Help with Castille cash problems :s

[Umega]

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here or if it is still too early in the game. I thought I'd have a good try with Castille/Spain and see if I can get a large Spainish Empire and start raking in the money.
I have 15 trade ships in Sevilla trade node. Technology increase has been slow, due to mediocre rulers. My only few colonies so far are in the carribean. My national ideas are exploration and religious, my third one will be trade ideas once I reach ADM lvl 10. And I was also lucky enough to get the Iberian Wedding event, so I have to wait until 1530 before I can start annexing Aragon. I am allied with Portugal.
Right now I am in some desperate need of cash, not from my treasury, but my monthly income really needs to be larger.

Does anyone have any tips and ideas how I can increase Castille's monthly income so I can field more troops, build more ships and get more colonies going? Or is it still too early at the moment?

Playing as France/Ottomans/Muscovy in the early game, I always seem to be raking in the money even when I'm not even focusing on trade. But even though Portugal and Castille are supposed to be colonizers/traders, they never seem to have enough money.

 

[gajop]

You are gaining money with army maintenance turned on.. You can turn it off while you aren't in a war (or reduce it to 20-30% so you can still defend colonies), but really, I think you are fine as far as money is concerned.

 

[Viperswhip]

I prefer to vassalize Portugal and let them do the colonizing while I block every other country from going West.

Portugal has some nice wine provinces in the the north and most importantly they are in the Seville trade node, so take them and get Portugal to vassal status. Castille is kind of screwed from being in two trade nodes, so you need to fix that, fight France, release Tolhouse or whatever, vassalize it and seize the rest of the Bordeaux node, and abuse the missions to seize the provinces in Northern Africa, hopefully you can like release Fez or vassalize one of the northern African states because coring them is pita.

 

[Umega]

I prefer to vassalize Portugal and let them do the colonizing while I block every other country from going West.

Portugal has some nice wine provinces in the the north and most importantly they are in the Seville trade node, so take them and get Portugal to vassal status. Castille is kind of screwed from being in two trade nodes, so you need to fix that, fight France, release Tolhouse or whatever, vassalize it and seize the rest of the Bordeaux node, and abuse the missions to seize the provinces in Northern Africa, hopefully you can like release Fez or vassalize one of the northern African states because coring them is pita.

Yeah...I'm not going to do any fighting against France or Portugal, besides I like my Portugese friend. I just want to trade and colonize. I'm not as skilled as some players on taking on big countries.

 

[Viperswhip]

Yeah...I'm not going to do any fighting against France or Portugal, besides I like my Portugese friend. I just want to trade and colonize. I'm not as skilled as some players on taking on big countries.

Well, I am sorry to say, without warring Castille is generally not the best ever trading country to start, but build plenty of light ships to patrol Seville and Bordeaux, colonize like crazy but you will run into Portugal there, and I don't have the colony DLCs so I don't know how they have changed anything, but once you are familiar with that area it's very easy to cherry pick the best places with the most valuable trade goods. Get gold provinces, it's laughably easy in EU4 to control inflation, so they are even better than they used to be. I like to concentrate on a trade node.

Exploration should be your first idea if you are going this route, and strive for diplo 7 as soon as you can. You can still beat Portugal even with your crappy king. It's also very nice, sorry to tell you to sometimes war with Portugal even if you don't take their land (do it though an alliance so you don't lose too many relations with them) and sink their navy. That slows them down a bit.

You will probably, eventually, get killed by France, but every game has to end some time.