Just passing by.
With a couple of years to spare. Mastah of the Middle Earth! (MediTerra ... get it ? get it ? Ah forget it)
> Moved to Malta
> Annexed* all of the vassals at one point so they are mostly catholic and theocracies (Byzantium are protestant .... and Albania was left orthodox).
* I did it in order to do some reorganizing (sold 2 of Algiers provinces to Tunisia; Released Sicily and sold them Sardinia and Corsica); Broke up Greece in 2 (Byz and Albania, Albania holding the northern part, Byz holding the soutern); Cyprus and Crete went to Tripoli (so they would be a bit less useless).
I wanted to separate the Mamluks on 2 (like I did with Byz) but I didn't have the opportunity to do so (more on that below; the part with the turks)
> Income from Vassals - 27.66. Total army from vassals at the date of the picture - 238k (after a war so they should be a bit higher in 1-2 years).
> Collect trade from Venice. At the end date I was collecting 100 gp per month despite the fact that my capital was on the Tunisian trade node.
> Naval forcelimit - 60. Sadly the turks killed my trade fleet (I forgot to bring them back to a safe port ;().
> Land forcelimit - 41. Generally I use them for picking up carpet siegers and strategic sieging (on islands and stuff)
> I REALLY wanted to beat the turks 1 on 1 but sadly they had Persia and Uzbek under PU and were allied with GB and France ... I had to make some strategic wars in order to drag in the French and I had to dump 5-6k gold every war to get GB off my shoulders.
> Austria, if the game had a couple of more years, would've probably revoked the privilegia (18 vs 9)
> Serbia was the reason the turks didnt expand a lot in the Balkans. They ate up Ragusa, Bosnia and Wallachia in .. the first 5-10 years. After that they took Dalmatia and 2 of the Croatian lands from Hungary. They lost Rashka to the turks and for some reason took Turnovo instead of it during the next war. (1 year before the end-date I DoWed the turks to return Rashka to the serbs)
> Castille and Aragon swaped a lot of land until I decided to screw with Aragon. Now they are a bit ... dead.
> The new world is a mess ... Mess (with a capital M)
> Russia ate up some Asia ... a lot of Asia .. All of Mongolia and Manchuria + some of the Chinese Region
If the Pope didnt own some random HRE land I'd vassalize him too but that's a bit ... not so Knightly to do (despite the fact that I switched to a republic soooo ... Merchants Hospitaller ?)
Looking at the map I probably had to vassalize Marocco as well but they were sooooo eaten up it'd look ugly
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The whole strategy was to try and contain the turks on the Anatolia (even if I get rid of them, someone else would've just replace them).
- With the Balkan block (me holding Greece as a vassal and Serbia having everything else except Moldavia and Bulgaria) they had to somewhere else.
- I vassalized the Mamluks in 3-4 wars (from Suez on west, the turks ate up the Levant) so they couldnt go west (not to mention I had the rest of north Africa as vassals already).
- Hedjaz had all of Arabia and were their allies, so they couldnt expand there.
- Persia we're their allies so the Iranian plateau was blocked too.
- The only place they could grab some land was Georgia and that's it.
- For the entirety of the game their lands remained pretty much the same - Bulgaria, Anatolia, Iraq and the Levant (until I retook the Levant). But even with only that they regularly fought off Russia and Austria to a standstill. TBH I was quite impressed.
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Aw man the last year started so interesting ... Persia (I assume) attacked Ottos for independence after I finished a war with them to return Rashka to Serbia. This would be an interesting war to watch.
