Ottomans 1.8

[Cossack_PL]

As my Manchu game was put on hold until patch fixes cores issue on formation of Qing, I'm going to start another play, this time with Ottomans. Main goals are to Unify Islam and get both Master of India and Definitely the Sultan of Rum achievements.
As for NIs, I think that the first two will be Humanism and Administrative (not decided on their order yet) to maximize savings of MPs and culture threshold (to accept small cultures before I get too big to accept them even with Humanism), then as 3rd or 4th I would take Expansion for the CB to conquer India easier. With AE scaling to basetax and reduced coring cost, I don't really think Ottomans need much diploannexing (most likely I will vassal feed Persia, maybe something more). Last time I played Ottomans, I found Jannisary bonuses incredibly powerful, therefore I'm not sure if I really need military ideas early.
What are your opinions on NIs for Ottomans?
Is making e.g. Serbia a March as a buffer from Austria a good idea? As I wrote I don't play to expand much in Europe apart from Italy.

 

[Osman Pasha]

No, annex serbia. Try allying France...I managed to conquer all of Russia, Austria, India in my last ottoman game in 1.7. 1.8 is going to be much harder due to the increase of provinces.

 

[finkellll]

You can feed Hungary to Serbia after vassalizing them (keep Serbia under 60 BT tho).

I haven't played them yet on 1.8, but I imagine the conquer paths are roughly the same.

I'm not too sure about expansion, since you get the imperial cb against everyone on earth just by reaching dip tech 22, and you are spending a ton of dip points on expansion for basically the same thing (plus a bunch of ideas you will never use).

I'm a big fan of quantity because of the manpower & mp recovery. It allows me to get a good chunk of manpower to come back while I wait 1-2 years for local autonomy to tick down 1.2-2.4%

 

[Cossack_PL]

Expansion uses adm points, not dip ones.

Imperialism CB is great, but the historical year of 22 dip tech is 1687, which is quite late in the game. I'm definitely going to start conquering India earlier. Expansion CB also has even lower WS cost of provinces than Imperialism.

 

[finkellll]

sorry, I mixed expansion & exploration.

Also looks like there are 4 useful ideas in there, so its not a complete waste.

 

[D-A-C]

Here is my current game so far by 1623 ... and the game is playing very slowly performance wise, but I'm sticking with it anyway:

The ideas I went for were, Innovative > Aristocratic > Diplomacy > Defensive and next I'll be going humanist, I left humanist till later as it's only a hundred years plus in that a multitude of nationalities becomes an issue once your well on your way to that global power. I haven't been able to complete much of diplomacy due to poor rulers and all the extra DIP points needed to annex people or claim territory extra in peace deals: