My population was reduced by 75%, which I think was benefited by having hospitals in as many locations with over 120k population (the Yucatan is very dense) as possible. Which was like, seven. I could have maybe done more but you really need your cabinet developing the high pop provinces because they also need 20 development for a hospital
even then, hospitals in 90% of my high density locations only seemed to change it from 80-90% population loss to 75%. My first run I had like 5.3 million population, ended at 1.03 million, and in this run I had 1 million fewer to begin with and ended at 1.03ish as well
Perfidious Castile declared war, got spanked, refused to land even after The Great Deadening, so I white peaced and have focused on consolidating the Aztecs. The largest Aztec player, Tepanecapan, is my junior in a personal union. Pretty much everything that existed prior to colonization from the Yucatan to central mesoamerica is owned by a vassal (except for a tributary who I can't make into a vassal because they made that really hard for some reason)
so even severely weakened the high unity might be why Castile hasn't tried to fuck with me again despite having 110k levies to my Whole Situation's potential 29k
anyway GOT SOME TIN CAN'T WAIT TO BUILD A REAL BOAT!!
btw I think I need to warn you about the conquistador thing/bug. If you're not aware, Castile can spawn a conquistador army in any of their mesoamerican colonies by spending 50 ducats and 4000 manpower. It will then spawn a highly experienced 4000-men stack that will go on to conquer an area for them. What really sucks is several things:
In my Portugal game they just kept spamming conquistadors one after another against my colonies (which they also can do for some reason) until they ran out of manpower. I probably killed 50+ conquistador armies in my campaign. The funnies part is that we were in a defensive alliance so Castille had to constantly fight their own conquistadors lmao
yeah none of the playtesters touched the western hemisphere, the release of this paradox title has to be the most broken and botched imo
yeah I want to like this game so bad because it's core systems are absolutely incredible but there is just soooo much jank