I recently played the Ottomans and I found two things rather important:
(1) Prevent wars with Russia. I always try to improve relations and befriend them, because it seems impossible to defend against them in the early game with acceptable costs. Either will you be forced to use your NF to promote soldiers or you will have to research military techs, or both.
(2) Stay away from egypt. Whenever I tried to attack it, GB and other GPs jumped in and gave me a beating.
(3) Do not industrialize early on unless you have good literacy and commerce techs.
What I did was promoting bureaucrats up to 2% in my 4 highest pop states to improve pop promotion ratio. Then I focused on clergymen to improve research points.
I started with Ideological Thought as first tech to boost plurality, afterwards I focused on culture techs to improve prestige, power techs to increase RGP output, medicine to boost pop growth and commerce techs to improve RGO output and input/output factors for my factories. I did not industrialized quickly, but rather waited until I had Time Studies and decent literacy.
Probably the most important thing is to start colonizing right in 1870. Thanks to the Ottoman territory in north africa, you can easily expend and block the other GPs, so that they are limited to coastal territory. In my game I was able to grab most of Africa, and that mad me #1 in prestige, which improved my ressource situation significantly.
(1) Prevent wars with Russia. I always try to improve relations and befriend them, because it seems impossible to defend against them in the early game with acceptable costs. Either will you be forced to use your NF to promote soldiers or you will have to research military techs, or both.
(2) Stay away from egypt. Whenever I tried to attack it, GB and other GPs jumped in and gave me a beating.
(3) Do not industrialize early on unless you have good literacy and commerce techs.
What I did was promoting bureaucrats up to 2% in my 4 highest pop states to improve pop promotion ratio. Then I focused on clergymen to improve research points.
I started with Ideological Thought as first tech to boost plurality, afterwards I focused on culture techs to improve prestige, power techs to increase RGP output, medicine to boost pop growth and commerce techs to improve RGO output and input/output factors for my factories. I did not industrialized quickly, but rather waited until I had Time Studies and decent literacy.
Probably the most important thing is to start colonizing right in 1870. Thanks to the Ottoman territory in north africa, you can easily expend and block the other GPs, so that they are limited to coastal territory. In my game I was able to grab most of Africa, and that mad me #1 in prestige, which improved my ressource situation significantly.