Best Korea: Part 01: 1444-1453: Peace in Manchuria

It's been a while since I last played EU4, and also this blog has been fairly inactive since Google Plus died.

I've been looking for countries with decent content, and Korea looks like one. It has 7th biggest mission tree, Emperorship of China got major rebalance, and Mingsplosions being a possibility again is going to make this part of the world a much more interesting place than it was in previous patches.

The rough outline of my plan is:

• stay Confucian and Korea
• rush unify Manchuria region by force, deal with coalitions by eliminating any potential coalition members
• colonize my way to Malacca node and get Pacific coast of the New World, turning Pacific into Great Korean Sea
• conquer Japan
• if Ming refuses to explode, push them a bit
• challenge Ming for emperorship of China
• dev push for institutions if necessary

Some difficulties:

• I only border Ming and Jiangzhou, but I have truce with Jiangzhou until 1450
• Korea gets a lot of custom disasters
• There's a lot of missions, but they very poorly fit any sensible strategy

First order of business was war with Donghai and Korchin. Korchin is inland, so I couldn't take any land from them, so I took all their money and humiliated them. Donghai got fully annexed.

Next quick war was attack on Udege, which got divided between me and Solon. Their ally Korchin tried to help, but got attacked by Ming.

Then war with Jiangzhou, in which I took most of it while vassalizing Yeren. I couldn't take 100% without going through overextension.

Then a war with Nivikh, Solon, and Ainu to feed my Yeren vassal. I annexed Nivikh for my vassal, Ainu for myself, and Solon unfortunately had to be left with a province as numbers didn't add up.

Unfortunately Haixi which up to this point was a good ally broke our alliance.

This is close to solving my Aggressive Expansion issues. Korchin, Haixi, Jiangzhou, and Solon are the only countries left in the region. Oirat, Ming, and Japan don't care due to cultural and religious differences.

I'm 82% towards developing Renaissance in my capital. It should have been easier, but I got a lot of bad events making burghers disloyal and increasing development cost. This all cost me a lot of points, but my starting monarch is a 6/5/5, so this early push is worth it. Unfortunately I had to give two of my heirs swimming lessons. Hopefully I get someone decent.

My vassal Yeren horde is feeling disloyal, but I have time to deal with it.

I'll clean up Manchuria, but I'm definitely safe from the hordes for now. Oirat and Ming are fighting, for now I'm OK paying Ming for protection.

Next goal is exploration for establishing peaceful trade relations with good people of Southern islands of the Great Korean Sea.

Japan is right now very difficult to deal with thanks to their crazy vassal swarm, but they'll only get weaker as daimyos conquer each other.

I've check some youtube guides, and a lot of them are "Wait for your truce with Jiangzhou to run out in 1450". How about not doing that?