When is the best time to recover Normandy? when the game starts or later on? and who should i have as an ally to help my achieve this? :wacko:
Ill try all the strategies given here. haha i have time to kill, must say Iwanow's strategy looks fun
OMFG the game crashed just before i saved and now i have to redo all that. needless to say im pissed right off now (Excuse my language)
The mission I told you about will only fire when you're already at war with France.
So if you're able to win the war, just cancel your current mission, as the "Occupy Paris" mission is probably the best in the whole game. Then just, well, occupy Paris and, whoop, you get cores of a huge part of their land. Especially good if either you or France started the war with the Reconquest-CB (which is quite likely) as in this case you can just demand that provinces in the peace deal for 0 infamy, even though they weren't cores at the start of the war.
If you're going to PU Castille as step 1 to world domination as England, you need to do it very quickly, before trying to PU Aragon. Castille's throne has a nasty habit of becoming invulnerable if you're not fairly quick.
My starting move as England is RM with Castille, then win any quick war to get enough Prestige to allow Claim Throne on Castille. Declare war on Castille (really early, 1400-1402 maybe), ideally whilst Castille is fighting Granada & really ideally with it's armies in Africa (where I can trap them with the RN).
Force a PU on Castille (after a lot of hard fighting - attrition in Spain can be nasty), ally with Castille, get relations up, & then worry about France. If you can military access through Aragon or Navarra (PU, vassalise or annex) then France is easy - Castille will march 30k troops to assist in any French war.
You've got until 1450 or so to Occupy Paris - that's an awfully long time.
I think that's a good idea actually. However, there's a lot of luck involved when it comes to choosing who to PU first (with that pesky new legit heir popping up - which sometimes make me want to have a CK2-style assassination system).1475 if i recall correctly. or 1470. Not quite sure.
Anyway PU'ing aragon first may make PU'ing castille lot easier. But best way is just to know how to fight(like not doing uber-big stacks in enemy lands, keeping your armies close to each other, and avoiding atrition...