In the case of Scotland, unless you ally France, you don’t have anything to worry about for the first couple of years.
Also you can either mothball or delete ships at first because you usually start with more than you need at that point. Definitely delete troop transports, that’s wasted maintenance
Something I only discovered recently is that in the peace screen it tells you exactly how much Aggressive expansion you’re going to take, how much overextension you’re going to get, and how many admin points it’s going to cost to core the newly conquered lands. Having to guess those things in the past probably ruined 10+ saves by overdoing it, and resulted in my leaving an ungodly amount of territory on the table playing it safe.
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lol my Amazonian tribe just colonized St. Kitts, wtf am I doing.
Gonna try a real game now as Portugal.
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If you don’t want to play in Europe you don’t have to. The Mongols are supposed to be pretty serious. Play as Oirat.
I had a ton of fun playing a game starting as Nepal and conquering all of India for an achievement. Don’t let these guys shame you into playing the colonizers 
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Ottomans are super easy. I easily conquered all of my surrounding area and now it’s time to go after the bigger blobs, mamluks probably being the biggest hurdle. My income at peacetime is +18 a month and I’m only in 1465. I’m ahead in tech and basically everything and think I have 3rd or 4th largest army. My navy is super strong too.
I took administrative ideas for the discounts it gave, probably was a mistake but nothing else grabbed me. Other than the occasional rebel uprising which i’ve all quashed, not much going on except Hungary getting totally destroyed to the northwest of what I haven’t conquered. I may need to expand north of the black sea because to the east i have mamluks (who feel too expensive to take on rn) and AQ, which is an ally. Then all those small countries around there are all allied with mamluks so I would trigger a big war if I go in there.
Kind of stuck, trying to position myself nicely with france but other than amassing a lot of money i’m not doing much. Kind of waiting to see how they divy up hungary in a peace deal before I go charging into what’s left. That place is just a mess right now.
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The real secret for the Ottomans is to just largely ignore europe unless you are going for a gamey move like having rebels force convert you to Orthodox and trying to become HRE or form Rome. A much better move imo is to just set up say, Serbia as a strong vassal, and then just crush mamluks and go east for Persia->India.
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Ming tho
This is all correct, you can snake all the way east to Ming and wreck their mandate and the whole far east opens up too.
Tunis made a good ally for me in my ottoman run, the two front wars made Mamluks much easier to deal with and from there I just painted Africa green.
had a weird, seemingly penalty free way to turn on my AQ ally. I invaded imereti north of them, vassalized them in a peace deal, and since they were already at war with AQ, I inherited the war and was able to conquer AQ without any penalties (I think?). Weird thing though, was I captured all their land and destroyed their armies and only got up to a 72% war score.
Diplomatic, Administrative, Humanist, and Religious are all really good. Defensive and offensive are really good military ideas, although I like offensive slightly better because of the discipline.
An important thing to think about though is policies. For instance innovative + quality is REALLY good because you get a policy that gives +25% infantry combat ability out of it… and it meshes really well with quality to create high quality armies… and innovative if taken early saves you a lot of mana.
Wait what? So they essentially got rid of the Mandate?
I like the core creation discount in administrative, that was the main reason I got it. Coring all these provinces is hella expensive and I’m loving the discount already.
It’s really good. Also don’t be afraid to vassalize people and then annex them later. It’s basically a way to get territory using diplo points instead of admin points.
I feel weird I’m not really taking advantage of the merc discounts. But I have been at mp cap for most of this game even after wars that didnt go so well, so I havent bought any mercenaries. I’m guessing that will come into play later.
At one point i was sitting with 1800 gold and full mp and like nothing to do except go conquer more shit so I’m continuing to do that. I think I’ve been firing super lucky events and am running like satan himself because i’ve had practically 0 problems.
Watching western europe is interesting - Aragon has erased castille off the map. I allied with them to deal with france but I’m not enemies with france yet. England invaded me once with like a 15k stack and then ran away when my full army came at them. Their navy’s really scary.
Europes such a mess - i could take over hungary and probably lithuania and the only big baddie to worry about would be england. But i guess I’ll focus on asia/africa for a bit and then once my force limit is through the roof set my sights on europe.
Any ideas about colonizing? I know ottomans arent a colonial power but I have so many resources and so much income, I feel weird missing that part of the game entirely.
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Oh and I’m pretty sure I’m the only nation with cannons now. So maybe I should take advantage of that but not sure how.
This is an addicting game, thanks for the recommendation. Initial learning curve was a little annoying but now I’m feeling comfortable with the nuts and bolts of how things work, even trade.
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Ottomans aren’t in a good position on the map to play the colonial game. But that really applies mostly to the New World. You are still well positioned to colonize Africa and Asia and make trade companies which will allow you to just print ducats. But you will have to defend those trade companies which means you need seaports in the Middle East/Arabia because you’re blocked from access to the Indian Ocean and further eastward at the start.
You should stream your next run if you’re still doing that (although if you’re not running at speed 4 you won’t get many views)
Try to make inroads in Ireland without fighting strong nations allied with them. Fabricate claims on northern england and try to ally france. When the french try to take normandy/gascon england will split its forces and you have a chance.
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I will definitely stream this. I usually do a bunch of shit, run at speed 5 until something happens, do a bunch of shit, etc.
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