[Abe Sargent]

1 Sept, 1459 – After being delayed a few months by the outbreak of influenza in Cebu, we now have enough tech for our ADM to level up.


ADMIN TECH 5 –

Allows a Group of Ideas
+2% production efficiency


I immediately choose Exploration Idea Chain:


This is in the DIP group, so I haven’t just spent all of my saved power in the tech advancement. I can spend 400 to increase my Exploration Idea by 1 each time, in the given order. My current DIP tech is 372, so pretty soon I’ll get my first investment in exploration.


1 April, 1460 - I now have enough DIP saved up to invest:


Exploration Idea #1 –

Colonial Ventures – We gain a colonist


So let’s talk a bit about what that means. Either as a reminder or for those new to EU Game systems.

I can send my colonist to a place within my colonial range that is unclaimed by a major power, slowly over time, my colonists will grow in size. While my colonist is that site, the growth rate increases, and technically, I can pull it back and send it elsewhere, but you won’t typically seek to do that.

This is expensive. It costs money for each colony I have. If I underfund colonial growth, my growth rate drops heavily.

Right now my colonial range is 160, and range is determined from the nearest port you control and have cored to make it a key part of your identity. Thus, I can reach places like the rest of the Philippines or nearby islands, but not Taiwan or south Borneo.


I am choosing a native policy. Natives have three stats that matter – size, aggression, and ferocity. The first is how many native the area has, the next is how often they will rise up, and the third is how nasty that rise is. You ideally want something like Halmahera, a nearby island with 500 natives with the lowest possible aggressiveness and ferocity. In previous games, you would get a big economic jump out of keeping large numbers of natives healthy, and then bringing them into your colony, but you no longer get the size of the population in the province in real cash anymore. It’s about the development of your province not the population.


Three native policies are available:


Repression - +20 settler growth

Trading - -50% native uprising, native assimilation events possible

Coexistence - -100% uprising


Which one? I am going with something I would not normally do – Repression. Many of the areas around are nasty with huge numbers of angry people, with low chance for eruption, but huge results if they do, so I want to speed through the colonization as quickly as possible. I will also be colonizing tropical stuff specifically, and that can be harder (-10 to colony growth in a tropical colony)


I send colonists next door on Maguindanao island, east, to Caraga, next of my capital, and also the land route with a strait north to Leyte. I don’t want to base the nation of Maguindanao yet, instead

Our colony costs 2 gold monthly, by the by, so my trade is basically paying for my colony.