Before I switched, Italy released kingdom of Jerusalem, kingdom of Egypt, and duchy of Fezzan as independent countries. I gave everyone alliances, max trust, max favors, historical friends, and so on, just so they wouldn't rival each other right away. Somehow kingdom of Egypt and kingdom of Jerusalem got Borromeo dynasty from Italy. Duchy of Fezzan got some local ruler.
So, New Italy, 3rd strongest CN in New World behind Castilian West Indies and New Venice Islands. But everyone suddenly became interested in colonization.
As name suggests America was named after Venetian explorer Amerigo Vespucci - disregard any Spanish claims to the contrary. The New Venice Islands got its colonial government. Then settlements of New Italy in Northern America, and Italian Brazil in South America got established.
Colonial government of New Italy claimed tho whole Northern continent, but when Senate funded colonies in Mississippi estuary, it put it under separate colonial government of Ferdinandia, named after the then ruling doge. What's worse, mandate of New Italy was also restricted to the North, under vague plans of setting up yet another colonial government there. The governor protested, but amount of political influence colonies had in the Italian Senate was very limited.
A much more urgent issue was budget. Of 10.6 income, 6.0 went for maintaining colonies, 1.8 for advisors, 2.37 for army, 0.68 for state administration, 0.56 for navy, and 0.38 for tariff payments. That's a very significant deficit.
New Italian industry was mostly fish, naval supplies, with a bit of furs and tobacco, nothing like gold and cocoa of Mexican natives. How did they get 12 gold producing provinces anyway? And 8 in Andes? Is that some Missions Extended thing? Unfortunately colonizing Mexico to get to the gold was also not in our mandate.
Well, the first order of business is sorting out my economy, so I spent a lot of points on developing my provinces, and moved traders around. I was barely making a profit, but then Italy doubled the tariffs.
Next I had to deal with the natives. First war got me into a fight against 40k natives with miserable tech, and cost me 10 war exhaustion, 4 loans, and a lot of devastation. I couldn't even reduce WE as Italy kept us at war with Pasai.
Once I reduced war exhaustion a bit, I started second war, where names of heathen barbarians changed, but the war stayed the same.
My initial 81dev, thanks to my conquests, Italy's conquests, my colonization, Italy's colonization, and my development grew to much more reasonable 363dev. That's 11th by dev, but only 24th by income since this is not good land. It will take a while until I convert the heathens to civilized ways.
Unfortunately Spain, Great Britain, Friesland, Holland, Norway all colonized lands which are rightfully ours, and even fellow colonial nation of Ferdinandia didn't fully respect borders.
I've been trying to cut them off inland colonization, but so far without much success. There's just too many directions from which they've been coming.
Meanwhile in the Old World, Egypt and Jerusalem beat up the Mamluks without anybody else's help. Fezzan which I specifically released seems to have accepted diplovassalization by Italy. Oh well.
Princes of the HRE elected duke of Burgundy as their hereditary emperor, and Burgundy is now happily wrecking France.
Before colonization rush, New Italy was just three tiny bits of coastline.
And now everybody's colonizing. I might actually defeat Provence.
The newly hereditary Reformed HRE.
AI tends to press this button as soon as it can, and that usually means a lot of countries stay out.
If something like an ongoing war blocks this button for a while so everyone joins, HRE will be 1900dev monstrosity, not far behind 2200dev Italy.
If it doesn't wait, it will still be strong second after Ming, Spain, and the Commonwealth, each a bit over 1000dev
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