ANSWER THIS THEN.
I am playing Iroquois. I colonize the eastern seaboard area, specifically from about chesapeake to manhattan. (The Most Valuable.)
I get 50% on everything forever. BUT a european 'conquers' it and suddenly it's "fun" and they get less penalty? OR WHAT?
You are looking at it purely from a european perspective, and the POINT of the fact that it nerfs ROTW is that it nerfs ROTW.
AOW is lauded as being a boost to ROTW, and then i see this, and i feel like I might as well call it straight up Europa Genocidalis: Simulation of Slaughter.
Your points are all very fine and good, but IRRELEVANT.
Iroquois should get full benefit from colonies that are 1 province from their capital. If you don't agree, I'm sorry, but you clearly don't plan to play anyone but Europowers.
I've played more games as north american natives than games in all of Europe combined (and the only reason I play in Western Europe at all is there's some fun idea sets and DHEs there, like the Ambrosian Republic). I disagree with you.
Disagreeing with you does not make anyone Eurocentrist, racist, or anything else. It means they disagree.
Here is the cold, hard fact: the old system of colonisation made it possible to be wildly more powerful than was reasonable as any African, American or Asian native country. It was not realistic - it was not even possible. And talking about CNs being able to reach 0% autonomy is pointless, because CNs colonise at the speed of lol so except in player hands they cannot try to become the USA two centuries early (even in player hands they're pretty painfully slow - colonising the other continent as say Inca and then returning to conquer the original as a CN will not be nearly as easy, fun, or powerful as people seem to think).
As for the late game scenario when CNs are more powerful and able to make better use of the land once they've seized it, thus giving them formidable monetary and manpower advantages over native states... well, that is actually
what happened in real life. Native states could and did acquit themselves well in many, many cases against the American colonial nations, but couldn't actually follow up successes or easily absorb failures due precisely to the fact that their manpower pools were tiny (and this was true even for large native confederations, the closest real life equivalent to a player-run large native state). Plus, the native population was still being hit by various epidemics periodically, which again would actually justify a permanent malus against native colonisers for biological reasons that cannot be realistically changed in EUIV's timeframe.
Complaining "but I can change history" ignores that you can in the game, too. It will still be very possible to have a powerful, viable native state that controls large chunks of one or both of the American continents. It will just not be
completely fricking trivial like it is right now. And it is trivial. I am not a master of the game but I have lost as a North American native like once ever, to an unusually aggressive and potent Spain which had not only unified, but conquered Portugal and had a collapsed France next door. Every other time I have efficiently limited European colonisation on my own continent, sealing off the coasts and only letting at most a single 5-province CN form (this means the Euro power, no longer adjacent to you, is less hostile and a 5-province CN is pathetically weak). Teching up is easy, Westernising is doable, you can get powerful Euro allies to help keep others off your back, and meanwhile you continue to fill up the continent and grow ever more powerful.
And it's even easier with Asian countries that can rather easily survive without Westernising. Manchu, Korea or Japan can colonise and crush Ming like a bug, every time, long before Russia gets there. And once you've got the money and forcelimits from taking most of China, Russia will never threaten you. Then you take the whole Pacific, mostly at full base-tax and productivity, while spreading into India, also at full basetax and productivity (due to capital connection). This change won't even stop that (I look forward to a Manchu game with their new setup), but it does make it, again, less trivial and reflects the reality that Manchu taking provinces in China was far, far more lucrative than spreading out further into the steppes.
Now, I agree (and so did Wiz) that it is desirable to have a way to reduce that malus, over time, at a cost (reflecting population migration, urbanisation, steady incorporation into power structures). But it isn't wrong to not have it, there is a very real problem even prior to the introduction of a massive boost in provinces to colonise with how easy it is to become vastly powerful as a native coloniser.
Also on that note, how does migration work with this autonomy system>???
Migration isn't colonisation, so it doesn't affect it. Wiz already said this. This actually gives more point to staying a migrating tribe for awhile to reach a sufficiently rich "home base" province, as opposed to stoppping and colonising as soon as possible.
