The Victorian period was a time of the creation of new colonies. Different powers were taking over Africa, colonizing unexplored parts of America or South Asia, and everyone wanted to get their own colony. But how to do that when you’re not playing for a country that is known for colonization – I’ll answer that today.
This article is based on my experience with the game. There are also articles on how to increase your GDP, how to increase your prestige, detailed article about obligations and how effective colonize more province.
How to prepare for colonization?
- Prepare a colonization law
- Prepare a plan – what and where
- Prepare the troops
Preparation of the Colonization Law
The first step to colonize is to prepare your laws. You cannot colonize without the support of your country. So the first thing to do is to open the politics section (first on the left) and then look for the highlighted box in the middle.
If you don’t see “No Colonial Affairs” you can continue to the next section of text. Otherwise, click through to the box detail and together we will find out what is needed.
If you have “No Colonial Affairs” it means that you don’t have a colonization law and you will have to work to implement it. If you click through you will see where your state currently stands. In my case I have already explored the colonization option. But you see I can’t change anything…
… to change the law, it is necessary to analyze the information we have about the law today. You need to see which parties have the thumbs up for the law and then you need to get at least one of them into government. Because without that, the law won’t pass…
… but be careful not to change the government willy-nilly. Your people must think they want it, so in case it means a 180% political turnaround for you. You better get your nation ready for it first. Support a party that is essential to win an election or claim a seat in government.
Once you have a supportive party in government then have the law researched and make good decisions when your country researches it. You can have it tested quickly through good decisions, but it can also take time if you don’t make good decisions.
Preparation of a colonization plan
Once you have the colonization ready so it is necessary to plan everything carefully. First of all, you need to “declare an interest” in a certain place where you want to expand. So you need to choose well in case you don’t have a sufficient level of…
… you can see your level if you click on “declare interests” now you can see that I have 8 depleted interests – on the map and in the list you can see that I am expanding practically all over America.
But if I wanted to expand to South Africa, I would have to increase my level of maximum interest. How to do this can be found by clicking on the number Maximum: 8…
Where you can see that I get 5 points from my position (so I can’t loose it) and then I get points for each naval base. With that being said, for 1 naval base I get 0.1 expansion opportunities. So if I have a small max level and need to expand further I continue by building more naval bases.
If I have set interests in the place where I plan to expand, I’m practically a winner. And I can move on to the next stages of colonization. During the planning process beware that the more provinces you colonize the longer the overall colonization will take.
Preparation of units
Maybe just to wrap up the preparations, I would like to point out that you want to have units ready. Because colonization is not usually peaceful and it is very likely that some conflict will happen during the colonization. I’ve experienced 2 types of conflicts in total and you need to be prepared for both…
… as soon as you advance further in the colonization of the territory so the original inhabitants get angry and provoke a conflict against you. If you have enough troops, you will simply fight off this war and the advantage will be that you will get the rest of the territory that belonged to the original state.
I also found out that when 2 strong states try to colonize a country it can happen that a war is provoked against the colonized state and your opponent. And if you take the side of the native state in this diplomatic war, you can defend the state – the natives will get more territory and then you can colonize and win the war.
This allows you to expand significantly faster. Therefore, prepare enough units. Carefully check how many units your opponent has and how many he can call up from backup. Because most of the time you’ll be fighting a war of blood. Keep money in reserve and attack only with the units you need to overcome your opponent.
Maybe just to end off this section, I need to remind you that you need to build industries that supply your troops in addition to barracks. In case you don’t have rifles so just build army industry. Otherwise you will have the problem that your units will need a lot of army material and it will be very expensive.
Colonization itself
If you have a colonization law, a plan in place for where to expand and troops on the way. Then start colonizing. Switch to the “colonization” tab and start colonizing the provinces you have planned. Although maybe hold off. Let’s go over the 4 rules.
The first is that the more countries you colonize the longer it takes to colonize. The second is that when you cancel the colonization of an already colonized province (and you already have some part) so you decolonize the whole province and if you want to eventually colonize the state so you have to start again from the beginning.
If no one has access to the state by land then no one else can colonize it – note this does not apply to island states and states that are by the sea. They can still be colonized by anyone. And the last rule is that once you start colonizing a distant province (even across the ocean) the colonization of that province will take a long time. Over time, colonization will start to accelerate even in these remote locations.
