Hey all,
just finished conquering the world. Took me about 5 or 6 serious attempts since 1.6 or so with various nations. In this thread I'll proudly share some screenshots and will give some experiences/tips gathered during this (imo hectic) endeavor.
Also, even though I had to form the HRE in the end (Friesland ended up with a colonial nation), I stayed as Austria the whole game.
"Western" hemisphere:
"Eastern" hemisphere:
Overview of ideas I picked:
Ironman proof:
A few things I learned/noticed/would do differently now:
- protectorating Asia is quite tricky, since most nations westernize real fast now. I could have shaved off probably 30 years or so if I just conquered them directly. Now I ended up conquering quite a few nations (including a blobbed Ming and Bahamis) several times. If you go the protectorate route, make sure there are no western neighbors for them, which requires some good planning.
- colonial nations of vassals count as independent nation (bit weird imo), so iow you'll need to annex them eventually for the achievement (cost me 15 extra years to annex Muscovy with parts of my Asian protectorates westernizing in the meantime, almost thought I wouldn't make it because of that...)
- Vassal swarm is nice early on while you fight in Europe; later on, once you fight more distant wars, AI starts to show its limits and they are more of a burden than help in some cases. Also for some reason my vassals had a very good portion of their troops exiled for most of the game.
- I would take exploration as my first idea and influence second if I'd do this again. This would have meant 1 less war with Portugal cause I couldn't find their overseas territories at the time and you won't be annexing much anyway in the early years.
- Don't underestimate western Africa, they westernize quite early nowadays through Morocco or Jolof if Portugal can hold their provinces there. They weren't exactly difficult, but it took a lot more time than I initially planned.
- For some reason I now can't fathom I decided to start colonial nations in the Americas and annex the natives there. Just don't do it, just protectorate everything there that doesn't share a border with any Western nations (which should be pretty much all of them if you move fast enough).
- Your vassals make excellent dumping grounds for conquered territory if you need the admin points or can't take the OE. Just make sure to pick vassals that have the colonial range to core (and therefore have a coastal province) and preferably picked religious ideas (I ended up using Utrecht, Ferrara and Oldenburg for the non Christian provinces)
- Coalitions are great (no really). I had Quara qoyunlu reduced to an OPM. Declaring on the coalition through him gave me 100% WS just by occupying this one province. I could then just take my pick from the big nation territory I wanted (and had sieged)
- You can't fully annex a nation (even a 2 province nation) giving the land directly to one of your vassals through transferring occupation.
- Stop Portugal and Castile ASAP, England is not too bad, but is also high on the list. France can wait a little. In the first war make sure to get the Islands and any African territory they have. Also burn their colonies when you're at war to slow down their progress. Also if they don't have a coastline, they can't colonize (mainly good tip for Castile and France). Galica and Granada make good vassals to feed Castilian/Portugese lands to.
- Vassalize the pope early on and keep him at 200 relations. You'll get loads of papal influence that way which is good for buying stability.
- After you reach admin tech 26, don't buy any additional tech levels (unless you're capped out for some reason, happened to me once after reaching 26), you'll need the admin points for coring....
These are the things I can think of now. Also if you actually made it through this text wall, thanks for reading!
Cheers.
just finished conquering the world. Took me about 5 or 6 serious attempts since 1.6 or so with various nations. In this thread I'll proudly share some screenshots and will give some experiences/tips gathered during this (imo hectic) endeavor.
Also, even though I had to form the HRE in the end (Friesland ended up with a colonial nation), I stayed as Austria the whole game.
"Western" hemisphere:
"Eastern" hemisphere:
Overview of ideas I picked:
Ironman proof:
A few things I learned/noticed/would do differently now:
- protectorating Asia is quite tricky, since most nations westernize real fast now. I could have shaved off probably 30 years or so if I just conquered them directly. Now I ended up conquering quite a few nations (including a blobbed Ming and Bahamis) several times. If you go the protectorate route, make sure there are no western neighbors for them, which requires some good planning.
- colonial nations of vassals count as independent nation (bit weird imo), so iow you'll need to annex them eventually for the achievement (cost me 15 extra years to annex Muscovy with parts of my Asian protectorates westernizing in the meantime, almost thought I wouldn't make it because of that...)
- Vassal swarm is nice early on while you fight in Europe; later on, once you fight more distant wars, AI starts to show its limits and they are more of a burden than help in some cases. Also for some reason my vassals had a very good portion of their troops exiled for most of the game.
- I would take exploration as my first idea and influence second if I'd do this again. This would have meant 1 less war with Portugal cause I couldn't find their overseas territories at the time and you won't be annexing much anyway in the early years.
- Don't underestimate western Africa, they westernize quite early nowadays through Morocco or Jolof if Portugal can hold their provinces there. They weren't exactly difficult, but it took a lot more time than I initially planned.
- For some reason I now can't fathom I decided to start colonial nations in the Americas and annex the natives there. Just don't do it, just protectorate everything there that doesn't share a border with any Western nations (which should be pretty much all of them if you move fast enough).
- Your vassals make excellent dumping grounds for conquered territory if you need the admin points or can't take the OE. Just make sure to pick vassals that have the colonial range to core (and therefore have a coastal province) and preferably picked religious ideas (I ended up using Utrecht, Ferrara and Oldenburg for the non Christian provinces)
- Coalitions are great (no really). I had Quara qoyunlu reduced to an OPM. Declaring on the coalition through him gave me 100% WS just by occupying this one province. I could then just take my pick from the big nation territory I wanted (and had sieged)
- You can't fully annex a nation (even a 2 province nation) giving the land directly to one of your vassals through transferring occupation.
- Stop Portugal and Castile ASAP, England is not too bad, but is also high on the list. France can wait a little. In the first war make sure to get the Islands and any African territory they have. Also burn their colonies when you're at war to slow down their progress. Also if they don't have a coastline, they can't colonize (mainly good tip for Castile and France). Galica and Granada make good vassals to feed Castilian/Portugese lands to.
- Vassalize the pope early on and keep him at 200 relations. You'll get loads of papal influence that way which is good for buying stability.
- After you reach admin tech 26, don't buy any additional tech levels (unless you're capped out for some reason, happened to me once after reaching 26), you'll need the admin points for coring....
These are the things I can think of now. Also if you actually made it through this text wall, thanks for reading!
Cheers.
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