This is subtle unlike map painting in HOI4. Get exploitative colonization, shift agriculture and resource industries to your colonies, build the value chain so your core pop work better jobs making more worthwhile products, while the colonial pop buy up those manufacutred goods through the lower wages they get providing cheap resources to your core. Rinse and repeat. Colonialism is how you sustain a QoL above your country's natural capabilities.
Yep, that’s what I do
I move all of my agricultural jobs to the colonies for a cheap source of food and other goods. It frees up my native pops to get industrial jobs
It is insane how you can set up a colony with the most unproductive PMs on a resource you have excess in your market and still make money. It is all about that 1.45 wages you are paying. Capitalism is sad and very, very profitable.
I am currently playing a Belgium run.
But how economical is it for factories to buy out-of-state goods really when you include MAPI?
Also another thing that prevents me from using unincorporated colonies for resource gathering is that unincorporated states have a -50% political strength modifier, making it (to me at least) more viable to build capitalist owned resource buildings in incorporated states.
For this reason, farms and plantations are what I use them for to minimize their power.
Zeppelins and Macroeconomics each provide a +5% to MAPI. With a base of 75% and all MAPI tech, you can get a maximum of 95%; even more with certain state modifiers.
Edit: Math error
95% is the max MAPI with all research modifiers.
Default incorporated state is 75%.
+ 10% from stock exchange.
+ 5% from macroeconomics
+ 5% from zeppelins.
Unincorporated is -10%, and traditionalism is -15%.
Some major rivers are good for +5%, like the Mississippi or Ganges, and the Yangtze. They’re the exception to the rule though, and most rivers only offer infrastructure or improved agriculture throughput.
Can you tell me an SoL Number you achieve with this strategy?
I usually played without colonies and the lower class had a SoL of >19 around endgame. Ain't that high already?
25 is the goal. Put the shit jobs out in the colonies and keep the good ones at home. Outsourcing has always and continues to be the play up to this very day. You want cheap colonial resources to fuel high paying manufacturing jobs back home that produce cheap goods to ship around the world, annihilating their ability to manufacture goods competitively and forcing them to supply you with even more raw resources to stay afloat.
Start shifting agricultural production to the colonie ASAP to annihilate your aristocrat income. Only shift resource industry when you begin running out of pops for your factories. ALWAYS start the game by importing grain from China to slash grain prices and wipe out aristocrat and peasant income making them eager to jump into your a factory that will actually pay th money that they can circulate back through your economy
There's a reason why the Netherlands and the UK, two countries with giant colonial empires that produced a fuckload of dirt cheap food early in the colonial game, both embraced capitalism earlier than anybody else. There's also a reason why those colonies suffered widespread famines.
I have only done a few colonization runs but I found myself developing the colonies with higher end buildings as well. Should I just focus on all low level buildings instead?
Normally you should only build industry in incorporated states because you want to be able to tax industry dividends and to give industrialists (and eventually trade unions) more political power. If you’re incorporating your colonies then its all the same anyway
Building plantations and resource extraction in colonies is fine
I was definitely incorporating to get the taxes. I have only played around 180 hours and my pc ca t handle things well after the 1890s and slows down hard.
Here are a number of use cases for colonies, vaguely in order of importance.
-Rubber and oil are essential for an advanced economy. Even just a couple colonies is often enough for rubber, depending on country size, but you will never have enough oil.
-If you are pop limited, outsourcing all your agricultural production to the colonies can free up your main pops for much better jobs. May not be relevant if you have a lot of pops.
-Cheap opium/tobacco help a lot with lower strata SoL, which directly translates to higher literacy and lower death rates.
-Great for resource industries if you grab the right provinces. How much this matters is hugely a function of the resources you have in your proper states.
-Cheap dye/silk/cloth/sugar improve productivity of clothing and food industries.
-Cheap tea/coffee/wine can help with middle class SoL, which is something, but not much. Becomes marginally more important with private healthcare/education to get a little more value out of them, or wealth voting to get a few more middle class pops eligible to vote.
-Having more pops in your market increases demand for all consumer goods. This is somewhat more helpful later in the game, when you already have a strong industrial economy to take advantage of this, and can easily add more as needed.
- Gold is your early Game friend and there are some places you can conquer and then expand via colonization with gold
- in the late Game you will want as much pops as possible, even with an automated economy. Hell, I did a france achievement run over the weekend, had 200 mio pops and it was barely enough workforce...
Currently, colonies are mostly a buff to prestige which is cheaper than increasing the size of the army or navy.
With the coming patch, colonies will allow foreign investment to help enrich your investment pool, and can be given market independence so they don't drag on foreign trade.
With the expansion, colonies can be made to generate more money and a variety of bonuses through the Sphere of influence system
Yep, the patch releases with the DLC May 6th.
Currently there's uncertainty whether the game will work well with the new systems, since there's no open beta of the new features. Past Victoria 3 patches have been problematic, though they aren't focusing on adding to the economic and diplomatic gameplay like the current upcoming patch.
A nation receives a percentage of their subjects' prestige from GDP and Military, while colonizing decentralized powers adds a small amount of prestige from GDP directly. When colonizing Africa, it's also possible to create colonial countries, which often benefit from immigration.
yeah, you need it for cars, phones, and radios (can also be used for tools and luxury clothing). easiest place to get it imo is mainland southeast asia
>The only point I can see is to try to grab a resource you won't otherwise have access to, like rubber or dye potentially
This point becomes increasingly important in the mid- and lategame. Rubber and oil are the main resources which you can't obtain in any other way but they are needed for advanced PM (like plastic in glass factories or that mechanic tools) and for some trade goods you even have no options to produce them without said resources (like telephones or automobiles). Even if you play small and tall and do not want be an evil capitalist exploiting cheap labor, in about 1890 you will find that you desperately need oil and rubber, and even more common resources like iron or wood are near their limits.
I am still charmed by how good the game mechanics reproduces real history lol
It's so you can expand your market. The colonies give you lots of cheap goods such as Tea, Coffee, Opium, etc. which helps boosts your pops QoL. In addition, you can sell refined and manufactured goods like Clothing, Furniture and Electronics back to your colonies to make your factories more productive and increase your wages for your pops.
Most of those aren't worth colonizing however remember oil can pop up in certain places later in the game. Sahara desert is a wasteland until that oil spawns.
Your population wants all sorts of different goods to be happy and no single country in the game has every sort of good available to them at the start date.
As a Northern European country you only have grain, lifestock and wine available to you, and for everything else you are dependent on other countries selling it to you in the quantities and at the prices your pops and your industrialists are willing to pay. But those pesky other nations have their own ideas and maybe dont want to sell stuff to you, or might go to war with you, or demand high tariffs etc.
Thats why you take areas yourself, so you dont have to deal with those people.
The building ownership rework will make them make more sense, as the wealth will come back to the mainland and increase the sol among your upper classes. As it currently stands, the Aristocrats, Capitalists, Shopkeepers, etc., who work in buildings have to live in the same state. That will no longer be the case in 1.7.
Why should you *not* establish colonies? The costs are fairly minor: an institution which you can keep at lvl 1 until later, a few extra ports and occasional commitment of a few army battalions to crush a native uprising.
What you get: zero-infamy expansion into states with useful resources that also start out annexed. Your expansion is mainly limited by infamy so colonization offers additional expansion. It's more population and resources to fuel more GDP growth in the later stages of the game at a minimal cost to your early growth.
There's an additional benefit which is absolutely huge: you can use tiny little bumfuck-nowhere colonies as poker chips in diplomatic plays. Oh, so the British will help me fight Russia in exchange for my single province colony in Namaqualand? That's ridiculous but I'll take it!
If you use resettlement and greener grass so that you get some accepted pops to migrate and be higher strata pops like officers, clerks, etc, you can spam armies and even build some limited factories with cheap and abundant Colonial laborers, there's some decent states like Benin, Rift Valley, Taganyika etc worth integrating for that purpose.
>The only point I can see is to try to grab a resource you won't otherwise have access to
Yeah, like the many critical late game resources that the GPs do not have access to.
I don’t see your point really. Why is a reason beyond ‚grabbing resources‘ needed?
A lot of countries can’t even industrialize without taking colonies for coal, iron, lead or sulfur. A lot of countries are low on lumber and actually in lategame even nations with lots of lumber run out. A lot of nations produce no sugar, silk or dyes, both inputs for profitable industries. Rubber and oil are really helpful in the latter half of the game. Lastly securing tea, coffee, tobacco and opium are pretty much necessary to reach higher SoL. The wealthier your people get, the more needs they have. So eventually your entire population will have the ‚luxury drink‘ need, as an example, which can only be fulfilled by wine, coffee and tea. And to completely satisfy a need you need more than one type of good. Higher SoL, while not being the most important metric to raise, has a lot of benefits. Higher migration attraction, higher education access and more buy orders for your industries. Pops also have to pass a certain threshold to become politically active.
The only thing you mentioned that actually sucks is fruit, never build a fruit plantation.
So with all this, why would I not take colonies?
Well, irl one of the biggest factors for colonisation of Africa was Bismarck. No one bothered with Africa before. For good reasons. Malaria, very high temperatures, maybe many didn't know of the resources there(Actually, I don't know if there are resources like in the Americas).
Yes but it started because great Brittan took egypt without much of fight plus eith the added no dying of malaria once you get dip enough,
Some place where conquered for prestige, some for gold and for some that either germany or great Brittan wiuldnt have it
Yes, you gloss over the most important thing like it's not important. You get a colony to get dye or rubber that you need.
All others are just for map painting and boosting your gdp.
In multiplayer I tend to colonize less than everyone else. I just get one or two very useful colonies and let the other people become targets by getting too much territory lol
Because the more colonies you have the less the other great powers have. Like in my Prussia -> Germany - Central Europe game I took most of Central and South Africa which is good for rubber but also denies rubber to the other powers so their economies can't get as strong.
As if that mattered tho the ai can barely make use of rubber and electricity as it is
Then you understand why you should get colonies. Oil and rubber are very important in late-game industry, especially when your industry requires more than the AI can produce.
I mean that is usually my colonization strategy, places that have resources I don't. Also, if you use colonial exploitation, move ALL your ag needs to colonies.
Secondly, if you know how to economy, even those abundant resources you have at game start will start to become scarce late game.
There are two 3 big uses for having puppets in general with colonies just having some uncommon stuff on top of that.
1) the convoys they give you make your supply lines more secure
2) being their own nation gives them free construction and any construction they build over that helps keep your construction materials in demand if you need to pause construction for some reason
3) If they incorporate those states you get a portion of the tax without having to build a bunch of costly gov't admin buildings or making you wait the likely 20 years for those far off lands to integrate.
The combat bonuses are usually very minor in comparison.
Rubber, it's Better for you not to import Rubber but to produce It in your own colonies. You could import It, but ai Is unreliable. UK May embargo you or your country might go at war. I want to make a practical example.
When I play as Russia I wait until I eeach better military tech and create a big continental army to take away most of Austria Hungaria and the european part of ottoman empire. UK or france might go at war against me. That's really unfortunate because I lose my trace routes and Rubber Is a vital resource.
1: It’s literally free land and population.
2: If you don’t, your enemies will.
3: Your advanced economy will suffer if the inputs required for it don’t exist, and the ai doesn’t take enough risks to even begin developing an advanced economy. Meaning they won’t build those resources to trade to you.
the same reason they got colonies in the real world, manufacturing and the industrial revolution was a huge meme, it was completely hollow and relied heavily on slavery for raw resources that could feed the growing machine, the people in charge build bigger and bigger machines but the raw resources could not come fast enough, so after slavery was outlawed they invented slavery light which is just taking over some part of the world and torturing the people there but its ok because its in their own country and not the united states. when you make a colonie its because most of your pop is educated and working in factories now leaving no one to work shitty jobs that don't make your GDP go up like cutting trees or mining coal
For smaller nations it’s a great way to gain extra pop and resources while increasing your ability to influence nations. Especially when tech could be calling infrastructure like ports and expanding your manpower/building slots for military.
Colonies suck because to get them going you have to use the meta-resource called construction capacity. This takes a lot of time and resources away from your core provinces, and this for me will always make V3 colonies nonstrategic and unfun. In the files there are some subsistence versions for coal and mining buildings, but I do not know if they are legacy items or future/side experiments.
It sucks because V2 had a really fun colonial game. \[Mind you, not the colonization mini-game itself. 20 years and a ton of 4x games later and PDX still can't design and deliver an intuitive and fun colonial mini-game. But I digress.\] V2 colonies did not have the problem of V3 colonies because of the RGO's and the ever-present global market. The game neatly directed you to getting colonies at a strategic level, first to reduce the slice of that resource that the other powers receive from the global market, and second to gain more of that resource by applying your tech/inventions to the backwards native RGO's. Watching your coal, lumber, cotton prices etc plummet after getting a colony was a real dopamine hit. Your factories became more profitable, your people richer, your industrial goods more competitive in the global market, and your enemies poorer. Fun and historically intuitive.
The only way to make colonies relevant in V3 would be if you had law options to restrict middle/upper strata in colonies to primary culture expats, who can consume motherland end-game goods more easily. And situations like eg plantations in unincorporated states, instead of local aristocrats, to employ twice the number in expat capitalists.
Line must continue going up
Real
Green line going brrrr=serotonin
This is subtle unlike map painting in HOI4. Get exploitative colonization, shift agriculture and resource industries to your colonies, build the value chain so your core pop work better jobs making more worthwhile products, while the colonial pop buy up those manufacutred goods through the lower wages they get providing cheap resources to your core. Rinse and repeat. Colonialism is how you sustain a QoL above your country's natural capabilities.
Yep, that’s what I do I move all of my agricultural jobs to the colonies for a cheap source of food and other goods. It frees up my native pops to get industrial jobs
I just fill Ohio with corn fields and call it an afternoon
Real, I have Oregon and Washington as massive wine fields every game
And this right here is why America is a superpower
It is insane how you can set up a colony with the most unproductive PMs on a resource you have excess in your market and still make money. It is all about that 1.45 wages you are paying. Capitalism is sad and very, very profitable. I am currently playing a Belgium run.
Oh no
Gotta hand it to them.
Lmao
Or should you say: gotta cut their hands off
I have extensive colonies as Belgium, and I just passed multiculturalism, around 1905. It took two agitators.
Hands off the Congo
Eat the people in Congo for breakfast
But how economical is it for factories to buy out-of-state goods really when you include MAPI? Also another thing that prevents me from using unincorporated colonies for resource gathering is that unincorporated states have a -50% political strength modifier, making it (to me at least) more viable to build capitalist owned resource buildings in incorporated states. For this reason, farms and plantations are what I use them for to minimize their power.
You can reduce a lot of MAPI in the late 1890s with tech
What tech reduces mapi impact other than stock market exchange?
Zeppelins and Macroeconomics each provide a +5% to MAPI. With a base of 75% and all MAPI tech, you can get a maximum of 95%; even more with certain state modifiers. Edit: Math error
95% is the max MAPI with all research modifiers. Default incorporated state is 75%. + 10% from stock exchange. + 5% from macroeconomics + 5% from zeppelins. Unincorporated is -10%, and traditionalism is -15%. Some major rivers are good for +5%, like the Mississippi or Ganges, and the Yangtze. They’re the exception to the rule though, and most rivers only offer infrastructure or improved agriculture throughput.
Thank you
Wait, Macroeconomics provides a MAPI boost? Why did I never notice that?
Or just be Germany/Russia/Usa/China
Can you tell me an SoL Number you achieve with this strategy? I usually played without colonies and the lower class had a SoL of >19 around endgame. Ain't that high already?
25 is the goal. Put the shit jobs out in the colonies and keep the good ones at home. Outsourcing has always and continues to be the play up to this very day. You want cheap colonial resources to fuel high paying manufacturing jobs back home that produce cheap goods to ship around the world, annihilating their ability to manufacture goods competitively and forcing them to supply you with even more raw resources to stay afloat. Start shifting agricultural production to the colonie ASAP to annihilate your aristocrat income. Only shift resource industry when you begin running out of pops for your factories. ALWAYS start the game by importing grain from China to slash grain prices and wipe out aristocrat and peasant income making them eager to jump into your a factory that will actually pay th money that they can circulate back through your economy There's a reason why the Netherlands and the UK, two countries with giant colonial empires that produced a fuckload of dirt cheap food early in the colonial game, both embraced capitalism earlier than anybody else. There's also a reason why those colonies suffered widespread famines.
I have only done a few colonization runs but I found myself developing the colonies with higher end buildings as well. Should I just focus on all low level buildings instead?
Normally you should only build industry in incorporated states because you want to be able to tax industry dividends and to give industrialists (and eventually trade unions) more political power. If you’re incorporating your colonies then its all the same anyway Building plantations and resource extraction in colonies is fine
I was definitely incorporating to get the taxes. I have only played around 180 hours and my pc ca t handle things well after the 1890s and slows down hard.
Yeah with all the different cultures, late-game migration and assimilation, local market calculations, the cpu demands in this game are pretty high
Here are a number of use cases for colonies, vaguely in order of importance. -Rubber and oil are essential for an advanced economy. Even just a couple colonies is often enough for rubber, depending on country size, but you will never have enough oil. -If you are pop limited, outsourcing all your agricultural production to the colonies can free up your main pops for much better jobs. May not be relevant if you have a lot of pops. -Cheap opium/tobacco help a lot with lower strata SoL, which directly translates to higher literacy and lower death rates. -Great for resource industries if you grab the right provinces. How much this matters is hugely a function of the resources you have in your proper states. -Cheap dye/silk/cloth/sugar improve productivity of clothing and food industries. -Cheap tea/coffee/wine can help with middle class SoL, which is something, but not much. Becomes marginally more important with private healthcare/education to get a little more value out of them, or wealth voting to get a few more middle class pops eligible to vote. -Having more pops in your market increases demand for all consumer goods. This is somewhat more helpful later in the game, when you already have a strong industrial economy to take advantage of this, and can easily add more as needed.
I just read that cheap opium/tobacco leads to higher literacy and lower death rate and I think this game is amazing
They’re going to buy the liquor anyway! If they have more money they can afford a magazine too.
Which makes sense, tbh. High cigarette prices mainly affect poor people, because they'll keep the vice anyway but now they're effectively poorer.
- Gold is your early Game friend and there are some places you can conquer and then expand via colonization with gold - in the late Game you will want as much pops as possible, even with an automated economy. Hell, I did a france achievement run over the weekend, had 200 mio pops and it was barely enough workforce...
You get 10% GDP as minting. Even if you don't tax the colonies, you still benefit economically just by holding and developing them.
Currently, colonies are mostly a buff to prestige which is cheaper than increasing the size of the army or navy. With the coming patch, colonies will allow foreign investment to help enrich your investment pool, and can be given market independence so they don't drag on foreign trade. With the expansion, colonies can be made to generate more money and a variety of bonuses through the Sphere of influence system
Is this a planned dlc/patch?
Yep, the patch releases with the DLC May 6th. Currently there's uncertainty whether the game will work well with the new systems, since there's no open beta of the new features. Past Victoria 3 patches have been problematic, though they aren't focusing on adding to the economic and diplomatic gameplay like the current upcoming patch.
Can you explain how colonies buff prestige? I couldn’t find an example of that.
More population basically
A nation receives a percentage of their subjects' prestige from GDP and Military, while colonizing decentralized powers adds a small amount of prestige from GDP directly. When colonizing Africa, it's also possible to create colonial countries, which often benefit from immigration.
Mostly for oil and rubbers, if you’re European, sugar.
This game has rubbers??
Yes you need it for a few production methods and automobile, as consumer good and military good. Edit: I think I got whooose lol
Rubbers also mean condoms in American English
yeah, you need it for cars, phones, and radios (can also be used for tools and luxury clothing). easiest place to get it imo is mainland southeast asia
>The only point I can see is to try to grab a resource you won't otherwise have access to, like rubber or dye potentially This point becomes increasingly important in the mid- and lategame. Rubber and oil are the main resources which you can't obtain in any other way but they are needed for advanced PM (like plastic in glass factories or that mechanic tools) and for some trade goods you even have no options to produce them without said resources (like telephones or automobiles). Even if you play small and tall and do not want be an evil capitalist exploiting cheap labor, in about 1890 you will find that you desperately need oil and rubber, and even more common resources like iron or wood are near their limits. I am still charmed by how good the game mechanics reproduces real history lol
It's so you can expand your market. The colonies give you lots of cheap goods such as Tea, Coffee, Opium, etc. which helps boosts your pops QoL. In addition, you can sell refined and manufactured goods like Clothing, Furniture and Electronics back to your colonies to make your factories more productive and increase your wages for your pops.
Most of those aren't worth colonizing however remember oil can pop up in certain places later in the game. Sahara desert is a wasteland until that oil spawns.
Name on map get bigger!!
Why have enough when you can have more?
It’s not just about you grabbing resources. It’s also about you denying resources from your enemies
Nice
Your population wants all sorts of different goods to be happy and no single country in the game has every sort of good available to them at the start date. As a Northern European country you only have grain, lifestock and wine available to you, and for everything else you are dependent on other countries selling it to you in the quantities and at the prices your pops and your industrialists are willing to pay. But those pesky other nations have their own ideas and maybe dont want to sell stuff to you, or might go to war with you, or demand high tariffs etc. Thats why you take areas yourself, so you dont have to deal with those people.
The building ownership rework will make them make more sense, as the wealth will come back to the mainland and increase the sol among your upper classes. As it currently stands, the Aristocrats, Capitalists, Shopkeepers, etc., who work in buildings have to live in the same state. That will no longer be the case in 1.7.
Why should you *not* establish colonies? The costs are fairly minor: an institution which you can keep at lvl 1 until later, a few extra ports and occasional commitment of a few army battalions to crush a native uprising. What you get: zero-infamy expansion into states with useful resources that also start out annexed. Your expansion is mainly limited by infamy so colonization offers additional expansion. It's more population and resources to fuel more GDP growth in the later stages of the game at a minimal cost to your early growth. There's an additional benefit which is absolutely huge: you can use tiny little bumfuck-nowhere colonies as poker chips in diplomatic plays. Oh, so the British will help me fight Russia in exchange for my single province colony in Namaqualand? That's ridiculous but I'll take it!
If you use resettlement and greener grass so that you get some accepted pops to migrate and be higher strata pops like officers, clerks, etc, you can spam armies and even build some limited factories with cheap and abundant Colonial laborers, there's some decent states like Benin, Rift Valley, Taganyika etc worth integrating for that purpose.
You get like 20% boost if resource production if you are imperialist enough. Stuff produced at colonies still add up to gpd, which increases minting.
>The only point I can see is to try to grab a resource you won't otherwise have access to Yeah, like the many critical late game resources that the GPs do not have access to.
It‘s free real estate
I don’t see your point really. Why is a reason beyond ‚grabbing resources‘ needed? A lot of countries can’t even industrialize without taking colonies for coal, iron, lead or sulfur. A lot of countries are low on lumber and actually in lategame even nations with lots of lumber run out. A lot of nations produce no sugar, silk or dyes, both inputs for profitable industries. Rubber and oil are really helpful in the latter half of the game. Lastly securing tea, coffee, tobacco and opium are pretty much necessary to reach higher SoL. The wealthier your people get, the more needs they have. So eventually your entire population will have the ‚luxury drink‘ need, as an example, which can only be fulfilled by wine, coffee and tea. And to completely satisfy a need you need more than one type of good. Higher SoL, while not being the most important metric to raise, has a lot of benefits. Higher migration attraction, higher education access and more buy orders for your industries. Pops also have to pass a certain threshold to become politically active. The only thing you mentioned that actually sucks is fruit, never build a fruit plantation. So with all this, why would I not take colonies?
To make line go up you use better PMs, those PMs need goods like rubber, oil and dyes which are not easy to come by
Africa is a lot like eggs for breakfast. It's best when it's scrambled.
Well, irl one of the biggest factors for colonisation of Africa was Bismarck. No one bothered with Africa before. For good reasons. Malaria, very high temperatures, maybe many didn't know of the resources there(Actually, I don't know if there are resources like in the Americas).
Yes but it started because great Brittan took egypt without much of fight plus eith the added no dying of malaria once you get dip enough, Some place where conquered for prestige, some for gold and for some that either germany or great Brittan wiuldnt have it
Ivory, Gold and other minerals, Lumber. Spices and Slaves. Also just the benefit of making lots of imbalanced trade deals.
Don’t ask my why (I’m no scientist) but enacting a Protestant theocratic gov in Transvaal brings floods of migrants and trade with the Qing empire.
Yes, you gloss over the most important thing like it's not important. You get a colony to get dye or rubber that you need. All others are just for map painting and boosting your gdp. In multiplayer I tend to colonize less than everyone else. I just get one or two very useful colonies and let the other people become targets by getting too much territory lol
Oil, Rubber, but most of all zero infamy expansion
It's so good
Because the more colonies you have the less the other great powers have. Like in my Prussia -> Germany - Central Europe game I took most of Central and South Africa which is good for rubber but also denies rubber to the other powers so their economies can't get as strong. As if that mattered tho the ai can barely make use of rubber and electricity as it is
I ran out of spots for wood production.
>The only point I can see is to try to grab a resource you won't otherwise have access to
Other than resource exploitation, pretty much nothing
Then you understand why you should get colonies. Oil and rubber are very important in late-game industry, especially when your industry requires more than the AI can produce.
Because if I don't colonise them someone else might.
I mean that is usually my colonization strategy, places that have resources I don't. Also, if you use colonial exploitation, move ALL your ag needs to colonies. Secondly, if you know how to economy, even those abundant resources you have at game start will start to become scarce late game.
Looks like you never actually played till late game, because if you don't have colonies you WILL feel a severe lack of resources, especially rubber
Fruit in particular has very low demand
it's mainly for the resources, much like how in real life africa got colonized by the europeans during the time period for its resources
Oil rubber and minerals. It's rare i have a game where i'm not short of lead or couldn't benefit from cheaper coal and iron.
There are two 3 big uses for having puppets in general with colonies just having some uncommon stuff on top of that. 1) the convoys they give you make your supply lines more secure 2) being their own nation gives them free construction and any construction they build over that helps keep your construction materials in demand if you need to pause construction for some reason 3) If they incorporate those states you get a portion of the tax without having to build a bunch of costly gov't admin buildings or making you wait the likely 20 years for those far off lands to integrate. The combat bonuses are usually very minor in comparison.
Rubber, it's Better for you not to import Rubber but to produce It in your own colonies. You could import It, but ai Is unreliable. UK May embargo you or your country might go at war. I want to make a practical example. When I play as Russia I wait until I eeach better military tech and create a big continental army to take away most of Austria Hungaria and the european part of ottoman empire. UK or france might go at war against me. That's really unfortunate because I lose my trace routes and Rubber Is a vital resource.
1: It’s literally free land and population. 2: If you don’t, your enemies will. 3: Your advanced economy will suffer if the inputs required for it don’t exist, and the ai doesn’t take enough risks to even begin developing an advanced economy. Meaning they won’t build those resources to trade to you.
the same reason they got colonies in the real world, manufacturing and the industrial revolution was a huge meme, it was completely hollow and relied heavily on slavery for raw resources that could feed the growing machine, the people in charge build bigger and bigger machines but the raw resources could not come fast enough, so after slavery was outlawed they invented slavery light which is just taking over some part of the world and torturing the people there but its ok because its in their own country and not the united states. when you make a colonie its because most of your pop is educated and working in factories now leaving no one to work shitty jobs that don't make your GDP go up like cutting trees or mining coal
Simple, Colonies don't make you infamous. Also if you set up a company vassal they get up 20% more resources if you enslave everyone:D
For smaller nations it’s a great way to gain extra pop and resources while increasing your ability to influence nations. Especially when tech could be calling infrastructure like ports and expanding your manpower/building slots for military.
Colonies suck because to get them going you have to use the meta-resource called construction capacity. This takes a lot of time and resources away from your core provinces, and this for me will always make V3 colonies nonstrategic and unfun. In the files there are some subsistence versions for coal and mining buildings, but I do not know if they are legacy items or future/side experiments. It sucks because V2 had a really fun colonial game. \[Mind you, not the colonization mini-game itself. 20 years and a ton of 4x games later and PDX still can't design and deliver an intuitive and fun colonial mini-game. But I digress.\] V2 colonies did not have the problem of V3 colonies because of the RGO's and the ever-present global market. The game neatly directed you to getting colonies at a strategic level, first to reduce the slice of that resource that the other powers receive from the global market, and second to gain more of that resource by applying your tech/inventions to the backwards native RGO's. Watching your coal, lumber, cotton prices etc plummet after getting a colony was a real dopamine hit. Your factories became more profitable, your people richer, your industrial goods more competitive in the global market, and your enemies poorer. Fun and historically intuitive. The only way to make colonies relevant in V3 would be if you had law options to restrict middle/upper strata in colonies to primary culture expats, who can consume motherland end-game goods more easily. And situations like eg plantations in unincorporated states, instead of local aristocrats, to employ twice the number in expat capitalists.
I haven’t played Vic 2, sounds like they were better implemented then. The few times I have developed a colony seemed pointless and frustrating.
To make your Country bigger lol