What ideas to take as England?

[Ketilsen]

Ok, so I'm a fairly casual player, and what I want is to play England, go for trade and colonization, and completely ignore the continent (for the most part). I'm sure that I want the Trade, Exploration and Expansion ideas fairly early, and I'm sure I don't want any of the military ideas (at least not early), but I'm a little unsure of what order to take things, and how many other things to mix it up with (Economic? Administrative? there's a bunch of things that look good). What's your preferred order of Ideas (and technology) when playing England with an aim to trade and colonize? How soon do I need to start the colonial stuff to avoid Spain and Portugal eating up everything?

(Also: Is there a way to get Bermuda before Portugal eats it?)

Thanks for any tips!

 

[Denkt]

Trade, expansion, quality for 20% trade efficiency policy, maritime and expansion are ideas that come in my mind.
Well you could try to remove portugals forward provinces to slow them down in the colonization race.

 

[Mikalos]

avoid martime like the plague

 

[Ketilsen]

Trade, expansion, quality for 20% trade efficiency policy, maritime and expansion are ideas that come in my mind.
Well you could try to remove portugals forward provinces to slow them down in the colonization race.

In that order?

avoid martime like the plague

Really, why?

 

[yerm]

Maybe cause I'm lazy, but if I'm doing something like what you plan to, I actually like having defensive. Some of my biggest annoyances in a sprawling naval trade empire are rebels or other nonsense on a remote island that siege my crap before I can sail to it, and sometimes attrition. Defensive nails those, and tacks on a little army tradition which can suffer when super peaceful on top of it. Really ideal for how I play; maybe, maybe not for you.

Navy-related ideas are unnecessary. I think you'll hear that a lot here.

For Bermuda, this may be way more trouble than it's worth... once you get that explorer, while you're waiting to finish your Canadian starter colony, if you sail down and smack a few coastal jumping points, once the colony finishes you can immediately start coring south, and be in the Caribbean way faster waiting to core conquered land than waiting for a string of colonies to settle.

I like going exploration first expansion second, which means I'm exploring and at a tech discount (for policies and time) as I tech up diplo. Obviously, national focus diplomacy. I like defensive (as I said), but you may prefer to double down on diplo and get trade asap. In previous versions when I did this mess I'd have several extra colonies vs colonists, now with how silly England's potential income is, you may just wanna look to get huge trade wealth asap and massively oversettle.

 

[Ketilsen]

Maybe cause I'm lazy, but if I'm doing something like what you plan to, I actually like having defensive. Some of my biggest annoyances in a sprawling naval trade empire are rebels or other nonsense on a remote island that siege my crap before I can sail to it, and sometimes attrition. Defensive nails those, and tacks on a little army tradition which can suffer when super peaceful on top of it. Really ideal for how I play; maybe, maybe not for you.

Navy-related ideas are unnecessary. I think you'll hear that a lot here.

For Bermuda, this may be way more trouble than it's worth... once you get that explorer, while you're waiting to finish your Canadian starter colony, if you sail down and smack a few coastal jumping points, once the colony finishes you can immediately start coring south, and be in the Caribbean way faster waiting to core conquered land than waiting for a string of colonies to settle.

I like going exploration first expansion second, which means I'm exploring and at a tech discount (for policies and time) as I tech up diplo. Obviously, national focus diplomacy. I like defensive (as I said), but you may prefer to double down on diplo and get trade asap. In previous versions when I did this mess I'd have several extra colonies vs colonists, now with how silly England's potential income is, you may just wanna look to get huge trade wealth asap and massively oversettle.

So you take exploration as the first idea? I tried that my last game, but thought I'd screwed myself because my colonial range was only half-way into the atlantic and looking to stay that way for a long time (I think until diplo-lvl 7 or something), so I'd have time to do something else before starting with the exploration. Or is that actually a good plan?

I thought the naval ideas would be good because bigger fleet supply -> bigger trade fleet -> more money, but I suppose one can go over force limits without problem and still profit?

 

[yerm]

For navy, going over force limits isn't too big of a problem.

For colonizing as England, I'm nearly positive you MUST get quest for the new world, so you have to take exploration one way or the other. Filling the necessary ideas first and then teching up second means you spend less diplo points when researching while spending the same on ideas either way, for less total points from ideas first. You'll get a small reduction for having taken ideas and you'll get a reduction at least for the first few for neighbor bonus, when you get to them. You can also national focus dip and get a big dip advisor to max it out. No reason you can't be dip 7 and exp 3 while still at like military and admin 5.

 

[Denkt]

you can go over forcelimit and still make profit, an even better way however that you can use in africa and India is to grab all important trade centers and all river estuares and form trade comapanies in all these provinces, that should allow you to dominate trade in that area even without the ships.

 

[Meridian235]

Exploration => Expansion => Quantity idea is generally how I roll.

Standard colonizer opening, rush to Admin 4 and take Exploration. Get your explorer out and discover the Carribean while you take overseas exploration for the extra 50% range. Then race to Dip 7.

You can't reach Bermuda from England anymore with Dip 7, but you can hit a couple of eastern-most islands. This gives you a fairly quick 3 colonists and a nice head start on the new world. Quantity isn't the best military idea, but it does give you an extra colonist and more force limit to support overseas armies without impacting the home defense too much. Expansion also has a couple of nice extra features, including a diplomatic relations slot (giving you six with your national idea) as well as an extra merchant and trade boosts.

Regardless of what strategy you are going to take with England, I think exploration first with a rush to Dip 7 is a no-brainer. Expansion has a lot going for it too, so I don't really see a good reason not to take it second unless you are badly in need of a military idea. I managed to keep the northern french provinces and expand into Burgundy, spitting out and feeding Holland the non-HRE provinces of Flanders. Most of this happened before a military idea would even have been online, and the rest of the game was mainly peaceful colonization and trade until I finally decided to eat France for the hell of it in the 1700s.