How to improve colonial takeover

[alpha2518]

I don't mean invasion, I mean by improving the odds of taking an area over there seems to be too much randomness. I had an opportunity to take over Iceland, not much there but itll make my budget slightly bigger, its not far from Europe and the main high seas fleet. Easy. Yet somehow it fails and some local guy took over.  So how can I further reduce this randomness in my favor because I already have ships patrolling on foreign stations. Does it matter what kind of ships you have? Like is a Battlecruiser or battleship more likely to take over the area in question then a CL or CA? Does the armament matter and amount of it matter? IE those 6 in guns might not matter, but if you have a lot of them on 4 CLs, they do.

[pirateradar]

As far as I am aware this event is completely random and your fleet has no impact on it.

[garrisonchisholm]

This is the case. I would say based purely upon my observations that the chance of success is about 40%, chance of things "spiraling" away about 40%, and chance of a rival with tensions grabbing it about 20%. I've been able to detect nothing that can influence these percentages, its seems to be purely a random event.

It has been brought up before about perhaps allowing the Navy Dept to influence colonizing targets & urgency, but at the moment is purely a 'card draw' as it were.

[kriegsmeister]

It's a pretty annoying event, I've only seen it pop up 0-2 times a playthrough and have only had a successful invasion 2 or 3 times in the 3 dozen or so games I've played (granted not really a huge sample pool). It really should be the same as the "Your/Enemy colony has rebellious tendencies" or whatever the exact wording is, and you have like 2-6 months to move ships to that sea zone to quell or support the rebellion. In that event, while I haven't done rigorous testing, it does seem to take into account your active fleet component in the region. The neutral colony event should follow suit.