Greek Strategy...

[GuileMike]

I took Crete. What should I look into doing next? Anyone had an enjoyable game with Greece?

[Kyoumen]

Well, of course, the dream of most Greece games is to form the hilariously ahistorical but very fun Byzantium.

There's two ways you can go with that, basically.

1) The slow route, picking up rich and easy targets like Sicily and chunks of Egypt to get to GP, then slow burn your infamy while waiting for a chance to go after your cores, playing the long game to eventually just be flat out stronger than the Ottomans.

2) The quick route, where you pick up one extra state at most (besides Crete), rush some army techs and try to jump the Ottomans when the Russians crush them, annihilating their armies in defensive battles and taking your cores as quickly as possible.

I prefer the latter route. It's riskier (for one, the Russians sometimes either don't attack or just have an inconclusive fight with the Ottomans), but also has the very distinct advantages that early in the game, the Ottomans have trouble gaining allies (and their allies usually desert them when Russia attacks) whereas they are usually being propped up by multiple GPs later in the game, and that the later you grab your cores, the less precious Greek people that will be in them due to assimilation and migration. Plus, forming Byzantium in the 1850s is AWESOME and gives you almost the entire game to bestride the centre of the world once more.

No matter which way you go, though, it's not a good idea to play Greece if you can't handle failing at your goals in a game. No matter how well you play, with bad luck it will be simply impossible to form Byzantium. That's fine, of course, if you don't mind playing Greece and turning a middling third-rate power into a significant player in the world. Greece can be a power player in Africa and build the Suez Canal without much trouble, though you'll always struggle to industrialise or gain significant numbers of national pops. You definitely want your basic cores back from the Ottomans even if you don't want to form Byzantium, so always be on the lookout to backstab the Turks when they're on the ropes and friendless (and make sure your army tech can handle it, because it will be a long time, if ever, before you can hope to numerically match even a weakened Ottoman Empire). Keeping your navy big enough to block the straits and strategically cut off reinforcement from Anatolia, getting a good defensive general and using mountains to annihilate the numberically superior Turkish armies (and then spread out to prevent reinforcements from being able to successfully be built and gather into new armies) is a must.

If you aren't going for the all-or-nothing-form-Byzantium-early gambit, be very careful about taking the usually given advice to attack Sicily. Yes, it's very easy to do even with the starting Greek army and navy (as Two Sicilies reliably disbands almost its entire fleet and army early on to save money), and Sicily is a wonderful addition to Greece (rich, easy to industrialise, higher literacy than you have) but weakening an Italian state also makes an early formation of Italy via redshirts very likely, and they will want their cores back. Unless you have a strong backer like France (unlikely if you have high infamy), they will probably give you bad Norman flashbacks as they unceremoniously boot you out of your ill-gotten gains.