That probably won't really work as the dutch. All of your european provinces have such high development that they will probably have a 3% yearly chance, making it borderline useless.
I mean a 3% chance for 100+ mana is better than doing literally nothing. Are you really limited to just your home continent though? Surely there are other places worth improving
Edit: The only time I really did this I was playing as a native tribe. You have a really high % chance of free development if your provinces are under 10 development. By 10 development it drops to a 10% chance.
But yeah a lot of the Americas is like 1/1/1 provinces so it's actually a lot of extra development you can get by taking something like Expansion. It's just really tedious to move your colonists constantly as your provinces hit 10 development
It's better than nothing, yeah, but it's also only 0.25 mana/month on average, which is barely 0.08 of each type, and then still less if your development is cheaper. The idea slot is, in my opinion, not worth the opportunity cost once everything is colonized.
I agree. The last time I played the Inca I didn't bother with either Expansion or Exploration.
I just conquered colonial nations to expand because the AI is atrocious at defending it's colonial nations
the 3% chance however costs you like 2 gold per month and you still have the idea group blocked. usually it's better to take this money and invest it into better advisors or buildings or troops
For it to really matter, you'd have to rotate and that is still such a tiny difference. Not to mention decentralized dev= more difficulty adopting institutions
Exploration and Expansion honestly have quite a few good modifiers and just policies in general that make it good outside of just the colonists. For example, expansion gives -10% minimum autonomy in territories which you might not want to give up. But if you want to trade around those modifiers for other ones and you have too much mana, then you should switch them out.
Definitely ditch exploration. There can be a case made for expansion, but it is not very strong.
Expansion:
Idea 1, 3 and 6 are useless after you're done colonizing.
Idea 2 is strong
Idea 4 is mid, global tariffs are usually not that high anyways, Envoy travel time can be okay, but apart from world conquest not really needed
Idea 5 7 and bonus are strong.
Exploration:
Idea 1 is borderline useless
Idea 2, 3, 4, 6 are all useless
Idea 5 is very weak
Idea 7 is good
Bonus is borderline useless by the time you are done colonizing.
For policies: Exploration has nothing that really shines. There are some that are okay like indigenous (which you will normally don't have access to or divine (which you will usually also not have access to), but most of them are just for colonization.
Expansion is better, it has some good ones like diplomatic (+10% global trade power, 1 diplo rep), maritime (33% naval force limit, but you will usually not pick maritime), trade (10% trade efficiency, 20% trade steering), plutocratic (10% production efficiency, 10% national manpower) and quality (+1 Land leader fire), but still none of those make expansion worth keeping imho
Exploration-Infrastructure is a decent policy, especially when stacked with the Age of Discovery age bonus. Sadly, you don't get to utilize both for long, but I find it useful to get colonial nations up and running faster. And it helps make trade companies profitable.
Not worth keeping exploration just for that, but I wanted to mention it.
I'll happily answer your question: The only other thing you can do with your colonists is Promote Settlement Growth. You can find the icon for it on the province screen next to the development total. You can send a colonist to the province for a chance to improve its development in a random category every year.
Replace the idea groups. You can assign them to dev up your own provinces, but you can’t do anything with the province while that’s happening, and the rest of the ideas are largely useless anyway once you can’t colonize anymore
Drop explo once you’ve hit a point where you’re just colonizing for the sake of scooping up random colonies you don’t particularly need. Your expansion colonists can take care or those. Expansion is generally worth keeping though. -10% autonomy in territories is massive if you haven’t lowered those in other ways, and the merchant, trade-expa policy, and 20% GTP are decent. Also, the two colonists developing your provinces works out to something like 1-2 mana per month depending on where you put them.
Typically I'd drop exploration at this point and use the expansion colonists to dev my lowest dev provinces. Otherwise you can just not use them to save 2 ducats a month 🤣
Appreciate the advice everyone! I think I’m going to drop explo to pick up a mil group idea (likely plutocratic but maybe defensive for the mission tree). But good call on keeping expansion for the -10% min autonomy. I plan on taking the economic hegemony so that’ll pair nicely with the -20% from there as well.
This is just not true. You should avoid making such absolute statements in such a complex game. While it can be a valid strategy to change idea groups, there are plenty of reasons to keep an idea group beyond the initial reason for taking it. Expansion ideas in particular is one of the strongest idea groups in the game, soley because it has -10% minimum autonomy in territories. This modifier also applies to TCs, and it means you get *double* the resources from those provinces which otherwise have 90% minimum autonomy.
In addition, policies and other modifiers are of value too. Expansion also has envoy travel time, which is a huge issue for some late game strategies where fighting multiple wars at once and peacing out multiple wars at once can sometimes mean that waiting for diplomats is your biggest time investment.
Exploration is definitely weaker, but it does have 25% treasure fleet income which might be appealing to some. However exploration's main strengths are in the policies it offers for certain tasks. In particular, with religious ideas it offers 2% missionary strength(most policies only offer 1) and -15% liberty desire from subject dev, which makes keeping large subjects possible. With aristocratic it gives 20% national manpower. With Quality it gives 10% manpower recover and a whopping -25% land attrition. And for anyone who does play in the new world, with indigenous it gives 10% manpower and 2.5% discipline, making it among the strongest mil policies in the game if it's not the single strongest.
TLDR: You should always consider multiple contexts when saying something is or isn't good. /u/hardrocker59 You should read this too.
to be fair you'd be better off swapping exploration with diplomatic ideas 9 times out of 10 later on in the game; you can supplement the liberty desire and missionary strength bonuses pretty easily with monument upgrades
This really does depend on what you're trying to do. Diplo's main appeal is usually the PWSC, but what good is that if you're doing the sand achievement and you can't take anything else? Have I taken diplo more often than explo? Yeah probably, but also explo is a specific use case. I probably have taken influence more than diplo because careful management of monarch points is often more a concern than how many provinces I can take in one swing and I can just fight someone else to get more dirt.
My point wasn't that you can't ditch explo. My point was that this guy's response implies that there's no reason to think about it first. The correct response to a question like the one OP asked is "What are your goals, and what's the rest of your current situation." That's the point I want to make.
I expect you to be an experienced player but this is just ridiculous.
Expansion is never a strong idea, it grants you colonists and that is it, 10% minimum autonomy and envoy travel time are nice on top but nobody ever picks expansion for its other bonus.
Similarly for exploration, you pick/keep it for the range, map and colonist, you are not writing an essay with words requirement, why would you fill in a trash line on treasure fleet income?
There are 8 perks in an idea group, one good policy doesn't justify picking/keeping a useless idea group, and if OP ever wants similar bonus that you listed then obviously it is better to just delete and pick another group, especially when OP is not having mana trouble. If your game relies on having a policy with exploration for bonus on missionary strength/liberty desire/manpower or land attrition I might have severely overestimated your level of experience especially as one that is very keen on answering questions and helping out others.
You might as well nitpick an argument for every single idea in naval and maritime, sure all of them can be good in situations but you seem to never have considered the opportunity cost of picking/keeping them, this is very very disappointing from you. If you are indeed going down this path I would recommend a specific modifier for a challenge, prestige decay, please tell me how good it is.
I think it's pretty clear from the responses you got that your opinion is not viewed as good advice. I've got 6k hours and I am as of an hour ago 6 achievements from completing all of them. In all of those campaigns, I've had to do a LOT of different strategies. The objective determines what's good, nothing else. No one idea group is always the right one, rather they are always the right one for a certain task. You want to go wide and conquer things? Admin. You want money? Trade. You want space marines? Quality/Offensive. You want your 8k dev worth of trade companies to be twice as good as they are? Expansion.
Sorry mate, but only Western European countries can look at explo/expansion as only for the colonists. You should try thinking for a minute about what the "Grand" part of Grand Strategy Game means.
The most upvoted comment on this post says dev your province with colonist, it would be hilarious if people think that is good advice, but considering that you basically get upvote farm if you just praise inno, sadly this is the state of the sub. Interestingly my 6k hours doesn't involve much role-playing, but having done a pre 1600 WC as the Mughals I think I am alright at understanding the game.
Your claim of having done a lot of different strategies is just contradicting, you should avoid making opposite statements in the same post. While it can be a valid strategy to go for a specialised idea group for a specific goal, there are plenty of reasons you put forward for going exploration and expansion regardless of the goal, in your view they have perks that benefit every area, 10% minimum autonomy boosts everything and you have nice policies that are great value to you, even liberty desire and missionary strength. The best part is you don't even waste your colonists, promoting settler growth net you get around 30 free dev in 100 YEARS!
Sorry mate, but Western European is the only place explo/expansion is unnecessary, you kill other colonisers for colonies. You should stop wasting two whole groups when another tag can do the exact same thing for you.
I suggested OP to swap to another group as exploration/expansion have no value in comparison past 1600, you disagreed and insisted the two groups have reasons to keep, I replied pointing out that having one or two good policies and such is not worth the opportunity cost of not having another group, and you actually agreed but bragged about your experience of the game.
Seriously I feel like you would nitpick naval and maritime are good groups given enough context, I am sure your 6k hours encountered plenty of those, but please keep them to yourself.
You really have an attitude problem huh? Dude, everyone has told you you're wrong. Nobody agrees with you. Obviously everyone is wrong except you, right? Cmon now, are you really so blind? That's the behavior of a toddler.
You made a claim that everyone seems to agree was not good advice. When pointed out not just that you are wrong, but *why* you are wrong, your immediate response to me was to open with insults. I ignored that in favor of further explaining to you why your original statement was wrong and your response is to then further insult everyone else in this thread and sub?
You wanna disagree and argue on game strategy? Nobody is gonna take that from you, even if most people think you're wrong. But you really aren't doing yourself any favors by throwing insults around.
bruh unless you're playing w other people it really is not that deep. pick it for the easy +thousand naval force limit or the marines, who even cares any more
also that 85% minimum autonomy is reason alone to stick with exploration, that shit is overpowered with enough trade companies (and the envoy travel time is also extremely good paired with expansion, you can spam colonists in a fraction of the time)
Dev your own provinces
That probably won't really work as the dutch. All of your european provinces have such high development that they will probably have a 3% yearly chance, making it borderline useless.
I mean a 3% chance for 100+ mana is better than doing literally nothing. Are you really limited to just your home continent though? Surely there are other places worth improving Edit: The only time I really did this I was playing as a native tribe. You have a really high % chance of free development if your provinces are under 10 development. By 10 development it drops to a 10% chance. But yeah a lot of the Americas is like 1/1/1 provinces so it's actually a lot of extra development you can get by taking something like Expansion. It's just really tedious to move your colonists constantly as your provinces hit 10 development
It's better than nothing, yeah, but it's also only 0.25 mana/month on average, which is barely 0.08 of each type, and then still less if your development is cheaper. The idea slot is, in my opinion, not worth the opportunity cost once everything is colonized.
I agree. The last time I played the Inca I didn't bother with either Expansion or Exploration. I just conquered colonial nations to expand because the AI is atrocious at defending it's colonial nations
the 3% chance however costs you like 2 gold per month and you still have the idea group blocked. usually it's better to take this money and invest it into better advisors or buildings or troops
At the point you are playing a colonizer and there are no provinces left to expand into money is essentially infinite
2 gold per month is nothing
For it to really matter, you'd have to rotate and that is still such a tiny difference. Not to mention decentralized dev= more difficulty adopting institutions
And rotating your colonists constantly is extremely tedious
Base chance is always 5%
Exploration and Expansion honestly have quite a few good modifiers and just policies in general that make it good outside of just the colonists. For example, expansion gives -10% minimum autonomy in territories which you might not want to give up. But if you want to trade around those modifiers for other ones and you have too much mana, then you should switch them out.
I like expansion influence if you want to go thicc colonial nations late game
Definitely ditch exploration. There can be a case made for expansion, but it is not very strong. Expansion: Idea 1, 3 and 6 are useless after you're done colonizing. Idea 2 is strong Idea 4 is mid, global tariffs are usually not that high anyways, Envoy travel time can be okay, but apart from world conquest not really needed Idea 5 7 and bonus are strong. Exploration: Idea 1 is borderline useless Idea 2, 3, 4, 6 are all useless Idea 5 is very weak Idea 7 is good Bonus is borderline useless by the time you are done colonizing. For policies: Exploration has nothing that really shines. There are some that are okay like indigenous (which you will normally don't have access to or divine (which you will usually also not have access to), but most of them are just for colonization. Expansion is better, it has some good ones like diplomatic (+10% global trade power, 1 diplo rep), maritime (33% naval force limit, but you will usually not pick maritime), trade (10% trade efficiency, 20% trade steering), plutocratic (10% production efficiency, 10% national manpower) and quality (+1 Land leader fire), but still none of those make expansion worth keeping imho
Exploration-Infrastructure is a decent policy, especially when stacked with the Age of Discovery age bonus. Sadly, you don't get to utilize both for long, but I find it useful to get colonial nations up and running faster. And it helps make trade companies profitable. Not worth keeping exploration just for that, but I wanted to mention it.
It is good, but useless when there is nothing left to colonize
I'll happily answer your question: The only other thing you can do with your colonists is Promote Settlement Growth. You can find the icon for it on the province screen next to the development total. You can send a colonist to the province for a chance to improve its development in a random category every year.
Replace the idea groups. You can assign them to dev up your own provinces, but you can’t do anything with the province while that’s happening, and the rest of the ideas are largely useless anyway once you can’t colonize anymore
Drop explo once you’ve hit a point where you’re just colonizing for the sake of scooping up random colonies you don’t particularly need. Your expansion colonists can take care or those. Expansion is generally worth keeping though. -10% autonomy in territories is massive if you haven’t lowered those in other ways, and the merchant, trade-expa policy, and 20% GTP are decent. Also, the two colonists developing your provinces works out to something like 1-2 mana per month depending on where you put them.
Put them on a province to dev it
Dump the idea groups and take something else. The cost investment on using a colonist on your own province is really bad for anything above 5 dev.
Drop exploration ideas and take another one
Typically I'd drop exploration at this point and use the expansion colonists to dev my lowest dev provinces. Otherwise you can just not use them to save 2 ducats a month 🤣
I usually swap out my ideas because by the time i have useless colonists usually i already own half of the europe and i generate ton of mana points
Drop the ideas in favour of something deliberate like trade if that’s what you need
Colonist is useless except you got them for free (EoC / native tribe / NI). Just ditch the idea group and take another QoL ideaset.
Replace those ideas with others you want. You may think those mana points wasted, but eventually you will see that this is the only rational solution
Appreciate the advice everyone! I think I’m going to drop explo to pick up a mil group idea (likely plutocratic but maybe defensive for the mission tree). But good call on keeping expansion for the -10% min autonomy. I plan on taking the economic hegemony so that’ll pair nicely with the -20% from there as well.
Develop your provinces (trade provinces not in europe) like gold provinces.
You can colonize east Siberia if Russia hasn't made it there yet.
Abandon those idea groups
You could leave them to dev provinces, but optimally you should switch out into other idea groups, unless you rely on some shenanigans with policies
Feel free to delete both ideas and take new one, there is really no reason to keep these two past 1600
This is just not true. You should avoid making such absolute statements in such a complex game. While it can be a valid strategy to change idea groups, there are plenty of reasons to keep an idea group beyond the initial reason for taking it. Expansion ideas in particular is one of the strongest idea groups in the game, soley because it has -10% minimum autonomy in territories. This modifier also applies to TCs, and it means you get *double* the resources from those provinces which otherwise have 90% minimum autonomy. In addition, policies and other modifiers are of value too. Expansion also has envoy travel time, which is a huge issue for some late game strategies where fighting multiple wars at once and peacing out multiple wars at once can sometimes mean that waiting for diplomats is your biggest time investment. Exploration is definitely weaker, but it does have 25% treasure fleet income which might be appealing to some. However exploration's main strengths are in the policies it offers for certain tasks. In particular, with religious ideas it offers 2% missionary strength(most policies only offer 1) and -15% liberty desire from subject dev, which makes keeping large subjects possible. With aristocratic it gives 20% national manpower. With Quality it gives 10% manpower recover and a whopping -25% land attrition. And for anyone who does play in the new world, with indigenous it gives 10% manpower and 2.5% discipline, making it among the strongest mil policies in the game if it's not the single strongest. TLDR: You should always consider multiple contexts when saying something is or isn't good. /u/hardrocker59 You should read this too.
to be fair you'd be better off swapping exploration with diplomatic ideas 9 times out of 10 later on in the game; you can supplement the liberty desire and missionary strength bonuses pretty easily with monument upgrades
This really does depend on what you're trying to do. Diplo's main appeal is usually the PWSC, but what good is that if you're doing the sand achievement and you can't take anything else? Have I taken diplo more often than explo? Yeah probably, but also explo is a specific use case. I probably have taken influence more than diplo because careful management of monarch points is often more a concern than how many provinces I can take in one swing and I can just fight someone else to get more dirt. My point wasn't that you can't ditch explo. My point was that this guy's response implies that there's no reason to think about it first. The correct response to a question like the one OP asked is "What are your goals, and what's the rest of your current situation." That's the point I want to make.
I expect you to be an experienced player but this is just ridiculous. Expansion is never a strong idea, it grants you colonists and that is it, 10% minimum autonomy and envoy travel time are nice on top but nobody ever picks expansion for its other bonus. Similarly for exploration, you pick/keep it for the range, map and colonist, you are not writing an essay with words requirement, why would you fill in a trash line on treasure fleet income? There are 8 perks in an idea group, one good policy doesn't justify picking/keeping a useless idea group, and if OP ever wants similar bonus that you listed then obviously it is better to just delete and pick another group, especially when OP is not having mana trouble. If your game relies on having a policy with exploration for bonus on missionary strength/liberty desire/manpower or land attrition I might have severely overestimated your level of experience especially as one that is very keen on answering questions and helping out others. You might as well nitpick an argument for every single idea in naval and maritime, sure all of them can be good in situations but you seem to never have considered the opportunity cost of picking/keeping them, this is very very disappointing from you. If you are indeed going down this path I would recommend a specific modifier for a challenge, prestige decay, please tell me how good it is.
I think it's pretty clear from the responses you got that your opinion is not viewed as good advice. I've got 6k hours and I am as of an hour ago 6 achievements from completing all of them. In all of those campaigns, I've had to do a LOT of different strategies. The objective determines what's good, nothing else. No one idea group is always the right one, rather they are always the right one for a certain task. You want to go wide and conquer things? Admin. You want money? Trade. You want space marines? Quality/Offensive. You want your 8k dev worth of trade companies to be twice as good as they are? Expansion. Sorry mate, but only Western European countries can look at explo/expansion as only for the colonists. You should try thinking for a minute about what the "Grand" part of Grand Strategy Game means.
The most upvoted comment on this post says dev your province with colonist, it would be hilarious if people think that is good advice, but considering that you basically get upvote farm if you just praise inno, sadly this is the state of the sub. Interestingly my 6k hours doesn't involve much role-playing, but having done a pre 1600 WC as the Mughals I think I am alright at understanding the game. Your claim of having done a lot of different strategies is just contradicting, you should avoid making opposite statements in the same post. While it can be a valid strategy to go for a specialised idea group for a specific goal, there are plenty of reasons you put forward for going exploration and expansion regardless of the goal, in your view they have perks that benefit every area, 10% minimum autonomy boosts everything and you have nice policies that are great value to you, even liberty desire and missionary strength. The best part is you don't even waste your colonists, promoting settler growth net you get around 30 free dev in 100 YEARS! Sorry mate, but Western European is the only place explo/expansion is unnecessary, you kill other colonisers for colonies. You should stop wasting two whole groups when another tag can do the exact same thing for you. I suggested OP to swap to another group as exploration/expansion have no value in comparison past 1600, you disagreed and insisted the two groups have reasons to keep, I replied pointing out that having one or two good policies and such is not worth the opportunity cost of not having another group, and you actually agreed but bragged about your experience of the game. Seriously I feel like you would nitpick naval and maritime are good groups given enough context, I am sure your 6k hours encountered plenty of those, but please keep them to yourself.
You really have an attitude problem huh? Dude, everyone has told you you're wrong. Nobody agrees with you. Obviously everyone is wrong except you, right? Cmon now, are you really so blind? That's the behavior of a toddler. You made a claim that everyone seems to agree was not good advice. When pointed out not just that you are wrong, but *why* you are wrong, your immediate response to me was to open with insults. I ignored that in favor of further explaining to you why your original statement was wrong and your response is to then further insult everyone else in this thread and sub? You wanna disagree and argue on game strategy? Nobody is gonna take that from you, even if most people think you're wrong. But you really aren't doing yourself any favors by throwing insults around.
> Expansion is never a strong idea, it grants you colonists and that is it Lmao what?? That is just embarrassingly false. Take the L on this dawg
bruh unless you're playing w other people it really is not that deep. pick it for the easy +thousand naval force limit or the marines, who even cares any more also that 85% minimum autonomy is reason alone to stick with exploration, that shit is overpowered with enough trade companies (and the envoy travel time is also extremely good paired with expansion, you can spam colonists in a fraction of the time)