Tips for France?

[OzzyKP]

I've been trying to do well as France by leaning into their abilities and focusing on my native allies. It seems like a doomed strategy though. I can have great relationships with nearby natives, missions, trading posts, do brisk business trading with them, but before long my culture has completely surrounded them. Then they give up their village and all that relationship is lost. I've had tribes that I thought would be great allies in case I was ever attacked, so I sold them horses & guns, but eventually they get totally wiped out without a shot fired by my cultural expansion.

I wish there was a way to create reservations or something, or stop your borders from expanding past tiles they can work. That would preserve pockets of land for the natives. It'd be nice if there was a way to play where they weren't auto-exterminated.

Also, Champlain gets bonuses for bargaining, but I never have any success with it. Almost every time I try they just get angry and stop trading with me. Another doomed strategy.

Is it just me, or are they weaker than other powers?

 

[Link Gaetz]

I wish there was a way to create reservations or something, or stop your borders from expanding past tiles they can work.

In the absence of a better border expansion system (which I can imagine would be near impossible to implement), you can edit the threshold for TXT_KEY_CULTURELEVEL_DEVELOPING under WeThePeople\Assets\XML\GameInfo\CIV4CultureLevelInfo.xml to a much larger value - say 5000 - and it will take centuries before any colony expands beyond the two-square cross. Do the same for TXT_KEY_CULTURELEVEL_FLEDGLING if you want it to take longer to expand from the one-tile border too.

If you put in the effort to place your colonies where their borders will auto-expand into fewer native settlements, you can maintain allies much more easily (albeit not completely trivially). They will sometimes offer to give up villages but you can refuse. You'll still need to stop other Europeans from settling next to them, though.

This is all a good lesson that there's no such thing as ethical colonization, though.