I was not playing new CoGEE much because of been short of time but there are not too much differences so here are few of my tips (please correct me someone if I am wrong with something):
As this game is about making war ...and even if you want to play peacefully you will need some force to defend your borders, main and sole purpose of your economic activities is to build, sustain and operate your armies and navies.
During first turn you should go through each province and find out what is that province good at producing of. Do not trust tooltips, move slicers and look at results yourself advice from game may be misleading. If province builds 5-6 or more of some resource with full slicer of manpower(except money, labour and food which should be higher) you can consider that province good at that resource. Some provinces can be good in producing more than just one resource ..like food, horses and wine (in agriculture) or spice and luxuries (in luxuries). That is very valuable. Concentrate production in provinces on things they are good at, which means putting max manpower there (well if you are short of food or other critical resource, you will produce that even if province is good at something else of course). Dont let your production spread all over - that is very inefficient.
Now when you know approximately what and how much your provinces produce you should look at what you need. Resources are valuable approximately in this order:
money
labor
wool/cotton = textiles *
wine/spice/luxuries
rest as needed
You are probably short of money so if you are not at war, you can consider to garrison your troops or if you fear some of your ugly neighbors can catch you with your pants down, move them all in to one province with single depot (depots cost money). Now initially there are just two/three things you can do to improve your financial situation:
- set your taxes to maximum. This might not look good at first since it will have negative effect on national morale but you can counter it by producing vine, spice and luxuries. Consider it trading money for resources. Money is what you are short at.
- trade resources you can produce in quantities and do not need right now with other countries for gold. This has benefit of improving relation with them as long as trade route exist. Countries with good relation to you will accept better offers (better for you). England usually accept best offers of all countries if on good terms with you. However each trade route you initiate cost money to operate for every province trade goes so try to get best from few ones and if possible choose provinces which are not far away ...make one province concentrate on one resource then trade all its production. Do not make lot of trades with few resources each. In CoG weather influenced production of some resources so I usually sold one less resource from province so if production was lowered due to weather trade route did not get broken. I think this is not modeled in EE any more (I liked it old way actually).
AI will offer you lot of trades and while you will not need to pay cost to operate them (one who initiate does), they usually want resources you need. However if some fits your trading policy or you are desperate for gold, accept.
- if you do not have high feudal level and you have some merchants, you can send them to sea zones with high profits. This kind of trade can be very lucrative but your feudalism must be pretty low (check economy report to see how much actually you get from trade since merchant ship interface shows only actual income of that ship which gets lowered by some nasty things like your feud. level).
Now when you set up some money inflow you can concentrate on developing your economy.
To develop something, you will need lot of money and labor (and sometimes textiles), you need other resources but in much smaller quantities.
So first thing to develop are banks and factories.
If some province is good in producing money (more than 10 gold) build banks there. To produce labor you need factories in high population provinces. So Pick few provinces with high population or create one by building lots of roads. Population of 5+ is fine. Choose province which is not particularly good at producing some other valuable resource if possible.
Once you developed your banks and factories and have steady income of gold and labor you should develop barracks/docks since province with high level of them produce good quality units/ships (barracks for units, docks for ships). High level of barracks is required for certain units to be produced and in CoG also granted military upgrades (this seem to be different in EE). Barracks are most effective in provinces with lots of factories since factories help to speed production of some units like artillery.
Next thing to do are courts and culture. Those reduce waste (which can really cripple whole economy once you conquer some more provinces) and grants you some benefits in morale diplomacy and fame.
Somewhere between things I mentioned you should develop some farms but it depends on how much population you need to support. At the beginning of game I consider not to expand your population to much since you will end up struggling to produce enough food for them instead of developing your economy and military.
Of course you can decide to develop things in different order or few at the same time, it all depends on your situation and goals. Sometimes developing some barracks can be you priority for example. And sometimes your opponents will not grand you time to develop at all
Vine luxuries and spice are used to rise your national morale (textile can be used too but is more valuable for other things). National morale is critical for many reasons and you want to have it as high as possible. If it is low, you can surrender instantly to your opponents and high morale rise also morale of your units on battlefield to some extend. Lost battles, enemy army in your capital, insufficient of food, feudalism adjustments, high taxes all lower your morale, sometimes significantly so keep eye on it. Once it starts to fall close to zero it should ring your bells and you should look at country details (via diplomatic screen) to find out reason and make corrections immediately, mostly by producing lot of vine spices and luxuries.
If your have little or none of feudalism, you can earn lot of money from merchant ships so build them few. Some sea zones brings lot of money, some brings very little, move your merchants around to find out. Merchant income is however significantly lowered by other merchant or privateer in the same zone. Merchant itself can be attacked by enemy so try to place them where you can protect them in time of war. They cost lot of textiles to build.
You can build few privateers, they cost only lot of wood and are not affected by feudalism level. However they will not bring you anything close to profits merchants can. On the other hand they significantly disturb merchant trade of your opponents (even your own if in zone with your merchant) and capture some resources. I use them also as a scouts so I can evacuate my merchants and fleets if opponent sends large force my way.
As I see from your post, you did not realize that putting man in to development will radically increase speed of building. Most of it can be done in 2-3 turns if maximum manpower is used and even few can speed things a lot ...to wait 20 months for something to finish is ridiculous and I understand why you gave up to do anything at all
* Textiles are actually representation of all sorts of 18th ct. advanced production** (I know it have slightly different role in EE so correct me if I am wrong) and they are needed for nearly every single important thing in game (development,unit, container and you can use them even to rise morale) and you will newer have enough of them. 1 unit of textile is produced from 2 units of cotton or 2 units of wool. So what is important for production of textiles are not textiles itself but wool or cotton. Therefore provinces which are good at producing textiles actually produce very little of them. They can be used in textile production only if you bring some wool/cotton by trade. So what is important for textile production are provinces with lot of wool or cotton production so use them all if possible. And as mentioned, you need double wool/cotton to produce textile (some seemingly worthless Med. islands are actually relatively good at wool). Reasonable production of textile you need per month is around 20-30 units.
** If you know something about history than you know textiles/costumes were actualy wery valuable thing ...wealth of family or man could have been measured based on how much of them and of what quality you have and sometimes they were used even for collecting taxes or as money in trade so representation is quit correct here.