More colonial nerfs?

[RobRoy3]

So, playing a Netherlands game, trying to limit my presence in most colonial regions to four provinces and noticing some changes/oddities I hadn't expected:

1) The colonial conquest CB used to give heavy discounts to AE, cost zero dip power, and allow you to take an entire pagan country in one war. When taking individual provinces, it still cost zero dip power, and still allows you to take more provinces than you would in a normal European war. But when trying to annex the entire country (just including the capital), you pay full (i.e., hellishly high) dip power costs, though it still allows an annexation that wouldn't be allowed in a normal European war.

2) There used to be a significant discount on coring (50%) and culture converting overseas pagans (80%). This is no longer the case, in either Africa or the New World.

3) Overseas colonies are no longer free of over-extenstion (again, both Africa and the New World).

Didn't see anything in the patch notes on these nor anything on the message boards. There has obviously been a lot of noise on the forums recently, though, so my apologies if I missed it. But has anyone seen anything to indicate these are intentional design changes or bugs? I'm guessing the annexation one (#1) has to be a bug, but the others might be intentional, since there's an obvious attempt to channel colonies into colonial nations. Seems a bit of a shame that a medium sized power can't still try to grab a piece of the Maya, for example. I mean obviously they can still grab it, but it'll cost the same as a regular European province, with little tangible benefit.

 

[FrigidSoul]

So, playing a Netherlands game, trying to limit my presence in most colonial regions to four provinces and noticing some changes/oddities I hadn't expected:

1) The colonial conquest CB used to give heavy discounts to AE, cost zero dip power, and allow you to take an entire pagan country in one war. When taking individual provinces, it still cost zero dip power, and still allows you to take more provinces than you would in a normal European war. But when trying to annex the entire country (just including the capital), you pay full (i.e., hellishly high) dip power costs, though it still allows an annexation that wouldn't be allowed in a normal European war.

This appears to be a bug with the peace system. It doesn't only apply to the exploration CB (as seen here). Of course, inconsistencies in the application of CBs, buggy or not, are nothing new. Personally I think the entire peace system needs to be overhauled.

2) There used to be a significant discount on coring (50%) and culture converting overseas pagans (80%). This is no longer the case, in either Africa or the New World.

Not sure if this is intentional or not. In theory, Europeans don't really need to core pagan provinces in the Americas anymore -- and the colonial nations shouldn't get a discount. That reasoning falls apart in Africa though, obviously. I think perhaps this is just a case of the developers failing to think through all of the repercussions of their removing the discount for colonial nations.

3) Overseas colonies are no longer free of over-extenstion (again, both Africa and the New World).

Same thing as #2. Colonial nations who conquer their neighbors shouldn't avoid overextension, so it's likely the devs unintentionally broke the system for everyone else when they changed the system to accomodate colonial nations.

Didn't see anything in the patch notes on these nor anything on the message boards. There has obviously been a lot of noise on the forums recently, though, so my apologies if I missed it. But has anyone seen anything to indicate these are intentional design changes or bugs? I'm guessing the annexation one (#1) has to be a bug, but the others might be intentional, since there's an obvious attempt to channel colonies into colonial nations. Seems a bit of a shame that a medium sized power can't still try to grab a piece of the Maya, for example. I mean obviously they can still grab it, but it'll cost the same as a regular European province, with little tangible benefit.

Ayup.

 

[Zander]

Not sure if this is intentional or not. In theory, Europeans don't really need to core pagan provinces in the Americas anymore -- and the colonial nations shouldn't get a discount. That reasoning falls apart in Africa though, obviously. I think perhaps this is just a case of the developers failing to think through all of the repercussions of their removing the discount for colonial nations.

That is debatable, though, since historically most of Africa really shouldn't be getting annexed during this period. (And was certainly not assimilated in the same way that most of the New World was.)

 

[Hootieleece]

Makes sure you have a neighboring Colonial Nation or Colony or conquer 5 contiguous provinces to Create on upon treaty kicking in. I created Castillian Mexico and Castilian Peru out of Zapotecs and Incas without having to worry about coring costs. I even wasted some admin points coring the Mexican provinces.

 

[FrigidSoul]

That is debatable, though, since historically most of Africa really shouldn't be getting annexed during this period. (And was certainly not assimilated in the same way that most of the New World was.)

True enough -- from a historical perspective it makes sense that Europeans wouldn't get a discount to help them integrate whole swathes of African territory, but there's no reason to suspect that the developers had any intention of changing that aspect of the game's mechanics in 1.4.

Historically speaking, it doesn't really make sense to allow wholesale colonisation or even conquest in Africa at all, disregarding the northern coast and possibly South Africa. Rightly or wrongly though, the game sorta relies on the players' ability to own provinces there, both so that Europeans can create bases from which to trade/explore, and so that African countries have meaningful things to do (within the context of EU4's definition of 'meaningful'). The way I prefer to rationalize it is to imagine that provinces are abstractions representing a wide range of different circumstances. YMMV.