What's the best way to counter European declaring war on natives and just asking for money?

[Thekickingturtle]

Long story short I'm playing as the Shoshone and every game feels random. All of my campaigns revolve around Europeans either taking land or taking money every time and I go bankrupt. I personally prefer when they take land instead of taking money because I can just reconquer my land back, but when Spain non stop wants nothing but 750 ducats and war reparations, I can't really recover from that and it spirals into me just straight up losing wars with Europeans and natives tribes. I've tried fighting back and I'm able to take on at least 10k stacks. The problems start popping up when they feel like sending their 20k stacks to the homeland and I don't know how to fight back effectively. I'm usually same technology as them with and sometimes where I'm like one or two military techs behind. My armies are usually 20k stacks, but I lose manpower really quickly when fighting them.
TLDR what strategies do you employ to make sure they don't take money from you?

 

[grotaclas]

The best strategy is to grow very big. You should be able to attack all the CNs without the interference of the overlord. Another good thing is to take over Mexico and Peru for the gold mines.
You can also avoid the war declarations if you don't have any provinces that they want. Usually their war goal are gold mines, so if you don't own any of them, you are safer till they have colonies near you. But then you often have CNs that you can take over.
The third option is to find a peace deal in which they actually want land. For that you need to experiment a bit, because the AI doesn't offer it to you and the suggest peace deal button doesn't work for that. The main part is to see which provinces the enemy marked as of vital and strategic interest. Then select some some provinces that are of vital interest and provinces of strategic interest around them and provinces that lead up to that from the coast. This turns the acceptance indicator for some of these provinces into a green thumbs up. Then you have to look through the province list in the peace deal for provinces which also have a thumbs up and deselect provinces which have a thumbs down. That way it is often possible to get a peace deal.