Swedish Start Advice!

[MiniaAr]

At some point you may get a mission to vassalize Norway, giving you an awesome CB that will greatly reduce the warscore needed to vassalize them.
For some reason that discount also applies to any of their allies joining the war, so if you're lucky enough Norway will be allied with Denmark and you can vassalize both of them at the same time. If Norway is still under a PU it should work too, because vassalizing Denmark means you indirectly control Norway then (although idk if you get the mission in that case, but I think you can).

It only works if said ally check the box "leader may negociate for us". Otherwise, it works on coalition members if Norway is in said coalition.

 

[grisamentum]

Then you waste time not expanding into Asia, not to mention you will still have to feed Muscovy to vassals over 2-3 wars before you can even vassalize them.

Vassalizing them will obviously take exactly the same number of wars as annexing them. Or are you just going to leave them there?

In the end, its simply faster to expand rapidly by colonizing yourself and conquesting the hordes. You lose too much time waiting for Muscovy to expand east.

You can attack the hordes yourself with the Expansion CB, or by going through Lithuania to Crimea/Golden Horde. You can and should still conquer the Hordes.

And "waiting" for Muscovy to colonize? It is faster than Sweden at colonizing. If you took Expansion you only have 1 colonist. If Muscovy takes Expansion it has 2 colonists. Even if you take Exploration instead of Expansion (and why did you do that??) you will only have the same number of colonists. And if you took Expansion and Exploration and are colonizing Siberia you are doing it wrong; you should be colonizing the New World/SE Asia (and you'd finish off Siberia pretty quick anyway and then have a bunch of useless colonists.)

Also, Muscovy is going to produce more troops out of its colonies than you would. You'd produce better troops, sure. But when it comes time to stomp Ming in to the ground, "better" troops is kind of a waste compared to lots of troops for carpet sieging all thsoe provinces. Same thing in India.

Eventually you will annex Muscovy, of course, but they will typically colonize Siberia faster than you will, and then Russian will be an accepted culture.