How do I expand as Cherokee?

[Karabas1543]

Hey all,

Ok so I'm still doing my "No trail of tears". I've colonized all I could in North America (almost no coastal provinces tho), I need another 50 years and I should be leading in all techs, I'm in the top 5 richest countries because of my huge trade income, and I have ~80K troops and manpower. I'm also allied with Portugal and Spain (I'm still Shamanist tho).

So the question is - how do I expand from here? I'm an Administrative Republic and I like it because of the high magistrate/trade eff bonus, and the fact that I can elect rulers. But this means I have a low infamy limit (with 9 diplo ruler it's 18) and no CBs on anyone I neighbor. I can't afford to go above badboy and lose my currently vital alliances (and trade because of high infamy). What do I do here? I'm sure I could just safely ride out this game until the end and get the achivement, but I think it would be cool if I could unite North and South America under the Cherokee banner.

Should I try to beeline for Govt tech 53 and get revolutionary republic? Or switch to an absolute monarchy and use imperialism?

 

[brifbates]

I'm in a similar situation in my Cherokee game-own all of NA except 6 dirt poor dumps in eastern Canada with a southern border of Tarasco-Guachichil-Tamaulipas. Still have a fair chunk of the interior to backfill as well as the west coast of Canada and Alaska but after that it's betray the one Eurpoean nation that's been decent to me (Aragon), take the trash in eastern Canada for big infamy, or just ride the clock out while seeing how stupidly rich I can get.

Since I went with all normal settings the non-colonial nations have gone hog wild colonising so the only open provinces atm are in eastern Siberia and the East Indies and I expect many of those will be gobbled up soon. I might try and snag Dadra (from Ming-not quite sure how that happened) and take QftNW with my level 33 idea to make my monster CoT in Pensacola even more stupidly money-making. Of course the other issue with doing any expanding is all the fun wrong religion provinces with no missionaries :/

P.S.: Are you playing very hard? That infamy limit you stated doesn't sound right...

 

[luitzen]

I'm currently playing Cherokee as well. Cherokee can get really strong when it is fully westernised and you can easily build a large empire without getting instability problems while you can still lead in technology.

Most obvious first targets are animist countries since you can easily convert them to your culture. You can usually find them in Central America, Western Africa, Inca, Ryukyu and northeast of Bengal. Also try to seal of the American coastline. When you're leading several levels in land tech, you can easily defeat most opponents.

In my current Cherokee game I control the entire American coast, Africa South of Majerteen/Ogaden and the Malian provinces (I control all of them except for two coastal provinces), Ireland, Roma (for missionaries), the Azores, Bangladesh, a big slice of Eastern India, Taiwan, a couple of Indonesian islands and Northern Burma.

Next on my target list will be Brittain, Japan, Spanish Africa and Iceland.

 

[Karabas1543]

I'm currently playing Cherokee as well. Cherokee can get really strong when it is fully westernised and you can easily build a large empire without getting instability problems while you can still lead in technology.

Most obvious first targets are animist countries since you can easily convert them to your culture. You can usually find them in Central America, Western Africa, Inca, Ryukyu and northeast of Bengal. Also try to seal of the American coastline. When you're leading several levels in land tech, you can easily defeat most opponents.

In my current Cherokee game I control the entire American coast, Africa South of Majerteen/Ogaden and the Malian provinces (I control all of them except for two coastal provinces), Ireland, Roma (for missionaries), the Azores, Bangladesh, a big slice of Eastern India, Taiwan, a couple of Indonesian islands and Northern Burma.

Next on my target list will be Brittain, Japan, Spanish Africa and Iceland.

Maybe it's a difference in difficulties, but that's not possible in my game. On very hard, you're better off NOT touching the coastlines. I'm actually replaying my game because I simply got owned trying to have coastal provinces. In that game I controlled almost all of North America, but the constant wars were impossible. The AI on very hard doesn't suffer much from war exhaustion, so they can keep the war going for decades. Meanwhile, the cut off my trade and slowly shrink my manpower. Eventually other countries join in on the fun and I finally ended up being at war with every major european power and given the size of their navies, it was hard to do anything else.

The reason I've survived so far is that I kept off the coasts (thus avoiding DoW's from the europeans), putting my economy into raising relations with them and eventually gaining alliances. The problem is that I now have low infamy limit, no CB on my neighbors, and I don't have anywhere to expand to. Yea I mean I guess I could try expanding west into the pacific (Brunei, Malacca, etc), or east into the un-colonized parts of Africa, but I'm more into trying to take over the Americas. Those are filled with Europeans and I need to somehow defeat them without killing my infamy. High infamy (and for me that means taking more than two provinces in one war) not only means my relationships suffer and I'm risking losing alliances, but it also means I lose my trade income as infamy lowers merchant chance.

What I was asking for was what's the best way to start conquering people when you have no CBs and very low infamy limit.

 

[brifbates]

Maybe it's a difference in difficulties, but that's not possible in my game. On very hard, you're better off NOT touching the coastlines. I'mWhat I was asking for was what's the best way to start conquering people when you have no CBs and very low infamy limit.

Lucky missions, boundary claims, rival claims, border tensions for CBs. Without CBs you can try popping nationalist rebels in bordering provinces and letting them take one of your provinces along for the ride, takes a fair amount of luck though. There's also the cheese of conquer/release although that seems unlikely to help in grabbing NA. You could also swap an NI to bill of rights for liberation wars although releasing nations probably isn't going to help you much since you can't subsequently diplo-vassalize/annex them. If you really want to do some conquering you'll almost have to swap governments away from admin republic.

If your tech is caught up/ahead I would think worrying about keeping allies isn't a huge deal. Your bigger problem is lack of ports & a navy-until you can project some power into Europe you'll keep getting harrassment DoWs. At least that was my experience in my Cherokee game-as soon as I dropped 32k on Iberia after beating off the Burgundian navy (Castille-Burgundyblob alliance) the Euro DoWs magically stopped coming. Since ending that war I've had a peaceful 25 years of colonizing the Pacific coast and great plains whereas before that I was never at peace for more than 7 years from the first time I saw a European boat sailing along the coast.

 

[Karabas1543]

Lucky missions, boundary claims, rival claims, border tensions for CBs. Without CBs you can try popping nationalist rebels in bordering provinces and letting them take one of your provinces along for the ride, takes a fair amount of luck though. There's also the cheese of conquer/release although that seems unlikely to help in grabbing NA. You could also swap an NI to bill of rights for liberation wars although releasing nations probably isn't going to help you much since you can't subsequently diplo-vassalize/annex them. If you really want to do some conquering you'll almost have to swap governments away from admin republic.

If your tech is caught up/ahead I would think worrying about keeping allies isn't a huge deal. Your bigger problem is lack of ports & a navy-until you can project some power into Europe you'll keep getting harrassment DoWs. At least that was my experience in my Cherokee game-as soon as I dropped 32k on Iberia after beating off the Burgundian navy (Castille-Burgundyblob alliance) the Euro DoWs magically stopped coming. Since ending that war I've had a peaceful 25 years of colonizing the Pacific coast and great plains whereas before that I was never at peace for more than 7 years from the first time I saw a European boat sailing along the coast.

Well land tech is not a problem, but the navy is. The difference in our games is that I have never gone to war with a European power until 1640 and even then it never got to my continent because my allies took care of the problem in Europe. The cost of that is not having any navy and with a naval forcelimit of 3, I don't think I'll be dropping a stack of 32 on Iberia anytime soon Great Britain and Burgundy both ahve like a 100 ships each.

 

[YXAndyYX]

On a side note: You can't become Revolutionary Republic unless your capital is in Europe, so if you want to follow that path you have to bring the fight to them the one way or the other ... might aswell take the coastal provinces then.

 

[Simberto]

There are two ways to get good universal CBs: Imperialism for 2 infamy/province against anyone, but since you want to stay an administrative republic that is not something you can do. Or the revolution/counterrevolution NI (at government tech 53, i think, and you don't need to be a revolutionary republic for this) which gives you a 1 inf/province cb against anyone who is a monarchy if you are a republic, or against any republic if you are a monarchy.

Surviving until 1800 is probably not a problem for you anymore, so you might consider taking coasts. You will need a navy if you want to fight europeans and actually get something from them. You don't even need a lot of coastal provinces, as long as you put lvl 6 naval buildings on them you can build a reasonable fleet from only a few ports (pretty fastly and cheaply too) since you will have good forcelimits nonetheless. Even if you want to take over your continent you need to threaten the europeans at home to make them give you stuff. Maybe your allies can do that, i don't know.

In my game i constantly fought most of europe (except england, who allied me and got destroyed by everyone in europe) until i suddenly became so strong that they did not attack me often anymore, so i just took most of the coast and then had a fleet capable of beating theirs. Once you have naval superiority, it is amazing how fast they will surrender if you land troops in their homeland, especially after you are used to fighting for 20-50 years and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of frenchmen until they finally accept a white peace, or maybe even give you a province or two.

 

[Karabas1543]

There are two ways to get good universal CBs: Imperialism for 2 infamy/province against anyone, but since you want to stay an administrative republic that is not something you can do. Or the revolution/counterrevolution NI (at government tech 53, i think, and you don't need to be a revolutionary republic for this) which gives you a 1 inf/province cb against anyone who is a monarchy if you are a republic, or against any republic if you are a monarchy.

Surviving until 1800 is probably not a problem for you anymore, so you might consider taking coasts. You will need a navy if you want to fight europeans and actually get something from them. You don't even need a lot of coastal provinces, as long as you put lvl 6 naval buildings on them you can build a reasonable fleet from only a few ports (pretty fastly and cheaply too) since you will have good forcelimits nonetheless. Even if you want to take over your continent you need to threaten the europeans at home to make them give you stuff. Maybe your allies can do that, i don't know.

In my game i constantly fought most of europe (except england, who allied me and got destroyed by everyone in europe) until i suddenly became so strong that they did not attack me often anymore, so i just took most of the coast and then had a fleet capable of beating theirs. Once you have naval superiority, it is amazing how fast they will surrender if you land troops in their homeland, especially after you are used to fighting for 20-50 years and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of frenchmen until they finally accept a white peace, or maybe even give you a province or two.

i ended up becoming a republican dictatorship and getting the imperialism cb. worked pretty well. i've done the constant-wars-for-hundreds-of-years thing and i just couldn't get through it. at one point my 40-ship fleet (10 transports and the rest big ships) got wiped out by the british fleet of like 80 ships and i just gave up.

turns out you could do the same thing by having european allies. i had a few wars with burgundy and just now took a few provinces from norway and because my allies threaten them at home, they are very quick to negotiate. even with burgundy when it ended up owning both of the iberian allies that i have rather quickly, it let me make peace by ceding one spanish province to them and that's it. such a difference from the 50 years of continuous invasion

 

[alexti]

Maybe it's a difference in difficulties, but that's not possible in my game. On very hard, you're better off NOT touching the coastlines. I'm actually replaying my game because I simply got owned trying to have coastal provinces. In that game I controlled almost all of North America, but the constant wars were impossible. The AI on very hard doesn't suffer much from war exhaustion, so they can keep the war going for decades. Meanwhile, the cut off my trade and slowly shrink my manpower. Eventually other countries join in on the fun and I finally ended up being at war with every major european power and given the size of their navies, it was hard to do anything else.

If you had a lot of a coastal provinces and westernized you could just build a decent fleet, take some base in Europe and keep Europe blockaded. If they want to fight forever, that's ok - you would be collecting blockade income.

What I was asking for was what's the best way to start conquering people when you have no CBs and very low infamy limit.

Republican distatorship gives you imperialism and it's available relatively early (around 1620).

 

[safferli]

I found this post to be awesomeness^3: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...0-Cherokee&p=12955770&viewfull=1#post12955770

 

[mathl33t]

Would QFTNW be useful for the colonialism CB? I'm not really sure how it works.

 

[Atlanteax]

Once I had westernized as the Cherokee and modernized my military ... and had a strong military that deterred aggression...

I basically fast-forwarded from 1690s to 1800 ... it was a boring couple of hours, speed up by toggling off a lot of notification that I had to remember to toggle back on for other games.

 

[MiracleTortoise]

I played my file with the spread of discovered provinces to 200 years. This saves you an almost indescribable amount of trouble as Cherokee, as you'll only face 2/3 nations DoW'ing you before you westernize. I endured a 49 year war with England before they got embroiled in a war with Bohemia, and I immediately westernized. By the time they and Castille came back for me 12 years later I'd gone from tech 2~3 to tech 18 or so, and my income had multiplied quite literally by scores. I only had to face down the one real war, and by around 1600 I was the tech leader. As soon as you've westernized you should be colonizing coastlines to bar future European arrivals, and at some point you should build an inland CoT. If you build it after 1621, the Europeans will almost definitely never see it and thus, ever be able to trade in it. This means you can go free trade without sacrificing the value of your monopoly at home. And, to be honest, if you colonize down the coast fast enough, its not as mad as you might expect to be able to annex the Aztecs before Castille/Britain does. Taking counter revolution gives you a free casus belli on most of Europe if you stick to republic, and even without really bothering to take land in Europe, I've used it to start dismantling the HRE. (I had to revoke a hereditary Sardinian HRE first).

The answer is simple, if you're hyper teching, just zerg south and west.

 

[brifbates]

Would QFTNW be useful for the colonialism CB? I'm not really sure how it works.

Nope, you apparently don't get to use that when you are a shamanist republic. The only CBs I've seen are religious liberation, trade dispute, and the conquest/reconquest ones as far as useful against non-tribal nations goes.

 

[MiracleTortoise]

Religious liberation I've found to be the most useful of these. Revolutionary war later on.

 

[pyroclastic]

Nope, you apparently don't get to use that when you are a shamanist republic. The only CBs I've seen are religious liberation, trade dispute, and the conquest/reconquest ones as far as useful against non-tribal nations goes.

You get Colonialism but only against provinces that are "Overseas" for both nations. So you could grab ones in South America or Asia.