And the tooltip of a MoM should read the same? At least in the 5.1 patch, players go over their forcelimits. Hard. So more money => more soldiers. There is no real point of "enough money". I don't really know how you can build up an army 3 times over your forcelimit, have a money reserve to build up destroyed regiments again and still use agents, especially magistrates. And later you say, you shouldn't pump all your money to colonization. Well, NB gives you money. Quite a lot of it.
No, you need one or the other, but advisor slots are a lot more flexible than NI slots. If MotM didn't exist then National Bank might be worthwhile.
And I play plenty of MP and do just fine without National Bank. Can't say I've seen you in the MP section, but feel free to pop into a game I'm signed up for next time one's starting.
Even in your mentioned multiplayers, there are some nations, that are usually quite safe. Venice, Brittany, Portugal, sometimes Holland have usually a protector. And England has his fleet.
Someone protecting your homeland can't stop someone who spent their money on ships rather than colonies from burning or seizing all of yours.
So, let's say we have a Spain, owning all of Iberia and maybe a little bit more in Europe (e.g. Italian holdings) and a not so little chunk of South or North America, which is not uncommon, neither in SP (well, it would probably be all of America there) nor in MP. Either way, if the capital is in America or in Europe, the player would still have some quite high tariff income.
Not high enough to justify viceroys if it's in North America. If you want +income NIs, take Smithian Economics and the trade NIs.
Glorious Arms offers little to no bonus, Engineer Corps is actually not that bad. But, as you and I before said, there are way more important NIs, so it wont be picked until quite late in the game.
There are much better NIs which offer too little of a bonus to be picked until late in the game, such as Battlefield Commissions.
You can afford to efficiently spend magistrates without National Bank.
Ive used those Colonial NI to absolutly blitz Colonies to full in atleast one MP game, they are great at getting it all out of the way and blocking off opponents, its not like you cant change your NI later anyways.
If your opponents don't war you it works. If they do you die.
You expanded inefficiently, probably due to RP reasons. Had you focused your provinces on North/South America you wouldn't be in that situation. You also really don't need more income with over 5,000 per month (you don't really need anything else either, but when you could pick Glorious Arms, Glorious Navy, Merchant Adventures, Engineer Corps etc and still easily be the #1 nation NI picks are meaningless and you can't use it as an argument for Viceroys being good).
I have to disagree so much with this. In my Sweden AAR, NB is an outright lifesaver. And for other states who need to mint to avoid taking loans, it's necessary as well. I don't think it deserves to be called "worse", just situational.
I'm currently in a multiplayer game as Sweden where I fought and beat multiple players (Brandenburg and Russia) at once without using National Bank. My inflation at its highest was ~1%.
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Solidarity to President_Eden for being part of the Great Crusade against National Bank!