Quote:
Originally Posted by DWetzel
I tend to try to get to 10 provinces per CN for the merchant then let them do their thing and sometimes help them out when I’m not ready to drop a colonist on a vacant land with 5000 angry natives.
Also, subsidizing your colonial nations to at least make sure they are wealthy enough to use their colonist is a good idea. If you build them up enough first that’s usually a non issue.
Yeah I've been snap subsidizing them for 2+ gold once they hit 5 provinces to nudge them to expand. For some reason that has stopped working on Thirteen Colonies and British Mexico (in fact, it never worked on the latter...all British Mexico provinces in this run so far have been either conquered by me or colonized by me, it's like they don't even have a colonist).
But hell, those Spice Islands provinces are quite lucrative. This is the first run where I've actually paid attention to the provinces I was colonizing and I've been snapping up the highest-developed ones first to both exploit them myself plus keep others from doing so. Quite a few of them start with double-digit development. One of them, Ambon, starts with 13 development! Which is weird because I'm pretty sure it's the tiniest one on the map.