Still learning

[unmerged(7475)]

What are bad boy points? why do you get them and what affect does it have on your nation?
And whats the best way to colonize other regions? is it to send a colonist there and just hope that it is succesfull?
How the hell do you handle the budgeting with the technology and so on?

Sorry to be a ball ache.

 

[unmerged(7288)]

I'm quite new myself and don't really understand BBs so I'll leave that bit to someone else.

Welcome to the happy world of EU by the way

You are probably aware that colonization has a % chance of success so if the number is in green you are in with a good shout of that colony taking. If there is a trading post of any level present you also get 5% For each level above 1 the chance increases by 5%. Conquistadors add 8% and it costs less (same for explorers in a port colony)

You sometimes may really like to build up a certain province but the cost is quite expensive and the odds not great (50% or so for 60+ odd gold) It may be worth sending 6 traders and then the colonist so the population is 160 when the colony takes, saving you a few years of natural population growth, but this does depend on which country you are. If you seem to be awash with colonists then its not a bad idea.

If you are Spain or Portugal it may also be worth letting the Pope help you out. The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the world between those two countries. Whilst in effect what this basically means is that you can march an army into another countrys colony and take it from them. I often share my maps before CoTs open in the new world, encouraging other contries to send colonists and then just march in later. Dirty eh?

Note this does not work on protestant or moslem countries so once you have given your map to Poland, Austria etc and they take a slap from Turkey (and believe me they will ) you will find moslems all over the place (although they seem to prefer east africa for some reason)

 

[The Andy-Man]

if you cant get many explorers/conquistadors, i found the best thing to do is colonize provinces with no natives (almost always works), trade post ones with 500 unaggressives ones.

Build up the colonies to colonial cities, and build troops and a few transports, land in provinces with natives and send colonists there then.

 

[unmerged(3627)]

Originally posted by Bravilor
What are bad boy points?

In a nutshell, the more badboy points you collect, the more likely it is that the entire rest of the world will declare war on you all at once, in order to prevent you becoming too big and powerful and upsetting the balance of stability in the world (think the large European coalitions against Napoleon, which fought to prevent France taking over the whole of Europe).

If you declare a war, and take provinces in victory, you are penalised 1 BB point for each province. This does not apply anywhere outside of Europe.
If you annex a country whole, you are penalised 5 BB points, *plus* one per province, and this applies throughout the world. So if you annex Japan whole, that's 5 for the annexation plus four provinces = BB goes up by nine.
There are also BB penalties for declaring war on any country within Europe, and/or on any country which is the same religion as yours, but I can never remember how big they are.

If your BB rating has gone much above 10, and nobody else has a higher one, it's very likely that the next time you get into a war of any sort, you'll find yourself being attacked by everybody and his dog. Unfortunately, you can only find out what it is by poking about in the savegame file (do a wordpad search for "badboy").

To avoid this happening, don't swallow countries whole but chew them up piecemeal, if they're outside Europe: conquer the Incas by taking two or three provinces every five years, until all they have left is the capital, then annex that. Also, keep an eye on which other countries are being greedy: often, Turkey will annex the entire Mameluke empire early in the game, which sends the Turk's BB rating through the roof. You can safely have a BB rating of 15, if Turkey's is already over 20.

 

[unmerged(1047)]

Yes, you'll only get ganged up on if you have the *most* badboy points - exactly how much that is doesn't really appear to matter. You can usually safely go to around 30-40 in the late 1500s, as Russia or Turkey will be above that by then.

There's about a dozen computer-controlled countries that usually end up with badboy points. Unsurprisingly these are the larger countries - the eight major powers (except Portugal), plus Sweden, Denmark, (later in the game) the Netherlands, and (in IGC, when you use the Unified option) Prussia. Usually it's Turkey, Russia and France early, and the rest start after the Reformation event.

Less often the small German or Italian countries wil rack them up, as taking out a whole country - even if it's only one province - will get you 3 to 4 times as many points as even a drastic victory over a larger country that gains 2 or 3 provinces. (The country's independence is worth the same number of points as about 5 provinces.)

There are mitigating factors that reduce the point costs for things, like declarations of war against non-European countries, or countries that have a different religion as you. Taking provinces outside Europe also will gain less points than provinces in Europe and its immediate surroundings (I believe you still get points on European terms for North Africa and western Asia, but I haven't actually tested this. It makes sense with the size of the usual Turkish and Russian point totals though).

Best choice when you get ganged up on is to stop expanding. Fight only the alliance leaders (ignore the allies), and capture a province or two, and force them into either a white peace or a small-tribute peace (in your favor if you can). Once you're at peace with everyone, the wars should stop (countries will usually only declare badboy wars if the badboy is already at war), and then you can simply sit back and wait for your points to decrease (they do slowly, but so do everyone else's) or for one of the computer countries to do some conquering and get more points than you again.

 

[SideshowBob]

Badboy pretty much covered but a few others it goes down 1 point every 4 years, so take things steady through the whole length of the game and don't go mad at the start.

To find out what yours is find your saved game, go my computer/program files/Paradox/EU/senarios/saved games (i think thats the path) and look for your saved game. There will be two entries for each save, a big one 2000k or so and a tiny one 1k. Douple click on the big one and your computer should default to wordpad to open it. On the toolbar at the top are some binoculars (find next), click on this and type badboy, then keep hitting find next and it will jump through all the countries. Your countries TAG should be your first three letters ie FRA = France (a few are different but this is true 95%)

Colonising, countries get a bonus to colonise areas which they did historically so i normally start off getting historical areas, ie north america for England, central and carribean for Spain, Brazil for Portugal.

Then i check the natives, if they are medium aggressive or above i kill them, (move an army in and keep hitting attack natives) if they are below i try to get them to join my colony (just colonise with natives still there).

Thirdly i check what the province produces, go for Tobacco, Naval supplies, Sugar, Spice, Chinaware, first. Leave things like fish and wool till later (ie when you have spare colonists)

Finally if you have any explorers or conquestadors with nothing to do, (not as unusual as it sounds) get them to the provinces you are currently trying to colonise as they increase the chance. Also a TP before you try a level 1 colony also increases the chance.

Budgeting, start of the game everything into stability until its at +3, then switch everything to land until i can build cannons, (if i'm naval at all everything to naval until i can build transport ships) then after that everything into trade until i can do monoplies, then everything to infrastructure until i can promote governors (reduce inflation, very good) After that it doesn't really matter, you should be strong enough by this point, whatever i feel like, depends on the type of game i'm playing. For example if i'm someone like Austria and i really really want to colonise then everything back to Naval until i can build golden shipyards.

I either take nil money from my treasury if i am playing a big country (lots of provinces to build governors later to reduce inflation) or run at full left (negative money) for small countries.

If you run at full right (max money) for one year you will get 1% inflation, so sometimes i will take this inflation hit for just one year to get enough money to fight a big war.

Hope this helps, welcome to the forum

 

[unmerged(6909)]

Addition to % when colonizing with a conq./explorer:

The percentage added to the chance of success is determined by the movement factor. It's 3% per point iirc. A conquistador with a movement factor of 5 will add 15% while a conquistador with a 3 would add only 9%.

You can also use your explorer if you want to send another colonist to an already existing colony with a port.