Colonization Quality of Life changes

[miniboes]

Hello,

I think colonization is a very fun part of EU4 but it can also be very infuriating. I think the main problem with it is colonist travel time combined with native uprising. If you want to colonize Oceania from Europe your colonists will be traveling for 500-600 days. In my opinion, the travel time is not logical at all. The fact that the colonist travels from the capital makes little sense in the first plays; in reality, if I was the king of Spain, I would not make my colonist return from Indonesia just to send him right back.

I understand colonization might be too strong/easy if it were much faster, but travel time is a really annoying mechanic, since you cannot station ships at your colony until the colonist arrives. If you wait for the colonist to arrive, you might forget because you get called into a war, then the colonist arrives and you lost your colony because you did not have troops there. I have some suggestions to make colonizing less annoying.

- adding some notification when your colonist will arrive soon (50-100 days)
- allowing ships to be docked in uncolonized territory, not taking attrition but not repairing either
- slowing colonization far from the capital down through lower settler chance/growth, but allowing colonists to travel from any owned or subject province
- Allow a colonist to reside in an uncolonized province without building a colony; you can make him actually start building once you have troops there.

That's just some suggestion, I don't think all of them should be implemented as that might be superfluous, but I predict all of them would make the game more realistic and fun. If someone else can come up with a better solution for travel time problem I'd likely be fine with that too.

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

The notification would be grand but im not so sure or fond of the other ideas

I like the idea of slowing down colonisation in theory but I think it would lead too much to Spain just going for Africa which is already too much of a problem

the residual colonist thing is meant to be characterised slightly by colonial nations but since they introduced trade companies it's a bit difficult, although I'm actually quite a fan of how it currently works because by the time you should be colonising the spice islands you should probably have a lot of settler bonuses

 

[miniboes]

I like the idea of slowing down colonisation in theory but I think it would lead too much to Spain just going for Africa which is already too much of a problems

I don't think colonization should be slowed down, I just think it should not be slowed down by travel time (as much).

 

[Fluffy_Fishy]

I don't think colonization should be slowed down, I just think it should not be slowed down by travel time (as much).

I worded it badly but you said that there should be a modifier for distance rather than travel time. but this would be worrying with Spain and Portugal with Africa. if you think what travel time actually represents its a good balance at the moment. The theory behind travel time is that a nation is collecting plans, supplies and resources to send on an expidition not that it just takes 2 years to get to new zealand.