Excited for EU4 and procrastinating at work so gonna ramble on about some stuff, including Ottoman strategy and some multiplayer theory. Probably standard stuff for the EU3 multi vets but might help some new people and hopefully we get enough new people in EU4 that we can have EPIC 15+ people games, so probably some useful information
.
I'm not sure I would include Ottomans as a superpower, sure in SP anything goes but in MP they can be tough as seen in our last MP game. With a good start they can be a superpower but its not guaranteed like Castille/France/Austria. Their stability costs are abysmal due to tons of poor, wrong culture, wrong religion provinces, combined with jizya decision which is enacted from the start which gives even more stab costs. They also obv have worse tech than Europe but thats made up with much better units until like land 18+. Also have to deal with Timurids to the east and Mamluks to the south which you are guaranteed to be fighting unlike say Austria who if they don't battle Bohemia is relatively safe.
Easily the best Ottoman strategy (for multiplayer at least) is to go ahistorical and basically ignore Europe. The Balkans are terrible provinces for the most part, poor, wrong culture, wrong religion, bad goods, bad manpower. This increases your already terrible stab and tech costs. The first decent provinces you can get expanding to the North and West are in the Ukraine, Italy, or Austria, and with a player Austria, Muscowy/Novgorod, and someone in Italy, those will be highly contested and lead to numerous costly wars. Best move is to simply vassalize the Balkan minors instead of annexing them, as they give you a useful buffer, some free troops, and give you some small amount of income without the accompanying increased tech and stab costs. They are also useful chips in peace deals if your European neighbors get jealous and decide to invade, as they cost you nothing to give away. The Middle East sucks too for the most part, but there are some decent provinces and they are at least same culture group and same religion.
If Timurids collapse on their own (or are crushed by you and then collapse
) you can vassalize the crappy Mideast minors and beeline to Persia and then India. Persia is wrong culture and religion but with max narrowminded you have plenty of missionaries and Persia has enough high tax provinces that you will gain Persian as an accepted culture. Besides that Persia has a ton of high tax, good trade good, high manpower provinces, and from there you can invade India, which is again wrong culture but extremely rich provinces in tax/goods/manpower. Let Europeans fight for Europe and spend years waiting for a return on their investment in their American colonies, peaceful OttoMANS will have the largest manpower in the game and the highest base tax. Even though with max narrowminded you will never westernize, your units are stronger until like the 1600s and we never make it that far anyways.
In most of the multi games we have played there hasn't been an Indian player (or if there was one, he was pretty weak/unsuccessful), which means India has been one of the most highly contested areas due to its wealth. Usually 1 or more colonizers rushes to get there (taking Ceylon/Sri Lanka first), but they have trouble projecting enough forces to take a lot of it early on as sending troops to India makes them weak in Europe. This means that a successful Ottomans can take most if not all of Northern and Western India at a minimum uncontested. IIRC the most epic of the multiplayer games in EU3 had an India divided in 3 between Ottomans/Spain/Milan which led to a huge Indian front in the eventual game ending world wars.
Edit: just found the final world map, basically this is what I'm blabbering on about, this is optimal Ottoman strategy. God this game was epic, which we had somehow finished and then converted to Victoria 2
.
Last edited by Nonfiction; 06-28-2013 at 09:19 AM.