Colonization vs Everything else

[GAGA Extrem]

Selective colonizing:

Colonize the carribean - high base tax + good late game production goods.
Another great spot is Canada. Fur is an amazing trade good during the early game.

 

[DDRJake]

Some pretty small-time Hansas we've got in here.

Colonising is absolutely worth it, but only if you accept that it is a long looooong term investment. You will be wasting potential if you just take lands and think you're done, you gotta build the trade buildings and, I cannot emphasise this enough, trade with those goods. Seriously, make sure all those goods you produce go straight into YOUR centres of trade. It's like doubling your income off of a province. If you go full merchantile, you can hold a perfect monopoly on your goods and get over 100% of the trade value of your COT, which should be in the thousands.

Hansa 1399 start, Very Hard mode. I am the only country in the Americas and was the only European who ever held a province there.

 

[DDRJake]

DDR Jake you doing free trade or merchantile? And how many provinces in the europe you have?

I'm not trying to hijack this thread but let's get some questions about my take on colonising out of the way.

For Roleplay purposes I've remained Merchant Republic all game except for a short stint where I needed to become emperor. I quickly changed back to Merchant Republic after a few years when I passed the hereditary rule reform.

I would -LOVE- to be back in the empire but you cannot move your capital into or out of the empire so I had to leave to put my capital on America and then I couldn't add those provinces to the empire. What a ball ache there.

I own 13 provinces in Europe. I snapped up Venitzia and Liguria early on to secure a majority of the trade and just ate the unlawful territory for it. Everything else I took were just cores aside from Thrace (early failed attempt at the sound toll, Ottomans STRONG) and the Danish lands (The other toll, but I have no idea how the coastal-capital works in peace deals. I swear I've been able to take coastal capitals before. Rrrrrgh.)

Personally, I can't see the point in having a free-trading Merchant Republic. You want as much passing through your COTs as possible and merchantilism increases the "pull" of your owned ones.

Perhaps someone can answer something for me though (as well as the explicit rules on taking coastal capitals from large empires) Since tariffs are essentially production*0.5, let's ignore taxes for now since when you're dealing with Coffee, who cares about 3 base tax? If you're full naval, trading in slaves and have the NI for +33% tariffs, are tariffs worth more than production, making it -better- to have them as overseas provinces? Naval upkeep is a joke if you just have loads of light ships.