I would like to form Netherlands as Burgundy, but France... France just can't stop bullying me. I need some help so i can survive with the dutch provinces until i reach Administrative Tech level 10. Alliances, deffensive strategies, what to do, etc. :wacko:
If you gain military tech 5 and france hasn't, you got big advantage. declare on france while they still are in HYW, after you secured some strong allies.
Ally castile or austria if they didn't rival you, both at once, by prepping relations beforehand and sending 2 diplomats ON SAME DAY to ask for alliance (this negates the -50 malus for having a greater power ally already). Alternatively, you can look who france its enemies are. If aragon or venice set france as enemy, an alliance with them might not be bad idea either, since they can help out with their ships.
After the end of the HYW, try to get alliance with england too.
Declare war on france and (important this for getting england into alliance): OCCUPY the sieged english provinces and try to break siege asap so france can't peace out and take english provinces. Gascogne especially. If you see the french sending in their doomstack to break your siege, retreat to Béarn province southeast of Gascogne and fight the french there with the help of the castilian (and other ally armies).
Use the trick to stack wipe their doomstack (retreat out of fight when france has morale lower then 0,5 at the early part of a month, then send in a backup army to stack wipe the helpless french doomstack) and proceed to occupy all french provinces. 100% warscore.
In first war it is vital that you ask france to cancel *all* their vassals.
You can conquer Béarn (foix country) after this war with no casus belli, and release the guyenne country as a vassal. Next wars you can ask for return cores to guyenne (guyenne has cores on like the entire SW region of france). You will get a lot less aggresive penalty for this then outright conquering.
Also, if you form netherlands, your guyenne vassal will not be returned to France. After you fully recovered guyenne as a vassal, ask france to release champagne country. You might be able to diplo vassalise champagne right after.
as i said before :
vassals you got inside france are not returned to france on forming netherlands. So obtaining guyenne and champagne as vassals is good idea.