How does the AI absorb its protectorate colonies without doing the mission?

When you start a game as either France, Spain or Great Britain, you get a mission on the second turn to take some native American land and as a reward your semi-independent colonies will join you. However, whenever i play a game, for example, as France, Spain absorbs New Spain and GB absorb the 13 colonies on turn 3 or 4, yet they have not taken the provinces required to absorb the semi-independent colonies.

Is there another way to get the colonies to join you that I have missed, or is that just a little boost the AI gets that the human player can not achieve?

It is scripted a few turns in the game. I believe they all get it at the same time.

Gah, that sucks. It's been made almost impossible to absorb those colonies with France or Spain because you have to spend so much money defending your home region and home ports from every other faction bordering you because the entire map has declared war on you by 1705, including your allies!

With Britain it's easy, you never have to worry about the island being invaded.

There was, and may still be, a bug in which any faction completing their mission resulted in all three getting their colonies.

This is a mod to fix that though, makes it impossible for them to be absorbed.

You can always modify the script file to change the victory conditions for yourself, or the AI. You can set it so they get absorbed by the AI at any turn you want...

I wouldn't know how. I'd like to have them absorbed by all 3 factions on the very first turn though, since they are colonies of said factions and only semi-independent, we should have control over them.