Concerning Georgia

[unmerged(496349)]

I'm what you'd call an amateur player. But for my next trick I tried playing Georgia.

The problem is that I'm not good at stacking the odds in my favour. So I had some easy expansion early game and then hit the rocks. My problem was that I could not deal with the Ottomans (overwhelming power) or Qara Qoyunlu (Alliance with the timmies).

I have identified a few problems. The first is that I didn't know how to pick idea groups. I just blindly grab at whatever seems good. The second is army modifiers. I don't know how to maximize morale, army tradition etc so as to trounce my opponents, who always outnumber me.

The third is, and this is the key problem, I don't know what my first steps should be. I decided to bully Circassia because they shared my religion and culture group, so they could be assimilated painlessly. I then went to town of Gazikumukh to my north-east, absorbing two of their provinces, converting them at great cost. Shirvan outfoxed me, however, and was vassalized under the Ottomans. Since I share my border with Gaz's and Shirvan's capitals, I couldn't just break them first time round. A 20 stack of Armenian Rebels blocked my advance south. Aq Qoyunlu was bastardized by Qara and Ottomans before I had a chance.

I've realized a few things: first, Defensive seems to be a good idea choice. Second, the Ottomans need breaking early. Third, I needed to vassalize, not Annex my neighbours.

But I still have no clue. I need schooling.

 

[Kinghillard]

You don't necessarily have to vassalize if you can migitate the revoltrisk properly, place your army in the conquered province with the largest taxbase, keep stab positive, theologian if you can. Annexation can be handled properly.
As for the ottomans i don't think they can be broken early, not by you, you need an alliance with Muscovy and maybe the PLC, you'll have to destroy them mid or lategame

 

[kneville01]

Who are your allies? When you have larger stronger neighbors, this is the key question.

 

[atwix]

read the eu4 wiki articles. It learned me quite a few things beginning player.


http://www.eu4wiki.com/Europa_Universalis_4_Wiki


read... ALL of it. All sections. Especally the land warfare article.

 

[Ultrix Prime]

Reading the wiki is good (usually - sometimes the wiki is wrong, particularly when a new version comes out - but it seems mostly updated now).

So, a key element wherein I basically have been able to do whatever I like in EU4, is to analyze alliance possibilities and leverage these to your benefit.

So, starting assumption is you're playing Iron Man (why play any other way?). For any given country and campaign the #1 thing, I feel anyway, that you must do is create your strategic plan for your campaign. At the front of that, you must plot out before hand what alliances you need to form to achieve your goals. I choose alliance partners based upon who my likely adversaries are.

For the Ottomans, playing as Georgia, your first ally should probably be Muscovy. You are both Orthodox and that makes it pretty easy to marry and ally with them. They very easily decide to rival the Ottomans.

Next, if it's doable (and it almost always is, if you get a diplomat and restart until there's one available) is Austria.

Austria is the one nation in the area that can make it over to the Ottomans and stomp them straight up. France can stomp them but probably cannot get to the Ottomans and takes too long to get there.

Thus far, in 1.7 and 1.8, if I have allied Austria, the Ottomans will not try to mess with me - whatever calculations the AI is doing, one of them seems to be "Ottoman strong, but Austria smash Ottoman, Ottoman no want fight Austrian Hulk."

Muscovy to your North is the one country that can bail you out against Lithuania and Poland once there's a PU.

So, another suggestion is, assuming Iron Man, start the game, play to a point, note what went well and what didn't, think through how to do better and restart.

Eventually you'll have sufficient experience in the game to simply start it and play. However, even with over 2000 hours of EU4 game play I occasionally find myself needing to do a play and restart to figure out who is possible to ally and who isn't and how long I have before being attacked.

In any event, assuming you get your alliances out of the way, I would not simply vassalize Circassia, but rather take a couple of provinces and vassalize the remaining ones such that you have a border with both the Golden Horde and Crimea.

Muscovy will happily go to war with you against both, but Golden Horde first since he doesn't start with a border with Crimea.

The Ottomans will probably ally with Crimea and they seldom, if ever, ally with both Crimea and the Golden Horde.

Likewise, you will want to war early on such that you expand as rapidly as you safely can given the AE you will build up. The reason is two fold:

1) the Ottomans will be busy fiddling around in the Balkans and consolidating their Eastern Cores - this gives you some time
2) you need to have land to the north to keep your armies in during the time periods when the Ottomans might consider coming for you

#1 is fairly obvious if you play the game a number of times.

#2 is about positioning. Getting your armies a safe distance away such that the Ottomans cannot jump you and stomp your armies at the outset is key. The same is true of Poland/Lithuania and QQ.

Muscovy grows into a big bad blob very quickly, just not blue. It any game Muscovy is not only your natural ally, but it takes quite some time and you can easily manage your wars such that you don't end up with a long border wherein Muscovy suddenly decides he wants to eat you instead of Lithuania.

Thus, manage your wars and your war gains so as to minimize borders with allies and maximize them with enemies. Otherwise, you'll suddenly have your +200 relations ally flip on you out of the blue due to -250 wants your provinces (long list of provinces) and things will suddenly look really bad.

Taking down the Ottomans from the East is a particularly difficult prospect. It very much requires one or more Western allies to come in to help stomp them. The reason is that for much of the game, the Ottoman armies are enough to crush all comers on any one front. Thus, it is key to get units coming in from various countries on *multiple* fronts. As Georgia, you cannot easily build a navy large enough to block the Bosphorus straight into Constantinople.

As an aside, the "traditional" approach to stomping the Ottomans is, from a western power perspective (everyone in general Byzantium in particular):

1) build a large galley to sink the Ottoman navy
2) go sink the Ottoman navy
3) block the Bosphorus straight so that they cannot re-enforce or retreat
4) siege all of the Balkans

wash, rinse, repeat

But you cannot easily do this, thus your more likely approach once you have chopped up Golden Horde provinces with Muscovy help is to smash Crimea while running away when the Ottomans show up until Muscovy stacks show up to help smash the Ottomans. This is where the "stack with this unit" box on your regiment view comes in handy as you want to lead the Muscovy horse to Ottoman water and get him to take a big gulp.

Timing is critical. You should look at the military display for countries and note Muscovy's manpower and current number of regiments and make sure he isn't actively in a war. You want Muscovy to be strong and ready to rumble when you declare. Whether you have max manpower and regiments is almost irrelevant. Your allies are your leverage and you are standing at the end of the lever exerting a small force to get their huge forces to do the work, essentially.

Once you have taken enough of Crimea to force them to drop the Ottomans as an ally and grab a province or two such that you now border Lithuania, end the war. You do not need to try to gulp up everything at one shot. Better is to fight your wars as a series of efforts to expand your overall possibilities for conquest. Thus, taking some of a country while making sure that your main ally or allies are not going low on manpower is key.

It does no good to get a 100% war score on an enemy, but have your allies with 0 manpower and low on regiments such that your other enemies attack you, your allies dishonor the alliance and then go off to suffer from peasant wars in their home countries because their manpower is depleted and they're overextended.

So manage the health of your allies in fighting your wars. Do not push it beyond what their capacity to fight the war is or you can very quickly lose the game.

Next, when Muscovy is fully recovered, or close to it, go after Lithuania and Poland. The provinces you want for you are the ones going around the Black Sea while giving Muscovy provinces far to the North such that the two of you do not intersect. By this time you will have *some* degree of border with Muscovy. If it becomes large enough for Muscovy to consider dropping your alliance, sell a bordering province to an enemy who isn't your rival. If it's the same country that you took it from, they'll buy it for 0 no matter how much they hate you, as *long* as it isn't a rival.

Once you have secured a border that takes you basically to the Balkans, you can now feast on Hungarian lands and will probably have the bulk necessary to face the Ottomans straight up alongside your allies without having to fear them hitting you with 3 times your troops in 1 stack.

You will want to have westernized if possible and have taken some military ideas because the Ottoman's national ideas buff their military a great deal. Quantity and Quality are good ones and some folks would substitute Offensive for Quality because of forced march. Learn the forced march mechanic as, with it, you can chase down an army in full retreat and break it allowing it 0 time to recover morale. This one reason is why some people totally swear by Offensive. Unfortunately, it also means a lot of micro. For the more lazy players (hi, hi!), Quality is better because the buffs are simply huge. You'll need quantity because the Ottomans have built in manpower buffs and start with a huge manpower pool to boot.

Alternatively, master getting your allies to do all the heavy lifting and skip any military ideas. I do this quite frequently now depending upon the country I'm playing. This does, however, require constant management of your allies. For example, if one of my allies won't go to war when I need them to and they're in debt, I send them a gift so that they pay down their debt and join my war. Little things like that can make all the difference.

In any event, the #1 thing to take away from my response is this:

Plan your campaign out

I have given you one campaign approach. No doubt others might (probably will) try to pick it apart. It doesn't matter in that case who is right or wrong. What matters is that you formulate your campaign strategy and planning for alliances and who you want to DoW and what you want to take before you even click the start button in 1444. Once you have done this one key part, the game becomes much easier because it is a matter of going to the units and screens and so forth to put your plan into motion and thus your actions are a matter of your intentions.

That is the hard part of the game as a beginner. Learning to make the game into a series of moves in which your *intentions* are being executed. Right now, you probably think in terms of "maybe I'll try this, hmm, ooops, that was bad" - so don't do that. It's a strategy game, so formulate your strategy and execute it.

Before embarking on any country and goal, I think and read a bit and do some analysis to formulate my plan. Your plan will very likely change because events will intervened like that darned comet, to mess things up a bit. But first have a plan so that you can then decide how to adjust it.

Do not start your campaign without your plan. Otherwise, your odds of success will remain very small until you start having one.

 

[bunse]

Ultrix is pretty much spot on.

couple small things i would like to add
-dont play ironman when learning this game. being able to reload and adapt, is vital if you want to understand what went wrong and why
-my first idea group would be religious because of the CB and the +3 missionary strength after that a military group

 

[Ultrix Prime]

Heh - play Iron Man - not being able to make mistakes without being punished for it will cause you to be more thoughtful!

But the previous poster is right, probably, that playing the game the boring way where you can save before you leap and restart from the save may be better. Personally, I go with the previous statement for *learning* - but that's mainly me.

Now, some other pointers. I said to myself "self, why not give a quickie try to Georgia" and so I decided to do so.

Russia apparently is a "historical rival" - I believe this is new to 1.8.
ow
It doesn't matter. One way to ally someone like Muscovy is with a guarantee. So by guaranteeing them I am basically creating a 1 sided alliance where I'll come to their aid but they won't come to mine. Now, once you have played the game a bit you will know that Muscovy *is* going to go to war, period. Whats more, everyone they're going to go to war with initially is separated from you by one or more nations such that whoever it is:

1) cannot easily get to you
2) will be too busy with Muscovy stomping them to try to come after you

So, to ally Muscovy in 2 years, I did the following:

1) grab a diplomat (this is key +14 to the decision for marriage)
2) start improving relations before clicking start
3) guarantee them as quickly as possible

So they went to war with Lithuania, my relations jumped, royal marriage came active when I accepted and poof, marriage, immediately followed by alliance.

It is important to note that I waited until *after* getting the alliance to declare on Circassia. The reason is you do *not* want to risk having AE with Muscovy to counter when trying to ally them. I'm not sure what the AE number would be (some tax based thing now), but this is a very good example of what I mean by planning. I still attacked and fully annexed Circassia. You may want to do annex some and vassal the rest. It's a matter of personal choices. I feel that the provinces are key to simply take because of the religion and culture and whatnot and the muslim neighbors will be the ones I want to vassalize. You might prefer to do it the other way, attack the muslim nations to the east, core them, release them and let them convert the provinces for you to your religion.

This sort of thing becomes a bit more stylistic. You must find your own style because it will influence your idea group choices.

So for instance, my style when playing Orthodox, I will eventually have max orthodoxy and have +2 missionaries and thus vassalizing muslim provinces so that I can come back later, diplo annex and convert with my buffed missionaries seems better. But this is to say that I pretty much never take religious ideas with Orthodox. I prefer taking Humanism if I'm going to be blobbing a lot of heathen provinces and rely on max orthodoxy - hint: with humanism you don't really need to bother converting them all because of the +25% religious unity and with the buffs for heathen and heretic tolerance and lowered unrest, you can let your religious unity go to complete disorder and not care at all.

So the above is how *I* think about things. Rest assured, this is *not* the only way to think of your approach to ideas and conquest. There are many many different ways of thinking about these aspects of the game, but you should formulate these kinds of ideas and approaches for yourself to apply automatically as you play.

Reading the forums is good for this part of learning the game. My personal favorite for learning is youtube. Arumba is the most instructional in learning terms for *me* (that, and he sounds like and is an adult - so no scratchy teen voice is a plus for me - you may not care ) - others will no doubt think of others that they prefer. But you may want to check him out, as, for instance, he went through the 1.8 feature notes and discussed these and provided examples of why or how a new feature or change is useful.

 

[Ultrix Prime]

So I restarted (as I mentioned doing) and it looks like Poland by comparison is a straight up, guarantee, improve relations, marry and ally and they don't seem to care about you taking Circassia.

Likewise, I found that with enough time, Russia is marry-able and you can get an alliance.

A key thing here is that if Poland gets a PU over Lithuania in a timely fashion, it won't matter that Lithuania hates Russia and vice-versa. Poland is oblivious to this (that I've seen, there may be exceptions.

Thus on my restart, I have Poland and Russia as allies. My next move is to finish the second claim on Golden Horde, kick off the third and in the following month declare war. This will be particularly opportune because the Golden Horde is slugging it out with Crimea and will be in no position to fight the 3 of us thereby allowing me to easily grab up 3 more provinces, or more and get a border to go after one of the two muslim countries to the east to make them a vassal (maybe no CB war Shirivan or w/e and vassalize them too).

So now, if QQ or the Ottomans come knocking, I will, hopefully, create a land bridge of provinces from Lithuania to Georgia that allows my 2 allies to walk across allied land to get to defend Georgia.

Accomplishing these goals means that Georgia can then properly blob up from the surrounding lands and prepare for a war against the Nogai and later QQ.

So there's a starting strategy for you. I may actually play this out a ways, but the problem is I prefer playing for an achievement of some kind and I don't really see one I could make out of this particular game.

 

[Ultrix Prime]

So as I mentioned, playing to figure out what to do and such is key. Here is a playthrough I just did where despite having every minor country around me except QQ and Kazan as vassals (including Nogai, or instance) the game is basically lost because of failing to follow one of the rules I suggested to you above -> Georgia - dead man walking

So despite having good force levels and vassals like Greece that took religious ideas and is converting everything to Orthodox and such, in the last peace, I gave Muscovy a province next to Nogai without thinking. Since Nogai is my vassal, Muscovy was suddenly furious because it now wants every Nogai province in sight and Georgia's 200 relation with Muscovy dropped first to 40 at which point in mere seconds the alliance was dropped following by setting Georgia as a rival.

Now here's a key difference beyond that error on my part. Poland did not get a PU with Lithuania. Thus, having an alliance with Poland doesn't do very much (Lithuania rivaled both Muscovy and Georgia). Moreover, Poland decided to make Muscovy a rival and thus dropped the alliance with Georgia.

So, now Georgia, despite eating up most of the Golden Horde, giving most of Crimea to the vassal Greece, stomping Nogai and making them a vassal, is now, essentially, dead.

Without a strong alliance with a Poland + Lithuania PU (the latter cleans up the negative relationship with Lithuania by making it irrelevant), and with Austria still being too far away to ally, Georgia now faces hostile forces on all sides, with the Timurids having an alliance with the Ottomans, there is practically no chance for Georgia to continue growing in any direction.

So, as you can see, the strategy I suggested can work. However, when it comes to a country like Georgia:

1) weak
2) isolated potential western european allies worth having
3) surrounded by heretic nations that will naturally ally against them

*any* mistake can basically end your game and any undesirable events or non-events (i.e. Poland not taking a PU with Lithuania) can sink your campaign.

Thus, if you are new and learning, Georgia is probably one of the harder countries to choose from and you may want to start out with a country that has better chances

I'm rather enjoying Georgia myself however, as it presents an interesting challenge and breaking the code on alliances is one thing. The next thing to figure out is what optimal aggression consists of.

I discovered that with a Russian and Polish alliance, I could make Trebizond a vassal and get away with it. Note that you'll probably have to do this by force as they will ally with Circassia and when you take Circassia, you can take Trebizond.

Likewise, something I did was a no CB DoW Gazikumukh. I took Gazikumukh and made them a vassal ahead of attacking and annexing Circassia. I chose this order because having Gazikumukh rebuild their army gives a 5 stack early on that is very useful.

I also found that having a diplomat, I was able to do the move on Gazikumukh and take Circassia and Trebizond and still get a marriage with Muscovy and alliance thereafter. The timing on this is very important and getting Poland in a marriage and alliace is the first thing to get thereafter. You can reverse the order on these is one thing I found (I did a bunch of restarts to figure out marriage+alliance versus AE and found that AE wasn't a big issue for taking all 3 countries).

The combination of these two was enough to basically cause the Ottomans to go hunt elsewhere all the way up to the screenshot (see link at start).

Next, taking quantity ideas was key. By getting 1 level ahead of QQ and having a +discipline adviser with the +50% manpower, the combination of vassal armies and my manpower hit a point such that it was possible to stack wipe Shirivan (they will end up a vassal of QQ in almost every game it seems) and the remaining force numbers were thus sufficient to take QQ down, take Shirvan as a vassal and grab 3 provinces from QQ.

However, *before* doing this, I took Muscovy into a war against Golden Horde and created a land bridge to Muscovy with provinces reaching up to Muscovy (I gave him 1) creating a single province border (this became a small amount of border friction).

Thus, when I stomped QQ, key was that Muscovy could come in and fight. Thus, if someone strong had come in to help QQ (in a previous start, the Ottomans allied and joined QQ rather late into the war and I didn't have a land bridge to Muscovy - this late joining thing is very annoying).

So key was that with my strong ally (Poland dumped me before this point), the Ottomans turned up their noses and went west to go fiddle around in the Balkans some more.

So an important point here is that you should constantly watch for the right force structures and opportunity from a DoW versus who you will be fighting, standpoint, all the time, looking for the right moment to smash whatever country is currently your most dangerous opponent. Breaking the back of QQ gives Georgia a free hand for some time because Timi and the Ottos will proceed to clean up QQ's other provinces for themselves.

Your next low hanging fruit for aggression once you've gotten as far north and west as you safely can without ending up in a huge war is to go for Timi. By the time you've secured horde lands and QQ, Timi should be about ready to explode into a bunch of small countries and Persia due to revolts. You'll want to watch closely for the black lined provinces to start showing up and key an eye on Timi's manpower. DoW'ing on multiple countries, one at a time, after Timi starts to fall to pieces can give you the Persia trade node which is very rich. You may even want to move your main trade province to be in the Persian node as the Crimea historically doesn't easily go into high double digits without a whole lot of investment.

Ultimately, you will want to decide whether your main goal is Constantinople itself or controlling trade elsewhere.

Constantinople has so many trade lines going into it that getting it to >100/month without trade ideas can be done through conquest. This is, to me anyway, unique, because this is normally only the case for end trade nodes. Taking the Persian node and lands further and further to the east once you've secured your other borders seems best. Constantinople would be better in terms of ducats but that means not only fully stomping the Ottomans but defending Constantinople from everyone else that would like to have it. Thus, you must decide over time whether to fully commit more so East versus west. This is important because to get into big blob territory in the middle game, you will need to focus Georgia in 1 direction. The provinces surrounding Georgia just aren't very rich in anything - taxes, manpower, trade power are all pretty weak and you go through a *lot* of work to get these. So you won't be France's rival in the first 100 years (no doubt a better player could pull that off, but I don't see it normally being the case). So you will really need to pick 1. East seems best and going West seems more risky. The call is up to you of course.

Beyond that, if you go East, continuing to push through India gives you control over trade routes to buff up your Persia node and at some point you may want to take trade so as to redirect everything you can to Persia.

Also, in the case of Eastern Tech, Westernization may not be necessary. I had no trouble keeping parity with other Eastern techs and thus easily surpassing the Muslim techs. It's not likely as deep as Georgia is into the East, that a big Western power is going to show up to stomp them. So Westernizing or not seems fairly optional.

Another thing about Georgia - the national ideas are just awful. The buffs are mostly ones that don't really do much to help Georgia grow and thrive - survive a bit longer maybe, but not much more than that. Generic NIs are better than what Georgia gets.

You picked a very non-trivial country

 

[Ultrix Prime]

So I adjusted my strategy for Georgia a big so as to minimize getting close to Russia. Between Russia and the Commonwealth, Russia is the ally you want to keep. Backstabbing the Commonwealth once they almost certainly end up rivaled by Austria allows you to come at the Commonwealth from 3 directions as well as giving you Austria fairly easily as an ally. Georgia's +1 diplo rep NI, while pretty measly, does help to lock the Emperor in as your ally. Another point for new players to note in this game is that my conquests on the Golden Horde were timed. First of all I wanted the Nogai to disappear. The reason being that then you can conquer their lands and recreate them as your vassal, thereby having them convert everything to Orthodox for you. Secondly, you want to make sure that all of the Astrakani lands are in one Golden Horde lump and you want to activate them ahead of Nogai disappearing (assuming they do) - thus 2 wars, timed to maximize your vassal lands and feeding so that you can pick up a lot of land with 0 AE.

Likewise, it is clearly almost inevitable that once you've crushed QQ, Timi and the Ottomans will ally. One thing that folks don't seem to know is that if you give an ally access to your lands, they will come and kill rebels for you. This appears to be something the AI knows because the Ottomans managed to have a 1 province wide border with Timi and I saw the Ottos go in and stomp Timi's rebels repeatedly. Thus, Timi is in far better shape given the year than he normally should be.

Anyway, the gist of the strategic plan I laid out for you is shown being executed here -> Georgia doing the von Schlieffen plan a bit earlier

Now, the reason I bring up the seemingly inevitable Timi Otto alliance is that having the two of them together means a couple of things:

1) it's makes things difficult for getting Timi alone
2) it makes it pretty much impossible to stop the Ottomans from growing into the Mamluks and thus growing their income and manpower significantly

So it's quite hard as Georgia to cripple the Ottomans and without the Ottos crippled, once QQ is gone Timi seems to pal up with them out of a sense of self-preservation (wise move by the AI).

Thus, my original suggestion to you seems to be more valid. Going through the Crimea and eventually backstabbing the Commonwealth or Lithuania+Poland when you are able to ally with Austria is probably the better way to go - safer anyway.

Now the big thing about Timi is that getting the Persia trade node is almost as good as having Constantinople. Consider moving your primary trading province into the Persian trade node once you take Persian lands from Timi. My current armies are at max, and advisors in all slots due to trade income. Georgia and the province around them are just bad for taxes. Orthodoxy makes this even worse. Production is ok, but there aren't a lot of very high income manufactory options in the area. Mostly it's 2-3 ducat manufactories with a few big ones - 1 @9, a couple of 7s, a 6, and that is about it. So grabbing Persia and getting trade ideas to redirect every line you can into Persia and the secondary lines to those is key to buffing up your Persia income. Crimea, even with a lot of investment, just won't be equal because it's hard to drive a lot of trade early on into Astrakan to go to Crimea. So at a minimum, figure out a way to get the Persian node, taking Tabarestan if you can get to them before Timi does.

The other thing is that I went straight up military ideas aside from grabbing trade and it mattered. I was able to force the Ottos out of 3 wars with white peaces wherein they actually had the upper hand in the long term, but by getting 2:1 casualties on them, you can push them into the medium enthusiasm range and concede defeat them out, thereby allowing you to finish up Crimea and the Golden Horde. As long as there are a lot of provinces for the Commonwealth and Russia (both were my allies early and mid game - you can get both in the first 3 years as long as you have that diplomat at the start), they will happily let the Ottos siege your lands and crush you. Thus, running to a safe location and looking for small Otto stacks to kill is key. Best is if you can hide well enough such that the Ottos decide to go fight the Russians or Commonwealth straight up.

In any event, a lot of military ideas so that your armies are cheap, plentiful and strong with strong leaders is key to getting the Ottomans to go away. It would, I think, require a really good player who micros well to actually defeat them with Georgia. I'm not that good, and I'm too lazy - so national focus to military, and, while it's probably overkill, I went quantity, offensive, quality, defensive. Paying 450 per level for military tech is one payoff from doing this such that in the middle and starting late game you can always be ahead of the Ottos in mil tech.

In any event, I believe the initial plan I suggested you try is quite workable. The trifecta would be to somehow not only grab up the Black Sea coastline but push through Timi toward India. If you can do both of these before 1600 then going after the Ottos such that you own a lot of Anatolia is feasible.

Incidentally, once you have your main allies, keep an eye out for when Byzantium has a truce with the Ottos and Constantinople is in the Ottos hands. At that point, you can do a quick smash and grab to vassalize them. This in turn, once you've managed to push around the Black Sea, means that you will have a whole bunch of ready made reconquest CB's in the Balkans. I am getting ready for this next stage with those cores in mind. Unfortunately, it's far later than I would like and Georgia being anywhere near #1 by the end of the game seems unfeasible. I hope you and others will do better!

Anyway, interesting country, and the rather sub-par NIs make it extra challenging. The 1 and only advantage I see with Georgia is that after the 0/0/3 heir all the heirs are pretty decent at 9 or better total MP. So once you get past the first 2 leaders, things improve drastically and you are awash in MPs for much of the game.