Tired of seeing AI Castile & Portugal in Canada, can this PLEASE be fixed?

[LiberiusX]

I really am beginning to wonder if the lack of attention paid to this problem is because it is in fact unfixable without scripting Spain and Portugal's colonization targets.

I will say this. I find this problem so annoying that I don't bother buying the major DLCs at full price(I don't buy the sprite packs and other nonsense). I picked up WoN, RP, and CoP in the bargain bin(75% off). I won't be buying AoW until it has a deep discount.

 

[D-A-C]

I absolutely despise seeing Spanish/Catalian Canada, especially when vast swathes of South America, Southern North America, the Caribbean and even Africa sit empty.

As people have mentioned, and it's a great argument, it can hardly be attributed to 'fun random chance' when it happens pretty much every time in the latest versions of the game.


How about scripting an event like Treaty of Tordesillas and have it fire roughly 75% of the time and that will enforce historical colonization priorities of Spain and Portugal, and then the other 25% have them reject it, maybe even cause a conflict or other repercussions and allow the random colonization (i.e. Canada) and that way everyone wins?

 

[Royalty27]

Agreed I've had this happen in 90% of my colonial games, be nice to have it fixed.

 

[Pugman]

This could be fixed with a better exploration mechanic. I think "explorers" should be done away with in terms of fleet leaders. Instead, you could choose a province to start exploring from for a monthly fee. Unexplored territory would slowly start being revealed in an area around that province. Northern countries would naturally discover North America sooner while southern countries like Spain and Portugal would discover the South America and the Caribbean sooner. After you've explored with a ship a few times it's just a chore anyway.

 

[Homer2101]

Ideally the AI should look to whether it is able to funnel trade into its home node from a colonial region before putting colonies into it. But it may be better and simpler to block certain countries from colonizing certain colonial regions if there's room elsewhere.

Iberian colonies in North America made some sort of sense in 1.7, when almost all trade from the Americas north of the equator was funneled into the Western Europe node, so trade from Chesapeake and St. Lawrence nodes could be funneled into Sevilla. Now it's impossible to funnel trade from Chesapeake or St. Lawrence into Sevilla, so there's no reason Spain or Portugal would put colonies in those trade nodes.

In general it seems that the AI doesn't do a proper cost-benefit analysis for its colonization targets. For example, in my current England game I stole all of Portugal's starting Atlantic islands, so it couldn't start colonizing Brazil and the Caribbean before me. Portugal promptly dropped a colony on the west coast of Africa, complete with negative annual population growth and single-digit chance of monthly population increase. Twenty or thirty years later, that colony now has 200/1000 population, +15 colonists per year, and 7% chance of monthly population increase.

So there should probably also be a hard block to prevent the AI from putting colonies in tropical provinces until 1550 or so.

The exploration mechanic seems okay. It would be neat if countries could designate claims for future settlement, and then other countries could choose whether or not to respect those claims.