User Guide

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that are already inhabited by other nations that
you simply haven’t encountered yet. This only
happens when a full-fledged country owns the
province. The presence of natives will not pre-
vent your movement.
Land and Naval Tradition
from Exploring
There is an additional benefit to exploration:
every new province you discover will give you
a small amount of tradition. An explorer will
increase your naval tradition, and a conquista-
dor will increase your land tradition as they go
about their jobs. This is one of the few ways to
increase your tradition when you are not at war
and actively fighting battles.
Natives
Many unoccupied provinces have native tribes
living in them. These represent small popula-
tions that generally kept to themselves in this
era, and were not large or advance enough to be
considered full-fledged “countries” in the sense
that this is used in the game. When you select
an unoccupied province, the left half of the dis-
play will show the colonisation interface. In the
center of this area, you will see an indication of
the number of natives (if any) who live here, as
well as their aggressiveness and ferocity.
A native tribe’s aggressiveness reflects how
hostile they are likely to be towards any outsid-
ers who enter the province, using a scale of 0 to
10. Low values indicate that tribe will probably
leave any foreigners alone. High values make
it very likely that the tribe will band togeth-
er into a small army and attempt to expel you
from the province by force. If they attempt to
do so, the size of the army will be the number
of native who live there.
Similarly, the ferocity of the natives indi-
cates how hard they will fight before fleeing.
This is used to determine the morale of a native
army if the tribe attempts to fight you. Com-
bat between one of your armies and a native
army is handled just like a regular field com-
bat; however, if the native army breaks, it will
disappear and hide in the province once more.
Any natives you killed during the battle will be
deducted from the number of native that live
in the province, although these will be replen-
ished slowly over time in much the same way
that regiments receive reinforcements. The rate
at which they replenish is determined by the
province’s manpower.
It is not only the presence of a foreign army
that might stir a native tribe to attack. If you
try to establish and then expand a colony in
the province, the natives may resent your in-
trusion and attempt to destroy your efforts. If
you want to prevent this from happening, you
must either station an army there to repel their
attempts, or you must actively attempt to de-
stroy them.
Attacking Natives
If you wish to completely eliminate a tribe
of native, you can station a large army in the
province and wait for the natives to attack you
in the hopes that you will be able to kill them
all. When the native population of a province
is zero, no new natives will appear to replenish
the tribe. This can be a time-consuming and
exasperating process that will likely also result
in a lot of your soldiers dying due to attrition.
Fortunately, there’s another way to rid your-
self of the problem: you can actively launch an
attack. When you select an army that is located
in a province that contains natives, there will
be gold button highlighted at the bottom of
the list of regiments that allows you to launch
an attack. Click the “attack natives” button to
initiate the field combat. You may not succeed
in destroying all of them in the first battle, but
by launching a succession of attacks, you will
eventually wipe them all out.
If the natives are not particularly aggressive,
it is often a good idea to try to co-exist peace-
fully with them since they will be added to the
province’s total population once it has reached
colonial city status. This will help to make your
colony a wealthier and more productive part of
your empire in a shorter period of time.