Day 1: 1444-1531
The Maldives begins the game with one province, and is somewhat similar to the Ryukyu start in that it is isolated from the rest of the world. This means we will need to begin by declaring a no cb war.
The obvious choice would probably be to attack one of the one province minors in southern India. However, the problem I find with expanding in southern India is that it relies on opportunism, which tends to slow things down a lot. For this reason I decided to go for south East Asia instead, as the countries here are smaller and therefore more manageable. I sold the three heavy ships that we were given at the start of the game, trained up a couple of extra cavalry units, and attacked + vassalised the one province minor Makassar:
I used Makassar’s claim on its neighbour Luwu to annexe it shortly afterwards:
Once Makassar had been integrated the next target was Kutai. Initially I vassalised them and took four provinces. This allowed me to convert to Hindu, which is probably my favourite religion in the game. Once the conversion was complete I sold Kutai back a couple of the provinces to save on admin points, as I wanted to get to the first idea group as fast as possible.
I took exploration as the first idea group. This allowed me to uncover the two lucrative spice islands of and Ternate and Tidore, which were both quickly conquered.
And a few years later I was able to get the colonial range that allowed me to start colonising. The aim is to get around Africa as fast as possible so that I can start to Westernise.
Once Kutai had been integrated my next target was Brunei. This war took longer than expected as Brunei had quite a nice income and were able to keep throwing troops at me. In the end though I was able to whittle them down, and they were vassalised:
The most powerful country in this part of the world at this time was Majapahit, but by the turn of the century I had overtaken them in both army size and military tech. Time to declare war! Seven provinces were taken, and I released Sunda as a new vassal. In 1520 I declared a second war, which polished off the rest of their provinces
It looks like Vijianagar is getting wrecked pretty hard. Bahmanis and Bengal are both looking powerful:
My goal at the moment is to completely dominate both the Moluccas and Malacca trade nodes. This meant that Siak was the next target:
And by 1531 my colonists had made it all of the way to South America, which allowed me to start westernising:
Keep up the good work!
