Settlements in wasteland - a Colonization problem.

[Featauril]

The problem is that your solution is just as bad as Paradox's!

For instance, it totally fails to represent the trade that operated in uncolonizable places like the hudson bay or inner Canada, or the American interior prior to the Conquest of Canada.

If your suggestion would go through, in the seven years war there would be New Orleans, Quebec, Montreal, and Nova Scotia colonized and some area around the thirteen colonies with vaste wastelands dividing them. You very well know that fighting occured all over the country.

I think that the solution is to model trade posts, religious missions, native alliances, etc... in "non-colonizable places" somehow, and have them colored your own color without being real colonies. It would be another reason to use missionaries, diplomats, merchants, etc...

 

[suplanter]

This is basking into fantasy land.

this is a video game. if that isnt the very definition of fantasy land then i dont know what is. as players we all have a wide range of goals and needs and my need is to see the whole world ruled by my historically based fantasy kingdom. if your needs and wants are different i can appreciate that but i would still like to see wasteland go away.

 

[unmerged(189294)]

I know this sounds a little far fetched but looking at how Britain was able to colonize India through the use of merchants and cash.
You should be able to send merchants to individual provinces, once a certain number of merchants have reached, a trading post is set up.
This will add penalties (and maybe some advantages) to the nation that harbors the trading post and the nation of the merchants gain advantages.
However the nation that harbors the trading post can choose to either close it down or keep it running.


This will in turn give the nation who sent the merchants a causus belli to invade the nation .
As you guessed you need to have the correct cash requirement and the correct trade level.
This way it's much more believable way to colonize India.

This could also tie into mercantilist vs. free trade sliders. Full mercantilist would reduce the chance of other nations setting up trading posts in your territories whereas free trade allows lots of nations to set up trading posts easily. Alternatively when a nation attempts to set up a trading post in your nation (which would lead to a slight reduction in income from internal trade, a value dependent on the nations size, trade goods and province improvements), you can chose to either agressively oppose the venture, or to allow it but impose tarriffs. Wars could then be fought with the CB of 'remove tarriffs on our merchants (probably requires a high mercantilist slider setting), or some form of link between trade agreements being broken and the allowance of a subjugation CB.

 

[Phainx]

@cymreg


I think we have a solid idea but who would back us or agree with us ?

 

[Lennart Stek]

Personally, i would like this to be a choice. Like, you could play a unrealistic version and one realistic.

 

[Niptium]

Even if the trading post idea was a good one - it was taken out in EU3. In fact, trading posts might be the only solution here since it would enable trade in the said province but these trading posts would be easily destroyable because no settlement can sustain them.

 

[Gwyn ap Nud]

Large amounts of Amerindians ? Nowadays Québec territory had, from rhe latest estimates between 2 000 and 4 000 Natives roaming. We have to take into account that Amerindian populations in nowaday Canada's territories were quite small by all account. After all, the hunting gathering lifestyles could not support much more. Only the Hurons on the Ontarian peninsula had villages and agriculture and a few thousand individuals (less than 6000 actually)

False. Before the series of crippling plagues, North America was surprisingly densely populated. There are parts of the Great Lakes that were described as being literally mile upon mile of village, with hardly any wilderness in between. Early explorers say that the population along the Eastern Coast was so densely populated that you could smell the bonfires far out to sea. In 1250, the city of Cahokia, modern day Illinois, was as large or larger than London at the same time (though I admit that's out of the time period)
As for what you said about the Huron? It takes almost NO research at all to find that at the time of first European contact, before being ravaged by disease both accidentally and purposefully transmitted to them by the Europeans, the Huron Confederacy numbered between 20 and 40 thousand.
As for modern Quebec being almost uninhabited? The St. Lawrence Iroquoians you may remember as the native group contacted by Jacques Cartier, specifically at the village of Stadacona, modern day Quebec City. That group ALONE is thought to have numbered 120,000, divided amongst 25 distinct nations or countries. The larger villages could have 2000 people in them. Of course, by the time Samuel Champlain arrived, they had disappeared, for unknown reasons.

While perhaps not being strong or centralized enough to warrant inclusion as a playable nation, to say that the continent was empty is, to say the least, wrong.

The Huron, Iroquois, and Algonquin people all had complex sedentary or semi-sedentary societies by the time of European contact. The various Mississippi valley cultures USED to have HUGE sedentary cultures and metropolises, before their culture disintegrated probably no more than a decade before the arrival of the Europeans.

95% of the native peoples died of plague from the very first european contacts, long before the large-scale colonization. THAT is why there are so few Natives.

 

[Niptium]

I didn't say it was empty. I said the Amerindian populations in today's Canadian territory was small by all account. You seem to have the estimates from wild guesses in the 1960 that have long proved wrong.

 

[Jongoster]

This could also tie into mercantilist vs. free trade sliders. Full mercantilist would reduce the chance of other nations setting up trading posts in your territories whereas free trade allows lots of nations to set up trading posts easily. Alternatively when a nation attempts to set up a trading post in your nation (which would lead to a slight reduction in income from internal trade, a value dependent on the nations size, trade goods and province improvements), you can chose to either agressively oppose the venture, or to allow it but impose tarriffs. Wars could then be fought with the CB of 'remove tarriffs on our merchants (probably requires a high mercantilist slider setting), or some form of link between trade agreements being broken and the allowance of a subjugation CB.

Agree and high free trade will open up your nation for merchant with little options to throw them out without repercussions but will allow you to set up trading posts elsewhere easy. Mercantilist would allow control over your nation, throw out foreign merchants easier but will lower your chance of succesfull trade posts. If you're a very free trading country you should get a CB to open up the market against nations who throw out your merchants but a very mercantilistic nation should instead get a CB to subjugate nations who throw out their merchants/keep them out of the market.

 

[Evie HJ]

I didn't say it was empty. I said the Amerindian populations in today's Canadian territory was small by all account. You seem to have the estimates from wild guesses in the 1960 that have long proved wrong.

Based on the census data and HBC records contained on National Atlas of canada, 5th edition, in the early-mid 19th century (end of the era, and after two-three centuries of disease), there were around 150 000 Amerindians in Canada at the time. Note that these numbers are based on census and estimates from later census and other records of the size of each individual band. Of these, the following were recorded in Quebec:

1339 Crees
2630 Montagnais
1597 Algonquins
687 Abenaki
79 Maliseet
640 Mikmaq
179 Huron
about 1500 Mohawk (approximate, since part of these lived in St Regis/Akwesasne, so some of their Canadian population were in Ontario, some in Quebec)

These add up, even if you don't count the Abenaki, Huron and Mohawk (1600s/1700s migrations), to 6285. (Counting the Huron, Abenaki and Mohawk, we get about 8650). This is significantly more than your high-end estimate for the native population of Quebec, and that's after much of the great dying-off. Again, we're not looking at baseless 1600 estimates here - we're looking at somewhat grounded data.

Considering that per Cartier, the Laurentians had several villages of several hundreds, if not 1000+, along the Saint Lawrence; and that archaeology bear out that they were essentially akin to the Hurons and Iroquois with their large-scale populations, your numbers appear very suspect to me.

-------------

As for sizeable settlements, I mean sizeable settlements in a North American colonial context: several hundreds amerindians living around a trading post. Not a large metropolis. But here Paradox's idiotic 1000 population requirement is to blame: colonies should turn into cities with a far lower population.

 

[Niptium]

Ok this is 19th Century data. So 300 years later and we add up less than 9 000 Natives. The 4000-5000 population I was talking about for Québec and that the latest historian estimates for the 17th Century sounds reasonable if you account for 300 years of slow population growth.

Anyways, this is not the topic of this thread. Let's not disgress.This debate for numbers is not relevant to the wasteland discussion.

 

[Evie HJ]

Really.

The Native American population increasing from 1600 to 1820-50 sounds like a reasonable estimate to you?

When pretty much all the evidence we have everywhere else indicate that there was a significant population loss at that time among Native people?

The 4000 number simply doesn't appear reasonable. It's more likely to be the population of one specific group (as a matter of fact, it appears to be the estimate for the Montagnais I see most often)

 

[Niptium]

Again. Let's not disgress or we will have this topic closed.

 

[Eh up me duck]

What's wrong with the current system? Each province is thousands of square miles... five thousand Europeans (probably what most colonies will get to late game) spread out over that entire province isn't exactly far fetched.

 

[Evie HJ]

Fair enough.

Back on the main issue from which this spun off, there were, in fact, by the end of the era, settlements of several hundred natives bands living around assorted trading posts, which would be a sizeable settlement by colonial standards. Examples include Carlton House (near the fork of the Saskatchewan), 700; Cumberland House, where the Saskatchewan river enter the province of the same name, 500, etc.

By colonial standards, these are relatively sizeable settlements. Not cities under EU3 standards, but it's the EU3 standards that are unrealistically high here: the colony -> city transition requires far too large a population, when you consider that colonies cannot build improvements, etc.

 

[Dafool]

I'll just add what I always add to this discussion. If you make wastelands colonizable, then you're allowing ridiculous scenarios where thousands of soldiers and massive populations can survive there. This is quite literally fantasy in most of the current wasteland provinces. Perhaps you'd rather just be able to claim them, but not actually settle or move soldiers into them, but what does that add to the game? Is it more aesthetically pleasing? Why should we make that stretch when it clearly doesn't even make sense? I've heard numerous times that it should allow you to claim them if you own all of the surrounding provinces, but that doesn't make sense. The only wasteland where that rule holds up is in Siberia and Australia. All of the wasteland provinces in the Americas, Africa, and the rest of Asia can't historically hold up to this rule.

 

[Evie HJ]

"Most". Not so much the whole Great Plains area of Canada and the US (at least the parts near major rivers), though. Nor large parts of the Canado-American rockies in the Columbia watershed.

 

[unmerged(431840)]

I'd like to see something like this:

Regions of the world are unlocked in something similar to a tech tree, rather than through explorer units. So once you discover a region you can start allocating discovery points towards discovering regions adjacent to it, or adjacent to any of the regions that you have previously discovered. The first country to discover an area gets their color on the provinces. They own them even though no one lives there.

Instead of the colony/city thing that we had in EU3 we end up with something more like the holdings from CK2. If you put merchants into a foreign province of a lower tech group you get a trading post. This gives you a CB to conquer.

Colonists come in two types: fortune seekers and dissidents. Fortune seekers favor tropical areas and they create plantations. Dissidents favor temperate areas and they create towns. Plantations provide you with good revenue, towns expand into adjacent provinces on their own. Each dissident has its own new culture, named after the region that it settles in. As it expands that new culture expands. Colonies can have buildings even before they become cities, and are promoted to cities when they get universities.

 

[Niptium]

We still have no information on the colonial system which was as much if not more broken than the trade system.

I am really hoping they don't leave it as it is. It's a boring paint in your color with ducats game. Not much troubles - Natives are way too easy to get rid of or bypass altogether.

 

[Lamartine]

I suggest EU4 implement a "shepherd" policy of colonisation. Colonisation would be determined by:

1. The placing of player "markers" that determine whether or not an area will be colonised by them at all. Similar to a national focus, but a few more of them, costlier, and instead of progressing colonisation they merely permit it.
2. Push factors influenced by the overall state of the player's (and the AI's) realm. Stability, religious differences, economic conditions, war, etc. all "push" migrants out of their nation and into the colonies that the player (and the AI) designate with "markers".
3. Pull factors influenced by the area being colonised. Life rating, economic gain, distance, etc. make some places more appealling than others, and can impose a ceiling on how many migrants relocate there.