1.51 Norwegian Wood Achievement

DDRJake said:

From my ongoing game to get this achievement, all I can really say is that the situation is incredibly fluid. You need to get independent as soon as possible and build up your power within Scandinavia while getting your colonising boots on, all the while ensuring that Muscovy and Britain do not get too strong and ruin your day.

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Good summary.

Your screenshot is much like the kind of game I like to play, with the exception that I never find the time to take over Denmark completely, because I instead have Perm+North Muscovy by this time.

I will give a recommendation: In my own ongoing game (1530s) I am in in the process of blocking the Iberians from colonizing outside the atlantic ocean. This will pretty much ensure that the achievement is mine easy (instead of frustrating). Important for this is that I colony hop south with each new colony in the new world to get coring range/colony range for sniping foreign colonies. So far it is working very well.

Crippling Muscovy and setting up strong Novgorod vassal by ~1510-20 means your back is free to fight colony wars around the atlantic ocean without being invaded from the east (or anywhere, since Your navy protects you from south and west). I have only been able to do this by extremely opportunistic play in Scandinavia/the North doring first 50 years.

Last, France is your best friend in the 1500s.

DDRJake said:

Sweden is a vassal, Scotland will soon be a vassal, England may or may not get PUd and Muscovy will regret declaring war on me.

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Just watched Norwegian wood 6 and noticed that England is just up for grabs as a PU again. Coupled with the civil war this could be good stuff.

EDIT: Oh, the oppurtunity passed again and the RM is gone, my bad. Will finish watching next time.

With no CoP, I finally got independence by 1450 in my luckiest start: I started as curia controller, which doesn't really matter much in the war, and I got 93 ducats :laugh: from the first event in December, which means I don't have to take any loans.

I DoW right as Lithuania got PU by Poland in August 1447. Denmark was able to ally Munster and another OPM after the war started and brought them into the war, didn't matter as they didn't have the land connection to send a single troop.

Built 16 galleys for a total naval size of 25. I wiped Denmark's and Sweden's fleet in two separate naval battles.

Built 5 more infantries for a total land force of 11k. 8k for sieging and fighting (stationed at Holstein before I DoW), 2k for scorch earth duties and 1k to loot Swedish provinces.

Was running on -3.8 ducats per month for quite a while and surprisingly, looting and my 20 ducats savings were enough. Even gained money as the war progresses.

I've never tried for this achievement, but it would be a shame to have Swedens ideas just disappear. Wouldn't they serve better as a vassal then just annexing them? Although ai is gonna ai so...

Light85 said:

It's rare because it's a relatively new achievement introduced in patch 1.4 if I'm not mistaken. Also, there are no known guides to power start from the horrible early game yet. The hardest part of this achievement is the early game and until that gets figured out, most of the achievement hunters won't get it. I have also seen a few close attempts that were foiled because of tag change. You can't tag change to Scandinavia for this achievement.

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Wish I had known that tag changing would mess up everything, been looking around the map for ages trying to find a province I missed. Any idea if this is going to be fixed? After all those hours it would be a bit annoying not getting it because of a tag change that hardly matters at all while playing.

Guridan said:

Wish I had known that tag changing would mess up everything, been looking around the map for ages trying to find a province I missed. Any idea if this is going to be fixed? After all those hours it would be a bit annoying not getting it because of a tag change that hardly matters at all while playing.

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You could try to file a bug report. Although since the achievement is named "Norwegian Wood" it might have been more apt to require a Norway tag. It's an easy 1-word fix actually.

From achievements.txt

any_province = {
trade_goods = naval_supplies
NOT = { country_or_vassal_holds = NOR }
}

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Change third line to NOT = { country_or_vassal_holds = ROOT }

DDRJake said:

Just to be clear, what counts as ownership here for all the provinces? Do protectorates count? Colonial nations? Vassals?

How about Colonial nations of vassals and protectorates of vassals/PU subjects?

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I don't think the latter two count for World Conquest (Citation Needed?), so I doubt they'd count in this situation.

I like reading these threads. Half of the ability on display here is something to strive for.

I just tried out my seize Cape Verde strat and it failed due to me being too greedy.

The strategy is as follows:
1) After breaking independence, improve relations with Morocco to max. Set your rival to one of Morocco's enemy.
2) Get military access, hire a +Dip Rep advisor and get fleet basing rights for 0.5 ducats a month.
3) Get Exploration (2) for Explorers and clear the fog on Cape Verde.
4) During the span when Cape Verde is being colonized, usually Portugal/Castille will go to war against Morocco.
5) Enforce peace to join the war. Seize colony.

I got greedy and wanted the colony to grow more before I seized it. The war ended a few days after I enforced peace... :wacko: If I succeeded I could have started colonizing in the 1460s and slowed down the Iberians colonization.

Clever, as long as they aren't allied with someone who would be more able and prone to smack you.

nth attempt (no CoP). Got independence a bit later (1452) because Poland didn't PU Lithuania and Lithuania was involved in my independence war. Managed to gain independence just barely without getting any land. Thrashed Scotland's navy's then trapped all its army at Orkney. Sieged down the rest of Scotland and peace out with Fife.

Sniped Cape Verde at 1457 by following the strategy outlined at an earlier post and it became a city at 1463. Now colonizing Brazil

How badly does it slow Iberian colonization? I notice they get their colonial range up extremely fast. Does taking CV hurt them a lot, or just let you colonize w/o needing both the idea + tech range boosts?

Either way, it's still a good ploy.

Tweakee said:

How badly does it slow Iberian colonization? I notice they get their colonial range up extremely fast. Does taking CV hurt them a lot, or just let you colonize w/o needing both the idea + tech range boosts?

Either way, it's still a good ploy.

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Taking Cape Verde means Portugal and Castille will have to reach Diplomatic Technology 7 (or get +20% colonial range advisor) to reach Brazil (Pernabuco is just slightly out of range from West Africa), slowing them down considerably, though not stop them.

Dip Tech 7+ You probably won't manage to keep them out by range unless you DoW and seize colonies.

It's 1468 and I'm done with one colony in Brazil and starting one in Caribbean. Castille has zero colony and Portugal has one colony up and starting a second, both in west Africa. The AIs have a tendency to fill up the exploration tree so it'll take a while for them to reach dip 7. I think it'll take till at least 1485 before Portugal can colonize in the new world. Castille will take even longer because they currently have Enrique the Idiot on the throne.

I just vassalized Scotland and England turned from friendly to hostile. Oh well, I'll try to befriend France next and see if I can annex Madeira/Azores/Canarias. Not sure if it's worth it though because it is certainly slowing down my expansion in the nordic countries slightly. And Muscovy has already blobbed a lot.

It sounds like a good play to really slow Portugal's grab at Brazil, but eventually they'll be able to hit Bermuda/etc directly, so it's probably best not to worry about it too much.

England going sour is why I'd likely skip Scotland. No wood means you can probably keep England allied the whole game, barring an unlucky colony. Who knows, you might even get lucky and PU em at some point.

Nearly every other power you're going to have to go to war with eventually, and then it's a crapshoot whether they'll ever love you again.

So I just finished my run last night and figured I'd come give my thoughts on completion.

I didn't take any screenshots till the end, but here's what I ended up with at 1728 (completion time):


Overall there was really no rush to complete this, were I to do it over again I think I could shave a lot of time off by doing a few things differently. The hardest part was the opening and then dealing with muscowy, once that was done it was all very reasonable. I wasn't able to start colonizing till 1490ish (kinda slow) due to a long living, really bad diplo monarch and simultaneously eating up a lot of diplo points in peace deals. The trick people are doing with seizing colonies in africa to jump into south america early is brilliant, and definitely would have helped (as SA was where I had to have the biggest colonial fight)...that said, I don't know if I could have afforded to fight russia and fund colonies during the 1460-1490 period anyway as it was very touch and go, and I definitely think dismantling Russia early is of great benefit (or at the least cutting them off from siberia)

Even starting in 1490 I was able to to lock down virtually all of NA (france and england got maybe 10 provinces combined, but they were very easy to feed to my colonial nations). I did have a bigger fight in south america as france/portugal/castille/england did make headways there -- but again, its so easy to consume colonial nations due to the low warscore cost for colonies that it wasn't really much of an issue. I think at the worst point I had to commit like ~30,000 troops to south america to support my CN's. I basically prioritized forming CN's then moving on to a new region and only came back to try and lock up coastline, with the idea being once the CN was formed I could feed them rival colonies and natives and let them do the coring. This only backfired on me once in the la plata region when another CN annexed my CN outright in a war I didn't even know was happening. The problem here was the CN's were weak at first and couldn't fight rebels, so I would leave them 10-15k troops "attached" to their army until their OE went away. I guess the bottom line is despite missing a lot of south america it never really mattered, although I think my life would have been easier overall if I had made a stronger brazil.

The other thing I would do differently is work on becoming HRE much sooner. Literally it would have been my next major goal after taking down russia -- once I was HRE (and I had a lot of chances to vassalize electors I passed on) things got pretty easy. I didn't even start trying till around ~1650, although part of it was because I had a queen live like 65 years(!) making me ineligible, but I should have vassalized the electors in preparation for her succession.

Finally, I had a really big france -> they got an early PU with portugal, they both colonized like crazy, and then they inherited, which made south america about 50/50% split between me and france. France also PU'ed a naples that was 2/3rds of italy and hungary, and also managed to take roughly ~30 HRE provinces before I was able to push them back. They kicked my butt bad a few times, which was good honestly as once I was able to turn the tide on france the game got really boring But had that PU not happened preventing me from DOWing portugal and eating their colonies without fighting france, I think south america would have been a total non issue.

On ideas: I went Exploration->expansion->offensive->innovative->defensive. I don't think naval is needed at all. Norways ideas cover it pretty well (morale, forcelimits, combat power for light ships). Plus your colonies give a ton of naval forcelimits. Exploration -> Expansion was a no brainer as maximizing colonists asap was key. I think for expansion I basically just grabbed the colonist and then left it untouched for a long time. I could debate offensive vs defensive for the third idea, but definitely military as I was constantly starved for admin points for coring and pushing for the next idea group -- and unlocking the norway NI colonist with unused military points was really the primary goal. Innovative was really about the tradition decay and war exhaustion modifier -- probably could have been replaced with something else and DOTF, but I had no regrets! I took defensive because despite full offensive and 100 tradition generals and baiting france into -3 mountains with equal or superior #s and DOTF (and +10% discipline for govt and equal tech) I was still losing about 50% of the battles and taking larger losses, lol. Once I had the morale bonus and was able to tank their prestige that issue seemed to stop.

I really liked this one -- it's definitely one of the better "difficult" achievements as there's a lot less monotony vs like a world conquest or jihad, etc!

A1551 said:

The trick people are doing with seizing colonies in africa to jump into south america early is brilliant, and definitely would have helped (as SA was where I had to have the biggest colonial fight)...that said, I don't know if I could have afforded to fight russia and fund colonies during the 1460-1490 period anyway as it was very touch and go, and I definitely think dismantling Russia early is of great benefit (or at the least cutting them off from siberia)

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First off, congrats on the achievement!

It is indeed hard financial-wise to fund colonies and fight wars at the same time. It's 1480's now and I'm running 3 colonists and my income is about -1 ducats/month during peace times though I still have a 300 savings to tide me through. I think even if you don't colonize as aggressively, seizing Cape Verde alone slows down Castille/Portugal by about 15 years and that alone will mean a far easier time in the future.

My strategy is to weaken all the major powers (except Ottomans, which is too far away) from the get go so that none of them get too powerful to take down later on. Downside is I will have many enemies and I need to be careful not to get so weak that they all DoW on me.

That's why I'm current ally to Muscovy and France and dragging them to all my wars to slow down their expansion pace. Besides, I think as long I block Muscovy off of Siberia, Muscovy can be dealt with easily once Western units far outpaced eastern units. I might even get a PU if I'm lucky and if I did I could even go for WC.

Have you had to core all your naval goods provinces to get the achievement?
I own all of the provinces, but have not cored the Czech and Hungarian ones yet. Thanks!

-edit:
It turns out I overlooked Bermuda and Azores. Got it in one war and achievement popped up
So there is no need to core all your provinces.