Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise dev diary 6: Colonial nations

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
I like the new colonial nations. Just one thing, will they get historical names when the historical country colonizes them?. I have read that in your post, but then you talked about Eastern America and Mexico instead of Virginia, new england or New Spain, to say some historical colonial "provinces"
 
What is fun with this?
You colonize in order to paint the World in your colours.
If I wanted vassals I could just fetch some in the old World.
 
I like the new colonial nations. Just one thing, will they get historical names when the historical country colonizes them?. I have read that in your post, but then you talked about Eastern America and Mexico instead of Virginia, new england or New Spain, to say some historical colonial "provinces"

Those are the arbitrary names of the "colonial regions" the actual colonial nation will have a name according to which country colonized where.
 
Will there be any options to try and unify them into your empire, rather than keeping them as colonial vassals?
 
Historically, there were tiny colonies beside massive ones, just look at the differences between the thirteen, or how canada got divided up with new foundland and junk

Ah the bucolic and picturesque Province of Junk. Our little known 11th province. Take a left at Saskatchewan, go until you see Manitoba, and look behind Newfoundland for a guy wearing a tuque cutting down trees as he ice-fishes and drinks beer.
 
Sadly, the answer appears to be no. I am not sure why this is.

They haven't discussed gameplay with them, but they have already hinted that there are mechanics that will cause them to try for independence if they don't like how much you are taxing them. Suffice to say, those mechanics are going to be totally short-circuited if you can just annex them in 10 years if you don't like how things are going (or just find parts of your empire disagreeing with your rule *cough* 'boring').
 
That doesn't make sense. Why couldn't a region which spans the border between, say, Colombia and Peru have one of those two names? Why not simply select the name whose region is closest to the center of the colonized region?

Further, just because I know where the borders are doesn't mean that gameplay might not lead me to colonize differently. Colonization puts you in competition with other countries, and you'll often not be able to colonize exactly the set of provinces you wanted. Especially in multiplayer, what's to stop players from blocking each other to prevent the assembly of the requisite five provinces? Does that really make for an interesting and compelling game mechanic? It strikes me as arbitrary and unfortunate.

Similarly, if I control, say, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, (assuming this constitutes five provineces, three in "Eastern America" and two in "Canada", does it really make sense that picking up, say, Georgia and South Carolina would cause them to merge with my Northeastern provinces to form one colonial nation, where as picking up two other actually adjacent Canadian provinces would do nothing?

I can't think of any situation in which having strictly-defined colonial regions leads to better outcomes than simply detecting contiguous or semi-contiguous regions as the map develops.

I've gotta agree with this fully, but so it goes (or so it seems) with Paradox's systems. And if game speed is really the limiting factor, then maybe one of these days I might just figure out a way to actually mod out some of the finer historical detail so that I can actually implement a more robust series of historical systems, because the latter tends to be slightly more important to me than the former.
 
It is somewhat personally gratifying that their flag and naming mechanics for colonial nations are pretty much the way I did things for my Aztec colonization mod in CK2. I've more or less abandoned it at this point, but it is nice to know I did things about right.
 
hm, i dont know if i like it that i put my colonists in there and then get no full control of the land, so i cannot build anything there. I also dont like that these colonies can fight wars on their own, i would like to decide that.
 
What is fun with this?
You colonize in order to paint the World in your colours.
If I wanted vassals I could just fetch some in the old World.

yes, i have to agree. i would like to decide myself if i create a vasall or not. this makes colonial efforts in america very questionable in my eyes, seems more worth then to go for Asia/africa where you get full control of provinces.
 
The flags are combinations of the mother country’s flag and a color, split in half.

Would not the mother country's flag in the canton be a more reasonable idea? British colonies, for instance, this was standard practice, even to beyond their independence. Canada, for instance, still used the Red Ensign until nearly a century after independence, the various states that were integrated into South Africa all used variants of the Blue Ensign, British Guyana... the New Zealand and Australia still use their variants of the Blue Ensign. Both ensigns feature the Union Jack in canton on a solid background colour.

Spain and Portugal for the most part simply used its own flag for its colonies, which obviously is not an ideal situation. The ones that didn't were entirely unique flags, which obviously is also not an option.

I thought to myself that the Thirteen Colonies flag I saw earlier looked odd, and this is clearly why. As other colonial powers' colonies mostly used the country's flag itself, it seems a bit more normal to follow the trend of the country that did sort of make different flags (though it was mostly just the red/blue ensign with a coat of arms).
 
yes, i have to agree. i would like to decide myself if i create a vasall or not. this makes colonial efforts in america very questionable in my eyes, seems more worth then to go for Asia/africa where you get full control of provinces.

Isn't it more historically correct thats why their doing it ?

Also do they count as vassals so you only get the same amount of gold you get from european vassals? because that would suck money wise
 
Isn't it more historically correct thats why their doing it ?

Also do they count as vassals so you only get the same amount of gold you get from european vassals? because that would suck money wise

I'm not allowed to spoil future dev diaries, but don't forget tariffs :)
 
These concerns regarding auto breakaway is exactly why I wish breakaway could be delayed by the player, at increasing cost/risk. This adds to strategy and player choice.

But in the absence of that, please can we get the breakaway moddable. So the defines entry for number of provinces before breakaway, as we talked about on Friday, and also adding triggers that can allow decisions/events to cause an immediate breakaway in a given region.

This mod-ability is all that's needed to keep everyone happy, and I will happily create mods around this to provide different options for different players and play styles. My personal preference will be to set the auto breakaway at a much higher province count, but then increase revolt risk and decrease base tax in those provinces until the player agrees to trigger it himself via a decision, or regularly appearing events. This gives the player a decision to make, with scaling risk/reward.
 
These concerns regarding auto breakaway is exactly why I wish breakaway could be delayed by the player, at increasing cost/risk. This adds to strategy and player choice.

But in the absence of that, please can we get the breakaway moddable. So the defines entry for number of provinces before breakaway, as we talked about on Friday, and also adding triggers that can allow decisions/events to cause an immediate breakaway in a given region.

This mod-ability is all that's needed to keep everyone happy, and I will happily create mods around this to provide different options for different players and play styles. My personal preference will be to set the auto breakaway at a much higher province count, but then increase revolt risk and decrease base tax in those provinces until the player agrees to trigger it himself via a decision, or regularly appearing events. This gives the player a decision to make, with scaling risk/reward.

There's not much point in retaining provinces in the New World that don't form a colony as they won't give income.