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You have to survive hordes , you are lucky if Poland only concedes defeat as their vassal will get munched otherwise , which means 40 to 50 golden horde regiments on you by 1410
 
What do you mean by "easily"? It is certainly easier than PU - for PU you need to wait until it's possible. With Ottomans you just declare Holy War on colonizers, so by 1430 you can easily eliminate colonizers simply by taking all their ports, annexing them completely or just by ruining them. Hordes should have no effect on that - I don't think there's much point in trying to absorb hordes that early.

You have to take out Castille, Portugal, France, and England fairly quickly. That's with dealing with one, possibly two, hordes with insanely large armies (not saying it isn't possible, but it makes it difficult to focus on Western Europe that early). And you'd have trouble getting there due to having a worse navy and all that. Plus Western Europe's love for the Anatolian peninsula.

The thing with PUs is you don't have to do it quick (though that certainly helps). As long as it happens eventually you'll still get all their land without infamy, possibly even with their own colonial empires.
 
You have to take out Castille, Portugal, France, and England fairly quickly. That's with dealing with one, possibly two, hordes with insanely large armies (not saying it isn't possible, but it makes it difficult to focus on Western Europe that early).
Ottomans only border Timurids and Timurids have enough enemies to fight and they are happy to accept concession of defeat. Neither GH nor QK have any realistic way to get a border with you if you don't want it. So it's a player's choice whether fight hordes or not (and I don't think it's worth fighting them early on).

And you'd have trouble getting there due to having a worse navy and all that. Plus Western Europe's love for the Anatolian peninsula.
You need few years to build up your navy, but there's no big rush. If you take Portugal by 1415 you don't need to worry about others for another 20 years or so.

The thing with PUs is you don't have to do it quick (though that certainly helps). As long as it happens eventually you'll still get all their land without infamy, possibly even with their own colonial empires.
PUs give you no guarantees. I am not sure what are the chances of inheriting all of them before 1500, but my feeling is that chances are quite slim
 
GH usually gets a border pretty quickly since AI Poland tends to lose to the GH.

I'd say that Castille is the best choice; PU aragon and portugal ASAP, spend the middle half of the game waiting for PU opportunities on England and France, and then get HRE in the late-middle game and form it, giving you a good chunk of asia and all of europe assuming bohemia and austria blobbed like normal.
 
Yeah, you can't really choose whether you get a border with the GH. That's up to Poland, which usually doesn't do well. Even if you don't end up doing much against the hordes, you'll still have to deal with one o both every few years, which can be troublesome.

And it doesn't matter if you inherit before 1500. You only need to do it before 1820, which is easily possible.
 
And it doesn't matter if you inherit before 1500. You only need to do it before 1820, which is easily possible.
Since the thread is about best WC country, I'm assuming WC should be finished by early 1500, so you can't wait until 1820 - if you are ready to wait until 1820 (almost) any country would do.
 
Since the thread is about best WC country, I'm assuming WC should be finished by early 1500, so you can't wait until 1820 - if you are ready to wait until 1820 (almost) any country would do.

I didn't realize best meant fastest. I thought it meant easiest.
 
I didn't realize best meant fastest. I thought it meant easiest.
You would need to somehow quantify "easy" to make comparisons. "Fast" correlates well with "easy" and it's also easy to measure :) I am not sure what else you could use as a metric. Possibly, the game play time (how much real time was spent to achieve WC), but it's dependent on the player and awkward to measure.
 
I don't know if anyone else noticed but playing as a Daimyo in Japan seems to net 0 infamy when conquering outside of Japan. So in a way I think staying as a Daimyo for WC would be easy with no worries of gaining infamy.
 
On the PU vs Holy War thing: surely with the PU option you still have to declare war and win comprehensively to enforce it, for it to be a reliable tactic? I've attempted to claim a number of thrones, without war and nearly every time I can think of it's been broken upon the monarch's death. With the larger network of alliances of some of the bigger nations this seems to always lead to a super-huge war that I'm not always capable of prosecuting so early. I guess on the plus side, if you're Castille/Spain, you can get free colonisation + building development and cores if you PU Portugal and Aragon but don't inherit for a long time.
 
Austia, has some gold provinces, and enough manpower!

Keep your colonies in the east connected to your home provinces and you dont have to bother the overseas tariffs, after controlling middle-east even into east Africa (with those rich gold provinces) is connected.

Further make the Vatican your vassal, get a lot of cardinals.

And be HRE and inherit as much as possible.
 
You would need to somehow quantify "easy" to make comparisons. "Fast" correlates well with "easy" and it's also easy to measure :) I am not sure what else you could use as a metric. Possibly, the game play time (how much real time was spent to achieve WC), but it's dependent on the player and awkward to measure.

Well, PUs and no early horde wars also count as easy.:) I understand what you mean, but I think it would be a bit harder, or at least a lot more complex, to do a WC by 1500.
 
I understand what you mean, but I think it would be a bit harder, or at least a lot more complex, to do a WC by 1500.
Doing WC by 1500 is definitely hard. There's another thread going on about whether it's even possible. It appears that the list of nations [possibly] capable of doing WC by 1500 is pretty short.
 
GH ? and it's still theory , no one tried it or came close enough AFAIK.
I think GH might be the bet. Ottomans are also on a short list. I did a test run with them, the main problem is shortage of diplomats, but as I played I was discovering some ways of dealing with it. For example, if you keep you gold low all the time someone irrelevant would ask you to give them gold and release some vassals you would want to release anyway - that's one (or more) diplomats you won't have to use. It also helps to plan what provinces of your target to occupy - you may get suitable peace offer from them thus saving you a diplomat. With all that I'm still not certain if there will be enough diplomats to finish by 1500. Perhaps dismantling HRE should be the first priority - it should help reducing number of nations.

Hordes look more promising because they require much fewer diplomats for conquest. But I have some concerns about dealing with TSC in 1440-1460 timeframe - you'll have pretty much all Europe revolting.
 
Ottomans are also on a short list. I did a test run with them, the main problem is shortage of diplomats, but as I played I was discovering some ways of dealing with it. For example, if you keep you gold low all the time someone irrelevant would ask you to give them gold and release some vassals you would want to release anyway - that's one (or more) diplomats you won't have to use. It also helps to plan what provinces of your target to occupy - you may get suitable peace offer from them thus saving you a diplomat. With all that I'm still not certain if there will be enough diplomats to finish by 1500. Perhaps dismantling HRE should be the first priority - it should help reducing number of nations.
How would you take the rest of the world with the Ottomans? I can see how it is easy to stop the colonizers but you can't use holy war to the east/south/southwest. What would be the plan to finish by 1500 there? Or is the plan to use every cheesy tactic possible? If that is the plan, the Ottomans wouldn't be in any better position than any other of the big ones. Or am I missing something here?
 
How would you take the rest of the world with the Ottomans? I can see how it is easy to stop the colonizers but you can't use holy war to the east/south/southwest. What would be the plan to finish by 1500 there? Or is the plan to use every cheesy tactic possible? If that is the plan, the Ottomans wouldn't be in any better position than any other of the big ones. Or am I missing something here?

You can use holy war on the Eastern and Indian nations as Ottos, you get a conquest mission on the Mamelukes, and there's the cheese PU tactic available for Arabia/Africa as needed. Or just eat the infamy, I'm pretty sure a "by 1500" WC is going to blast past the infamy limits anyway.
 
How would you take the rest of the world with the Ottomans? I can see how it is easy to stop the colonizers but you can't use holy war to the east/south/southwest. What would be the plan to finish by 1500 there? Or is the plan to use every cheesy tactic possible?
Ottomans have HW on many eastern nations - there aren't that many muslim non-hordes in the game. Nevertheless I would assume that cheesy tactic will be required to finish by 1500.

If that is the plan, the Ottomans wouldn't be in any better position than any other of the big ones. Or am I missing something here?
Ottomans start with a better tech, have better units, quickly get better units. They have much less infamy to burn (in comparison to Christian nations) and burning infamy (even with cheesy tactics) costs diplomats.
 
There is no way to finish a WQ before 1600, especially not 1500 with OE. They have indeed almost no diplomats.

Also PU'ing Castille, Portugal, Aragorn, France, Austria, England, Scandinavia, is extremely more powerful than being the OE and declaring war on them. It requires 6 wars to annex France, Castille, etc. It requires 1 war to PU them and they will fight on your side until you annex them with 0 badboy instead of 20-35 badboy dedepending on their number of provinces.

Personal Unions are extremely important in World Conquest. Ottoman Empire is insanely powerful, but a holy-war CB is much less powerful than the ability to PU.

Also 1500? You have to conquer more than a thousand provinces and you don't have enough diplomats to contact much with vassals, annex them, release them (for negative badboy on own cores, in order to reconquer 5 years later. Burn BB 3 times the speed.), declare wars. The PU option is easy and insanely powerful