Natives in India

[unmerged(35125)]

I apologize if this question comes up often, but bear with me.

Playing as Vijayanajanagar or whatever. I've got about 8 level 1 colonies with 5k-10k natives ranging from 5-9 aggressiveness. What to do? I'm planning on going free trade, narrowminded, and possibly even naval to try to develop them, and eventually grab Sri Lanka. Should I:

1. Kill off the natives?
2. Station 3k+ soldiers in every colony to quell native uprisings?
3. Ignore my colonies and just forget about it?

Very hard and furious by the way, don't know if that matters...

 

[Hallsten]

Try to quell them, if they revolt there's not much to do. Those areas are supposed to be difficult to colonize. If you can get natives to join it's very good though!

 

[unmerged(4344)]

You'll need more than 3k troops to put down those natives, unless your tech is fairly advanced. You'll definitely want to kill off the natives that are more aggressive than say level 6, and even those are questionable. Aggressiveness 3 and below you definitely want to keep and incorporate; 4 and 5 are borderline. In any case, you should choose two provinces to kill the natives on and colonize first, in order to get your first 20 colonization attempts out of the way and the associated malus. Then tackle the easy natives. By this time, it's likely that your other colonies are lost - no big deal. The empty provinces will last for a while, often the entire game, without AIs being able to colonize them effectively. (They'll try and get their colonies or TPs killed by the natives.) If the AIs do wipe out the natives anywhere, then you do want to jump on it.

It's very useful to know the "provoke and run" tactic for these aggressive natives. Immediately after natives have appeared if they win the battle, there will be a brief window where they are not counted as being there and you can colonize with better chances. So, when you're trying a new colony, move in, attack the natives, and run, making sure to pause. Send the colonist then.

 

[unmerged(35125)]

I've already had a few colonies where I've killed off all the natives from them revolting so much, so it's sort of unavoidable. If I dwindle down their numbers, they regenerate back up to 10k, but if I completely kill them off, they stay dead. Natives can't suddenly reappear, can they?

Edit:

The natives have really become a non-issue. They rise up every couple of months, but have very low morale. My patience with colonists was rewarded with Pondeberry (?) jumping from 899 people to 10900 in one day. YAY! Unfortunately, colonists are damn expensive. I moved my sliders too much toward colonization and I can't afford to send them all. I get almost 2 a year but I can afford less than 1 a year.... But Vivayanajanagar is fun. I'm the only Hindu nation so tech costs are absolutely nuts (no neighbor bonus) and I only have the one border to defend. It's been really interesting.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

State religion doesn't affect neighbour bonus, tech group does. I think your tech costs are high because you're in the Chinese group - what often happens in this case is that Indian and SE Asian nations eat each other until only one or two are left, while China and Japan partition Korea, followed by China diplo-annexing the Japanese thanks to the new land border. This leaves you with very few tech neighbours.

 

[unmerged(35125)]

So I suppose it would probably be in my best interests to reduce countries like Dai Viet and Arakan to one territory and vassalize them instead of outright annexing them? Neighbor bonus would be nice. 1470-something and I'm at land 1, naval 1, trade 2, infra 2, and apparently I'm the most advanced of all the SE Asian countries... All my muslim neighbors are land 3....scary already.

 

[unmerged(4344)]

One thing you ought to do is discover Japan then swap maps with them. Once they are no longer isolated, their rich provinces will tend to tech pretty fast. Eventually you'll get a bit of leader bonus from them.

But generally, in the Chinese group don't worry about keeping enough nations alive to get a leader bonus, since it won't happen.