Finally did it, and with a "comfortable" 40 years to spare. Here's some overview screens-
This was a pretty exciting game the entire way through (well, except for the first 50 years of putzing around). The first major difficult was taking control of the close Sub-Saharans. I mainly vassalized and sold provinces to keep my admin points, avoid the incapable ruler penalties, and that my sunni vassals were better at fighting than I was. I got a little lucky here-Songhai had beat Mali up pretty bad, but hadn't completely wiped them out by the time I started on them. Furthermore, their huge war exhaustion led to a lot of animist revolts and flipped religions, which made conversion significantly easier way down the line. The real terror from them were their mercenary armies-since they couldnt spend any money they had a massive bank to put out mercenaries-in addition, most of their territory was incognito so I couldn't chase. When I DID beat a stack completely, they just hired more. This led to needing a lot of careful manpower control (an earlier attempt was ruined by peasants war due to low manpower), and extreme WE since my actual army forcelimits were so small (I probably spent around 1000 diplo points reducing WE).
Once I had managed that, it was time to colonize like crazy and westernize/reform. I managed to get all the land from benin to gabu, and just had one French territory to worry about. I basically raw-dogged westernize as soon as I got a core near them even though my ruler was admin 0-I had to become christian ASAP to remove that CB. Portugal did declare on me once here, but I was able to drop the majority of my bank to get a quick peace (around 4k ducats at 1550). From there, westernization was a slow-ish but straightforward process, helped along some by a defeat rebels event trigger (an event I abused heavily throughout the first 200 years). Converting to christianity was extremely easy, as all the provinces I personally owned were shamanist.
From there, I had to reform the government and start annexing vassals (I had 3 vassals, each between 8-12 provinces). I started annexing before I reformed as I got a young-ish 5-1-4 ruler (no huge tax penalty, revolts were actually useful for the aforementioned mission, and no huge coring costs for colonies) with a 1-2-4 heir. Reforming the government was similiar to westernization, but generally shorter. At this point, it was just boring colonizing around africa until i could start in on swahili (and making sure the Ai didnt get any footholds). The real slowing factor was taking 7/7 innovative ideas-in hindsight, I probably would have chosen economic instead but the innovative boost really came home later on in the game.
Swahili and Omanian adal were very easy by the time I got to them, as my military tech had started to catch up to western tech. At this point, however, I was in a bit of a bind. On the western coast France had 3 territories (2 of my cores from my foolishly declaring a coalition war with the coalition at truce), which was a bit awkward. The real concern, however, was a Portugal with GB as a vassal holding most of Morocco. Even more concerning, the Ottomans had pushed in and taken 4 African territories AND taken defender of the faith, making the prospect of scooping up the rest of the Berbers a dim one. Finally, I had missed a number of random african Islands that both Portugal and Spain had scooped up, which meant I couldnt ignore my navy if I wanted to win.
The gaming gods then smiled on me in the form of the Enlightenment Movement event. For anyone who doesnt know what this is, it's an event that requires 7/7 innovative ideas, gives -20% to all tech costs and an additional -20%/-15% to admin/diplo tech, in exchange for +8 revolt risk for 20 years. I desperately needed this tech, as both my admin/diplo techs were 15 levels behind. At the end of the 20 years (1705) I had a fully modern level navy/military and enough admin tech to take 2 more idea groups AND get absolutely Monarchy for that precious 10% discipline. I also scooped up and annexed a decent size mamluk (around 7 provinces) during this whole deal.
Like true gentleman, the Ottomans waited to declare war on me until after I had gone through this event and picked up an alliance with a rather powerful Bohemia. My western troops crushed theirs in fight after fight, and I eventually managed to scoop out their african holdings and release a number of nations to keep them busy. From there, it was just an easy romp through tripoli, Algeria and Morocco followed by one big war for Portugal's colonial holdings. Feeling pretty good about myself, I started up a war on Tripoli right after the ottoman war ended (and without any manpower reserves).
I need to watch cascading alliances closer. A wear against just tripoli turned into a war against Portugal (fresh off integrating GB), a pretty nasty italy and a Scandinavia-sized Denmark. Yipes. But crises call for daring play, and that's just what I did. An easy military access with algeria meant my troops could march all the way to the Portugese holdings (and silly Portugal didnt take defensive). The ai landed some 80k troops on my shores, but my shores weren't connected to the portugese holdings! After a quick siege down of all of portugal's territory and some easy warscore boosting thanks to my tripolitanean conquest, I wiped Portugal out of the African continent (and picked up Mauritius, a critical island territory for claim fabrication on the Spanish island next to it). After creating Fez and selling a bunch of cores, the rest of the game was just a matter of managing the coalitions formed against me (and one audacious double truce breaking pair of wars) until Africa was mine.
With all of that, here are some tips if anyone is interested in pursuing this achievement themselves-
-In the beginning, you want to vassalize sunni nations and take your territory from the animists. Sunni nations will buy fresh territory much more easily due to same religion, make you more money, and have better fighting troops. If you get too much animist territory to hold onto, release one animist vassal to hold onto it and make sure sunni rebels never come knocking.
-Your first idea definitely has to be exploration, but I think economic is the best choice for a 2nd. There are a *lot* of gold provinces in Africa (my inflation was upo to 35% by the end of the game), so any kind of inflation reduction is mightily ggood. Furthermore, you'll never be able to hire the +3 advisors that make going innovative so strong, whereas the extra gold from economic will do wonders. That said, a major reason I made it was the Enlightenment event from having full innovative, so innovative may be the best option depending on game circumstances.
-It goes without saying when going for one of these achievements, but the day you spend admin points coring a conquered territory is the day you start losing. You have to spend a hilarious amount of admin colonizing and coring the african coastline (not to mention the huge stab costs to westernize/reform), so you really want to cheese the coring process as much as possible. The usual strategy is scoop a bunch of territory with ONE owned by a dead nation, release that nation and sell provinces to em, take their cores back in the next war. As an added bonuses the released nations will be catholic, so you can get some conversions done without any effort.
-You can move your capital to the Ivory Coast node and snipe all the Brazilian trade that goes into it. Dont be surprised when the European powers decide to bomb your node with trade fleets though.
-Don't be scared of the European powers. The ai is hilariously bad at any kind of cross-continent warfare, and they can't make any use of the shatter mechanic when they dont have any friendly territory to retreat to. Do be scared of the ottomans until you've got them beat in military tech (around 24-26 is when I did it) and, ideally, have a large ally to help draw their troops away.
-Your manpower is going to suuuuuck. If you've got extra mil points dont be afraid to dump money on military buildings-with all of africa I still only had like 80k manpower (with an ok number of mil buildings too).
-Get enough admin tech to get absolute monarchy, then never get any more unless you absolutely have to. Having a deep admin pool will protect against stab hits and allow for big truce-breaking moves (which you'll almost definitely have to do once coalitions become a problem).
So yeah, that's a huge amount of text. Hopefully at least one other huge nerd reads it all and gets something from it. This achievement is quite a lot of fun as there usually isn't much action in Africa, but as you can see it's almost never smooth sailing.
This was a pretty exciting game the entire way through (well, except for the first 50 years of putzing around). The first major difficult was taking control of the close Sub-Saharans. I mainly vassalized and sold provinces to keep my admin points, avoid the incapable ruler penalties, and that my sunni vassals were better at fighting than I was. I got a little lucky here-Songhai had beat Mali up pretty bad, but hadn't completely wiped them out by the time I started on them. Furthermore, their huge war exhaustion led to a lot of animist revolts and flipped religions, which made conversion significantly easier way down the line. The real terror from them were their mercenary armies-since they couldnt spend any money they had a massive bank to put out mercenaries-in addition, most of their territory was incognito so I couldn't chase. When I DID beat a stack completely, they just hired more. This led to needing a lot of careful manpower control (an earlier attempt was ruined by peasants war due to low manpower), and extreme WE since my actual army forcelimits were so small (I probably spent around 1000 diplo points reducing WE).
Once I had managed that, it was time to colonize like crazy and westernize/reform. I managed to get all the land from benin to gabu, and just had one French territory to worry about. I basically raw-dogged westernize as soon as I got a core near them even though my ruler was admin 0-I had to become christian ASAP to remove that CB. Portugal did declare on me once here, but I was able to drop the majority of my bank to get a quick peace (around 4k ducats at 1550). From there, westernization was a slow-ish but straightforward process, helped along some by a defeat rebels event trigger (an event I abused heavily throughout the first 200 years). Converting to christianity was extremely easy, as all the provinces I personally owned were shamanist.
From there, I had to reform the government and start annexing vassals (I had 3 vassals, each between 8-12 provinces). I started annexing before I reformed as I got a young-ish 5-1-4 ruler (no huge tax penalty, revolts were actually useful for the aforementioned mission, and no huge coring costs for colonies) with a 1-2-4 heir. Reforming the government was similiar to westernization, but generally shorter. At this point, it was just boring colonizing around africa until i could start in on swahili (and making sure the Ai didnt get any footholds). The real slowing factor was taking 7/7 innovative ideas-in hindsight, I probably would have chosen economic instead but the innovative boost really came home later on in the game.
Swahili and Omanian adal were very easy by the time I got to them, as my military tech had started to catch up to western tech. At this point, however, I was in a bit of a bind. On the western coast France had 3 territories (2 of my cores from my foolishly declaring a coalition war with the coalition at truce), which was a bit awkward. The real concern, however, was a Portugal with GB as a vassal holding most of Morocco. Even more concerning, the Ottomans had pushed in and taken 4 African territories AND taken defender of the faith, making the prospect of scooping up the rest of the Berbers a dim one. Finally, I had missed a number of random african Islands that both Portugal and Spain had scooped up, which meant I couldnt ignore my navy if I wanted to win.
The gaming gods then smiled on me in the form of the Enlightenment Movement event. For anyone who doesnt know what this is, it's an event that requires 7/7 innovative ideas, gives -20% to all tech costs and an additional -20%/-15% to admin/diplo tech, in exchange for +8 revolt risk for 20 years. I desperately needed this tech, as both my admin/diplo techs were 15 levels behind. At the end of the 20 years (1705) I had a fully modern level navy/military and enough admin tech to take 2 more idea groups AND get absolutely Monarchy for that precious 10% discipline. I also scooped up and annexed a decent size mamluk (around 7 provinces) during this whole deal.
Like true gentleman, the Ottomans waited to declare war on me until after I had gone through this event and picked up an alliance with a rather powerful Bohemia. My western troops crushed theirs in fight after fight, and I eventually managed to scoop out their african holdings and release a number of nations to keep them busy. From there, it was just an easy romp through tripoli, Algeria and Morocco followed by one big war for Portugal's colonial holdings. Feeling pretty good about myself, I started up a war on Tripoli right after the ottoman war ended (and without any manpower reserves).
I need to watch cascading alliances closer. A wear against just tripoli turned into a war against Portugal (fresh off integrating GB), a pretty nasty italy and a Scandinavia-sized Denmark. Yipes. But crises call for daring play, and that's just what I did. An easy military access with algeria meant my troops could march all the way to the Portugese holdings (and silly Portugal didnt take defensive). The ai landed some 80k troops on my shores, but my shores weren't connected to the portugese holdings! After a quick siege down of all of portugal's territory and some easy warscore boosting thanks to my tripolitanean conquest, I wiped Portugal out of the African continent (and picked up Mauritius, a critical island territory for claim fabrication on the Spanish island next to it). After creating Fez and selling a bunch of cores, the rest of the game was just a matter of managing the coalitions formed against me (and one audacious double truce breaking pair of wars) until Africa was mine.
With all of that, here are some tips if anyone is interested in pursuing this achievement themselves-
-In the beginning, you want to vassalize sunni nations and take your territory from the animists. Sunni nations will buy fresh territory much more easily due to same religion, make you more money, and have better fighting troops. If you get too much animist territory to hold onto, release one animist vassal to hold onto it and make sure sunni rebels never come knocking.
-Your first idea definitely has to be exploration, but I think economic is the best choice for a 2nd. There are a *lot* of gold provinces in Africa (my inflation was upo to 35% by the end of the game), so any kind of inflation reduction is mightily ggood. Furthermore, you'll never be able to hire the +3 advisors that make going innovative so strong, whereas the extra gold from economic will do wonders. That said, a major reason I made it was the Enlightenment event from having full innovative, so innovative may be the best option depending on game circumstances.
-It goes without saying when going for one of these achievements, but the day you spend admin points coring a conquered territory is the day you start losing. You have to spend a hilarious amount of admin colonizing and coring the african coastline (not to mention the huge stab costs to westernize/reform), so you really want to cheese the coring process as much as possible. The usual strategy is scoop a bunch of territory with ONE owned by a dead nation, release that nation and sell provinces to em, take their cores back in the next war. As an added bonuses the released nations will be catholic, so you can get some conversions done without any effort.
-You can move your capital to the Ivory Coast node and snipe all the Brazilian trade that goes into it. Dont be surprised when the European powers decide to bomb your node with trade fleets though.
-Don't be scared of the European powers. The ai is hilariously bad at any kind of cross-continent warfare, and they can't make any use of the shatter mechanic when they dont have any friendly territory to retreat to. Do be scared of the ottomans until you've got them beat in military tech (around 24-26 is when I did it) and, ideally, have a large ally to help draw their troops away.
-Your manpower is going to suuuuuck. If you've got extra mil points dont be afraid to dump money on military buildings-with all of africa I still only had like 80k manpower (with an ok number of mil buildings too).
-Get enough admin tech to get absolute monarchy, then never get any more unless you absolutely have to. Having a deep admin pool will protect against stab hits and allow for big truce-breaking moves (which you'll almost definitely have to do once coalitions become a problem).
So yeah, that's a huge amount of text. Hopefully at least one other huge nerd reads it all and gets something from it. This achievement is quite a lot of fun as there usually isn't much action in Africa, but as you can see it's almost never smooth sailing.
