Want to create a colonial empire with a smaller nation,which one to choose?

[Zion_Shall-Fall]

Which country would be best or an interesting choice?I don't mean Portugal, Castile,England or any bigger countries.

[Gandolf]

Scotland, Norway or some Irish opm could be interesting. All of them are in a position do colonize quite early, especially Norway, but you have to somehow deal with superior neighbours.

[Zion_Shall-Fall]

Hehe ye good luck surviving as Scotland with England as your neighbour:)

[Gandolf]

I think the most interesting choice would be Norway. Thanks to Iceland you'll get into northern america before anybody else and your national ideas give you colonial range and an additional colonist. But you start off under a personal union and have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ base tax.

[Dreamers]

England is pretty much only a great power when no one actually cares about England.

In this case I see two strategies one is to simply ignore England just setting up things to prevent it from attacking you. The other is to attack and conquer England which should be rather easy but kinda removes you from being a small nation.

Also do you consider moving to the New World and expanding there an option? If yes one of the Irish minors is best.

EDIT: Not really, you need dip 7 to reach NA from Iceland. Was a pain to discover that as Denmark after taking exploration as first idea.

[Nikiforos V Fokas]

A horde. Crimea is the easiest to play to get used to steppe strengths and weaknesses. You're also glued to the Ottomans at the beginning of the game -can't hurt, can it?

[Surimi]

I saw the AI manage to create New Britanny once, so that might be interesting. Also, if you feel like a completely insane challenge you could try Granada.

[Kagemin]

Any of the south-east Asian (Malayan) nations are cool. You get to play in a very different region from usual, and you can go colonize tons of stuff as soon as you get your first colonist. You can also island-hop to western America and Australia fairly early.

And Malayan nations even get an additional colonist from their national ideas. Even if it's one of the later ideas, it still helps a lot.

[sr902]

Doing a colonial game with an Indian country is really fun. You can take exploration as your first idea group and hop down to South Africa pretty quickly. From there, you can use St. Helena to hop over to South America, and of course you could always go east and get Asia and Australia as well. In my game, I actually moved my capital down to Cape, and sold my provinces in India, only to come back a century later(after westernizing) to found an Indian trade company.

For an extra challenge, you can convert to Sikh, and try to build yourself a global Sikh empire.

[Kyle Reese]

Netherlands is a good choice, as well as one of the merchant republics. I used the Hansa in one game and it was pretty easy to get to North America while Austria protected me from outsiders.

[sr902]

On the Hansa, one thing I found really fun was using the crazy money I was making to build a ridiculous fleet of ships, then every time England finished a colony, I built one next door, got a claim on their colony and went to war for it. Destroyed their navy immediately so they couldn't send troops to defend their newly finished colony, then just sieged that province and sieged English held provinces in Ireland to drive up the warscore without actually having to fight the English army.

By doing this repeatedly, it's surprisingly easy to take every colony England makes, while making your own as well. Taking over North America has never been so easy.

[Killer of Gems]

clearly the best nation to choose for colonization is Aachen. Reason is if you let france wipe out burgundy's army you can annex about 10 or 12 provinces from burgundy in 2 wars granted its hard going at the start but once you get your 3 claims at the start and take those then follow up by claiming everything else and making sure france doesn't get too big you can rush for holland in the second war by that time your tech 4 don't go exploration first trust me i made that mistake. go administrative or something military you need your colonization range up then for the second idea go exploration using this strategy and abusing the fact aachen is a republic you can spam 6/6/6 rulers every couple of years also you should make it a priority to ally france so you can fight off your coalition later on if you do it fast enough and improve relations between wars you should lose your colonization sometime around the early 1500s

[GoldenBears]

I'm in the middle of a game as Granada. It's actually not as difficult as you might think, and there's a great guide to help, too.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=304943828
Since Morroco always gets Tunisia as an ally, I sign a seperate peace with them, making them my vassal, so I can sell them my provinces rather than Castile.
I've also heard of a similar strategy as Portugal, but I only use it as Portugal if I get a vassal I can feed my provinces to.

[Belgian Problem]

I'v made a video of a portugal game where scotland got part of mexico.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=292629829

If the AI can do it then so can you ;3

[mss73055]

Yemen and Adal.

[elvispehadzic]

Bosnia and Hercegovina its Hard does Ottomans :( they always kick me out