Can someone give me a "colonizing for dummies" guide?
I'm playing a game as Holland to try something new, after I got QFTNW I started exploring around Africa, I had a colonial CB against Kongo so I started beating them down, then did the same to Mali after establishing a colony next to them. Here's where I'm at right now:
I have the Azores, Madeira, the Canarias, Cape Verde, a few colonies between Mali and Morocco, five provinces from Mali (three coastal, two inland), and two provinces from Kongo.
Anyway, I find this adventure eating through my finances and I'm not even sure why. I get that it's like 20 ducats a year to support a colony, but I've only established 7 colonies and I went from having like 1500 ducats with an income of 100+ per year to having 100 ducats and losing ~20 per year (and my island colonies have been full-fledged provinces for a few years now...).
Also, is there a way to tell if a province is worth establishing a colony in? Two of my African colonies are producing........grain, which makes me a little sad that I wasted hundreds of ducats on a **** colony. I know you guys were talking about the New World colonies and how awesome they are, is it just something you learn by trial and error when establishing colonies (which provinces are good and which ones aren't)?
Also, looking in the mission files I'm supposed to get a bunch of colonization missions for the Caribbean, America, Indonesia, etc. but they don't trigger until they're in my colonial range. Is there anything I can do (besides hire those ****ty +colonial range advisors) to speed that up?