One-feature-a-day articles: #15 The Colonial game: Part I, the basics

[DooberGuy]

This is a re-posting of Pocus's original posting on the Paradox forum. I believe he has probably been insanely busy getting PoN ready for us, so I am only attempting to help him out.



One-feature-a-day articles: #15 The Colonial game: Part I, the basics

As you may have now noticed because of the numerous screenshots we are shelling you with , Pride of Nations boasts a quite complete and flavorful colonial system. This is indeed one of the big modes of the game, a part of the gameplay where we wanted people to have a lot of fun, while being immersed as much as possible in the game.

At its heart, the colonial game is about changing a group of wild, uncivilized regions to an entity that will provide benefits to your nation (beware, I’m using non politically correct terms here, but we are in the Victorian era, and so at this time Europeans believed that what was not educated to Western standards was not cultured, so I stick with that).

These groups of regions are called ‘colonial areas’. You can’t define them as you wish; they are already defined for you. This was necessary so to keep some consistency and overall to simplify what could have resulted in complex problems, because of zones overlapping and such like. These colonial areas have a status, ranging from ‘wild’ to ‘influenced’ and then ‘Protectorate’, ‘Formal Colony’, and ‘Dominions’. Your aim here is to do the most colonial missions so that it is you and not another organized nation that attains Protectorate or better status (in opposition to tribal/feudal nations that will mostly suffer from your actions).

Why would you want to do that (except to show the rest of the world the supremacy of your nation)? Because each colonial area falls in a given Sphere of Influence. If a Colonial area you own is in your SOI, you gain prestige. That alone is a great incentive, but you can also see colonies as a new market for your manufactured goods or as a reservoir of men for your army (but in PON you will need to recruit native units in the colonies, and can’t recruit metropolitan ones). Or perhaps some resources can be exploited, the benefits are numerous.


Merchants are great to add some CP while earning money.


In practice, the struggle in the colonial regions is done with the concept of colonial penetration. CP is a value, for each nation, in each colonial region. When you manage to augment your CP to a certain level, and with some other conditions fulfilled, you can play a special colonial decision that can switch the colonial area status to the long awaited status of Protectorate, or perhaps even better Formal Colony.
But there are other considerations to understand, in addition to Colonial Penetration. Because a colonial region is also defined with a development level, that eases movement and reduces attrition, a revolt risk, and can produce some wealth. So CP is only a part of the game, and you’ll want to watch over the other values and increase them, if possible (except you’ll have to make priorities!).

How it is done, you may ask: With colonial decisions. Colonial decisions can be seen as ‘Cards’, that you drop from the interface toward a specific region. But that is the subject of the next article! Stay tuned and see you tomorrow for the second part on the colonial game!