Vadermath 说:
socks 说:
Vadermath, you can send all 5 diplomats at once to bypass the once every ten years.
See, I never thought of that.
Neither did I...
Personally I find it easier to just annex them to begin with rather than making them vassals. The -centralisation of diploannexing is the biggest issue.
I usually keep one large vassal (in my current game, 6-province Algiers). Useful for killing small armies/rebels I can't be bothered with basically.
AWDev, I think the requirement for annexing without suing for peace (and the colonial conquest casus belli) is the shamanist/anamist religion.
Herrsir - colonising doesn't really help with tech, especially not in the short term.
The more provinces you have, the harder it is to keep up.
Non-core and low-population/wealth provinces also hold you back, so if you expand really quickly you can expect to fall behind.
That's why Italian and German OPMs are usually ahead of the pack.
The biggest problem with colonising Africa is that most of the provinces are "tropical", which affects supply limits, colony growth and tax.
Slaves become pretty valuable by the end of the game though, and ivory provinces are always good (there's quite a few gold ones as well).