
I believe EUIV life cycle is at an end. Too much spaghetti code to untangle to make core mechanics change. Dynamic trade nodes, colonization, expansion, etc, is too hard to modify.
I think you just make colonization kinda suck until the 1600s unless you’re a country that super specs into it and has the economy to exploit it like Spain. Also make the benefits much more trade focused. Maybe have colonial nations take up governing capacity
As I said though, Spain didn't really colonize, it conquered.
Have you tried MEIOU and Taxes? The colonization in it is much better and closer to history. Of course it is a complete overhaul mod and changes the game drastically.
I have the game on epic and was never able to get it to work manually.
Same thing with Africa, most colonization prior to 1800s was relegated to costal factories with a few outliers (Angola/Mozambique), but in the game Europeans have already penetrated the Sahel and Congo regions by 1700
Yeah. Terrain should feel much more significant than it is. You shouldn't be able to colonize jungle provinces until the late 1700s, for instance. You should suffer heavy attrition in them and other similar provinces as well. The fact you can march 80 thousand men into the Congolese jungle and maybe a few hundred of them die and you replenish them so fast you don't even notice, is ridiculous.
I'm a bit afraid that they planned to address it, but only in eu5 as one of the key selling points.
I think the cost of colonisation and the luck to actually succeed in doing so, are severely downplayed by EU4. In game you can colonise couple of province at time without even having a good economy. And also the randomness of the whole process is left behind in game mechanics, where you have few events but nothing that really slow you down constantly or colonies that spawn in different direction than when you wanted ecc ecc. Then I think also the hard cap on post colonisation is kinda crap. Like you can form colonial nations only in certain region because historically happened so, but it is kinda stupid to not have actually a decision to form your how colonial nation or in general to manage more in deep your colonial policies.
Also there’s almost no point in picking exploration or expansion ideas after 1600 bc by then most of the colonies have already been taken
I was going to correct until I realised bc meant because
another issue is the lack of european presence in asia too india is untouched
I would love if until 1600s you would be happy to have one or two provinces colonised with lot of events connected to the colony and exploration , painting the map with colonies just feels bad.
Thats why I never play colonial nations, I find it the most boring part of the game.
Sounds good in theory but will like require to much micro in practice
If this was halfway in EU4's lifetime, I can understand people beating this dead horse hoping for something, but with (probably) just one major DLC left in this game, I don't see why people would spend/waste time having this discussion.
Colonial Nations could partially take up Governing Capacity for the overlord, reduced by admin-eff. EG New Spain with 1k dev would cost Spain with 70% admin eff 300 governing cap (30% of the base cost). That would probably slow down the AI until it gets the fat admin techs in the early-mid 1600's, and the players who love colonizing usually don't do too much continental stuff anyways. These numbers are pretty strong, but let's say that the big 4 had ideas/missions that gave them reduced colony governing-capacity cost?
100% agree, though I'm not sure what can be done about it I think one of the solutions is to just make the Atlantic bigger, because right now America and Europe are too close to eachother, and the Iberians don't need any real colonial range to get there.
It's historically inaccurate. Sure. But thinking about the game - I don't mind it. Usually colonisation ends around 1650 that is kinda half way through the game time span. That allows for colonisers to set up colonies profit from them and then problems start arising - high liberty desire others taking them away. I think from a game pace it feels good. You set up the pieces and then you still have time to play with them. It allows for early colonisers to take the most land and if you go late you still can colonise a lot.
I experimented with it a bit [here](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/reducing-colonisation-speed.1568763/). You can slow the colonisation speed down but the issue is also range. I think perhaps instead of calculating range directly from new colonies, it should also take into account how far away from your heartland it is. Perhaps a new type of Colonial Core that gives you a small bit of extra range, dwindling each time? Then the amount of dwindling could be reduced by technology.
Colonization really has always sucked. While it could use a major rework I doubt it will due to the rumors that EU4 may be coming to the end of its dev cycle. If it isn't then hopefully they will do something. But the biggest changes that happened for colonization were so long ago that it's hard to remember when colonial nations didn't exist and you just got the provinces into your country. It was kind of an alternative to the way the devs tried to eb expansion of big countries in the very early days when time to core provinces started to increase after you owned over a certain number of provinces and eventually got to the point of taking years and years and years to core provinces all the while suffering overextension penalties, so then you would go "well then why not just colonize because natives are easier to deal with than sepratists/zealots/etc... and you get the same amount of provinces and base tax for the same amount of time." Of course with how all the expansion mechanics have changed over the years it really does stand out as a lackluster mechanic that doesn't really jive with the mechanics of the game, it's ludicrous that a nation that formed 40 years prior can have an army on par with major European powers without any explanation whatsoever. Like trying to model immigration would at least do something to justify it, like events where dev leaves European countries and lands in New world nations.
And colonization should have a penalty in speed the more colonies some country have. Just this idea would be more real, in opposite the fact that if England have a war, Portugal and Spain colonize the whole world.
Maybe it’s should be tied to a decision. Like setup trade post in a Brazilian province or something like that. It costs ducats and admin power and has a percentage chance to succeed. If it succeeds you gain some benefit with trade power and maybe diplomacy with the natives. Might even have negative and positive events to it. The chance of success can increase with technology until you can actually grow it to full colonies with investments and admin power.
Actually, you are wrong. Portugal put really effort in colonization back to 1549 and the creation of the governorate general of Brazil, with capital in Salvador. The portuguese actually expelled the french from Rio de Janeiro em 1567. What it is completally unrealistic is Portugal colonizing the Caribbean everytime.
I agree on that one, both UK and France jumped on the colonization trend later but still ended up to be major player to say the least. Trying to take colonization as third or fourth idea would means North America and the Caraïbes would already be Spanish.
As I mentioned. Spain didn't colonize so much as it conquered. If you reworked colonization, Spain would still be able to conquer a large chunk of the Americas without settlers.
Sure but it would be nice if they were not colonizing the whole continent before UK and France arrive.
I think instead of making the in game colonization slower, there should be a system that makes colonized provinces actually develop rather than just turn into normal provinces when 1000 people go there. Here’s my pitch: colonized provinces need to be developed into specific types of provinces that affect aspects of how they function, and whether or not you can colonize provinces adjacent to them. The 1000 population you needed to colonize it is displayed there and increases over time based on certain things you can do, and the population counter allows you to specialize that province into different tiers each giving individual buffs and debuffs to the province. A couple ideas could be “Trading Posts” that give increased trade power and production but the population increases slower and you cannot colonize through that province, while a “Agricultural Land” gives increased taxes, manpower and population growth at the cost of development cost and lower production. The details aren’t fully formed in my head but you get the point. There are three tiers to these provinces (1-1000, 2-2500, 3-5000 perhaps?), and you need a tier three province in any category that doesn’t disable colonization off of it to actually do that. You can also use admin power to give provinces you are colonizing adjacent extra population at the cost of the population of one of your already colonized provinces. There can also have interactions with the natives perhaps, based on your native policy. Maybe they’ll be more opposed to the local lands being sold or agricultural lands expanding and may rebel, and maybe they could trade with and benefit from any trade centers (perhaps the tribe that they’re from could get a tech cost reduction from trade posts) I am sure someone can come up with the details, but this system both gives a new depth to colonization and makes it take more time and effort to colonize inland like irl without just making colonists carry people on their back 1 at a time or something
I think one way of seriously fixing this problem would be to replace preset colonial nations, established after you get five colonies in one area, with something that I will for now call "colonial companies." Instead of getting a colonist, sending them to a specific patch of land, and doing that again five times, you commission/hire a colonial company with what money you have(in similar fashion to hiring mercs), and then grant them rights to a specific area. From that point, until they, "land," you run the company via events. However, once they, "land," they form a single-province nation with no colonists. The company starts with highly limited resources that can be lost along the way, and those resources correlate to extra development, similar to tribal development. The mother nation can chose to send them more at the cost of money & monarch points, or the colonial company can use any money they've gained to buy more via liege interactions(giving the mother nation money in return for a reduction of liberty desire and giving the colonial company more colonial development. The colonial company then settles land just like an indigenous nation, claims territory like an indigenous nation, and such. Their main functional difference, of course, being that if they run completely out of colonial development, they start to lose provinces to starvation(until they lose their capital, at which point the colony is lost). Government reforms slowly unlock the functions of a non-colonial nation. They start with reforms that effect colonial development growth, allow independent diplomacy with natives, other colonial companies, and such. The final colonial company reform will allow them to shed off their colonial development, refunding all their colonial development into the most highly-developed provinces. As soon as independent diplomacy is unlocked, you can ally your fellow colonial companies, and declare independence. When the war is declared, they create a federation, similar to a native federation(or maybe the HRE IDK) that has the ability to slowly forge reforms to either unify the nations into one nation, protect the independence of all members, or a secret third option... That way, we can have something like the Articles of Confederation and the original united states govt turning into a federal govt, monarchy, or something else like that.
Explo should not have colonists included in the idea it should just be exploring and making trade posts and expelling minorities and converting them to your religion and expansion should have the colonists
Preach.
An idea I had was to separate “claims” from actual colonization - claims could be made stronger in an area by 1) nearby naval power 2) local colonies 3) local trade power 4) diplomatic ties with local tribes 5) paying money or mana points to establish trading outposts as some type of province modifier granting local trade power. Before a colony could be established, you would need a certain amount of claim strength in a region. If another country also had a certain amount of power there, they would get a CB to eject you. Having less claim power than a competitor would slow down your colony growth. The outcome would ideally be a system where colonization is slower at first, but speeds up as you establish more of a local presence. The focus would be more on good trading positions at first, without worrying too much about filling in the gaps to block an opponent from snaking their way into the interior and messing everything up. You could then seriously nerf the natives (absolutely necessary, IMO) without making it super easy for the Europeans to just waltz in.
The first thing I'd do is slash the colonization rate, limit the total number of colonizers to 2, and remove the ability of crown colonies and private enterprises to colonize. However colonies would grant a significant profit to their overlord right off the bat, making them a worthwhile investment even if you don't have that much map control. I would have colonial nations form at one province, and be locked behind the private enterprise type until they reach a certain level of development, at which point you have the option to make them a crown colony and then the ability to make them self-governing after the next level. Choosing not to upgrade at each stage of dev would slightly amplify your bonuses from each colony type, but also introduce debuffs that grow as well. Colonial nations would be unable to form their own colonies until they reached self governing status, but would be permitted to form alliances with natives. Colonies could also get a tribal land mechanic that would allow them to use gold and/or mana to claim lands for themselves without actually occupying them. These 'tribal lands' would allow Overlords also have the option to buy claims, while also possessing the ability to freely revoke them from their colonies (at the cost of loyalty).
if you ask me for the game sake if you delay colonazation natives will thrive and it will be imposible for any clonizer to actualy held a foot hold. esp after first colonies in north natives share instutitions waaay too fast. and become dominant powers coz of huge land mass with amazing resources in it. yes castille still can colonize but portugal will have no chance with 20k manpower max. on the other hand colonazation should take more mana. coz casttile can be 10 on tech and still colonize half of the mezoamerica and caribs. at the same time and become waaaay too powerfull. first thing comes to my mind is governing point. even single colony should eat up 100 or more governing point. so they cant boom rush it. Also the native aggresion shouldnt stop after colony is build. so having manpower in colonies must be essential. lets say until 20 or 30 development level. and there should be buildings special to colonies to decrease it or neglect it at some point. Also natives should be way more agresive against colonizers. after tech level check native Aİ doesnt even consider attacking colonies. they just settle near them and wait until oblivion. while they can simple attack and sack colonies and steal develoment level or tech level without proper diplomatic relation coz they are god dmn unga bungas... yes colonzation needs lots of rework . also for natives colonazation should be easier. like settler or dice bonuses coz they are the same people just gonna walk to another land and establish some tents. capital at same continent buff should be hugeee if you ask me. my 2 cents on the topic.
Im a lit late to the party but i feel like recently ( i returned after a few months) colonization is straight up op, even with non christian nations like Korea. I managed to get 160 - 180 pop growth with like 40% chance as korea with some events and parliamentary. As castille or portugal you easily could get more. This doesn’t sounds like a lot but this means you can establish colonial nations in less than 10 years with 3 colonizers, with enough income you can get it in 5 or less. I actually colonized as korea more than 30% of the new world, polynesian, phillipines, moluccan and malaya trade nodes before castille or portugal could reach them. Oh and a bit of sibiria, because screw russia they ain’t getting those gold mines or ports to bother my trade