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Greetings All:

Hoping to crowd source a strategy. As Italy, I have been investing in the Horn of Africa extensively. Its 1886 and its all paying off. I've had Berbera, Zayla, Hobyo, and Bussaso all become non-national territory. However, I noticed something each time a territory turned. My prestige gain from colonies dropped and I didn't pick that up in any other prestige gaining category. This begs the question, what good is it in terms of game strategy to keep sending immigrants and extending telecoms and the like if all that does is in the end is make it harder to win the game? Any thoughts and commentary would be appreciated.

I had this, mainly triggered by concentrating my immigrants in a region of low population.

The gain is you have more development cards you can play to push up population and development. This can be good as some areas lack the population to fully exploit the natural resources that are there - I had this in the Persian Gulf region with oil and gems - so you can increase exploitation. You do lose the colonial prestige, but you also lose the malus for being out of SoI, so the prestige trade off rather depends on how the region fits within your SoIs.

In general, I'd now be very careful about concentrating the immigrant cards on borderline useful provinces that are in my SoI. There is little to gain from the additional economic activity and you lose colonial prestige. If I had a potentially rich province, out of SoI, I would try to flip it to non-national status.

I also think, if its non-national, its harder for someone to take in the event of a war (higher warscore), but not sure about that, just something I recall seeing at the early stage of a late game war when I had negative warscore due to a couple of lost battles in the opening phase.

an hint from Pocus would be precious to see the grounds of it (if deliberate choice, there are certainly sound motives) , else would look like an oversight for me.

negative SOI are supposed (for history minded player playing with historical options) to be a deterrent, but to really be so it certainly requires some extensive rebalancing of VP - a huge task to say the least

There was an un-intended side effect introduced in 1.03d (I believe it's d, not the last patch, but the one before that) that easily made territories into non-national. This was corrected with 1.03e, and 1.04. We were trying to fix a problem with Japan and the end of the Boshin? war. Territories didn't go back to the empire like they should have.

As Loki100 says, the areas aren't colonial, so you don't gain Prestige, but you also don't pay for colonial buildings (as they are destroyed in the process). You can build more stuff in a non-national region, but I rarely have used non-national territory like that. Personally, I want to keep those territories colonial as long as possible.

Thaks for the replies everyone. My goal in Hobyo (or Bussasso?), whichever one with the mineral deposit was to get it to level to build the mine since minerals become scarce in late game with steel and mechanical parts production sucking them up. I guess I went a little nuts with the cards. It looks like with 1.03e I'll have to be a bit more careful to maintain colonial prestige gain.

ajnatalo wrote:Thaks for the replies everyone. My goal in Hobyo (or Bussasso?), whichever one with the mineral deposit was to get it to level to build the mine since minerals become scarce in late game with steel and mechanical parts production sucking them up. I guess I went a little nuts with the cards. It looks like with 1.03e I'll have to be a bit more careful to maintain colonial prestige gain.

I feel you, minerals become very precious late game, I'm in 1900 in my game (as you possible know if you read my AAR) and it's a pain to supply my industry with enough minerals as Germany, I used to import a good amount from Great Britain, but since we're now at war that's not possible anymore, my allies (Austria and Italy) hardly ever have any left to export and it's getting even harder to supplu my industry.

By the way, I don't think the victory points granted by owning colonies offsets the advantege of owning a larger territory to invest (specially if the territory in question has good/rare resources) that ends up granting a good amount of vp by itself from these investments etc.