After all these years of playing EU3, American Natives still felt like an unmet challenge to me. Each time I tried, it was the same story : some 100 years of high speed and uneventful playing, with paltry efforts to get some tech progress, until I met England, Castille, France or Portugal who immediatly crushed me in spite of all the diplomacy I could use. Very frustrating, unfair (after all ,North American tribes resisted European colonization well into the XIXth century in OTL) - and I couldn't help thinking about how Prawnstar had managed an almost world conquest with Iroquois (one of the first, and best, AARs I ever read on this forum). So... let's try it again. Iroquois, then, since they're not completely hopeless (as a tribal democracy they don't get tribal succession crisis for example).
I played the first century as patiently and wisely as I could. Didn't conquer Huron at once, but in the 1420's they betrayed me after I had vassalized them, and I also gained some cores against them in border disputes, so I finally annexed them. I made all the slider moves I had to in order to westernize. I chose Colonial ventures as my first NI, which allowed me to expand a bit towards the South (and make contact with Shawnee, Cherokee and Creek, which ended up in partial conquest and vassalization) ; and, prudently, towards the East Coast where I expected the European to show up sooner or later. Honestly though, I still didn't have much interest in that game so far. But something happened... or, in fact, didn't happen. 1500, then 1510 and 1520, and still no colonists were in sight. What was going on ? I gave a look at the world map...
Europe was a mess as usual, but with some special flavor : all the big colonizers had been destroyed by their non-colonizer neighbourgs. Castille was reduced to a shattered 3PM by Aragon, while Portugal had already vanished from the map. France got slaughtered by Burgundy. England was severly beaten by Scotland - but even reduced as a 4PM, they still chose QFTNW as their 3rd NI. So they discovered America... but only 50 years later did the new European superpowers take advantage of that discovery. By then, I was more than ready, with cores and forts in all my provinces.
Here is what the world looked like shortly before my first encounter with Aragon, which was going to allow me to westernize (an ephemeral colony in Gespeg, which I promptly destroyed with spies inciting natives to revolt once I had completed westernization).
I mentioned spies. I used them a lot, since I produced twice as much spies as colonists. This was very helpful because while I couldn't colonize very fast myself, I really needed to slow down European invasion of North America without wars of agression (didn't really needed them, since I was still weak and the Europeans DoWed me quite often - it was not Aragon though, rather that scary, enormous and agressive Burgundy).
Here is a closer view at the situation in early 17th century :
They really started to hate me after I began to get those coastal provinces. Even westernized with my army modernized, I got consistently DoWed not just by the big ones but actually by anyone (like the Papal State or Norway
) and the game remained pretty tough for the following century. But I kept calm, had a good peace pipe... and eventually managed to give those palefaces a taste of their own medicine, and kick them out of the continent. I wish I could do more, but this result was quite satisfying in itself. Well, I didn't even think about a WC, of course...
(A long time before, England had moved their capital to Pipil... I decided to keep them as a vassal, which proved useful in my last war against Aragon. Oh, and France had practically become Argentina).
STOP! COOKIE TIME