Oda: Part 03: 1477-1498: Island Hopping

I went Eastern Plutocracy, as Elective Monarchy is only worth it for countries that can have PUs, and the other two choices are boring. We'll get some new alternatives later thanks to our mission tree, and even more if we conquer China.

In a normal Japan game, at this point your goals are dev pushing for institution, maybe preparing to spawn Colonialism, and destroying Ming for fun But there's no dev pushing here, no spawning institutions outside Europe, and waiting for them would take forever. I need to reach Europe somehow.

There are quite a few possible ways:

• meet Europeans in the New World
• conquer my way through steppes to Eastern Europe
• conquer my way through Malaya to the Middle East
• conquer my way through Malaya and Africa to Western Europe

OK, maybe that last one is a stretch. But going for Malaya makes perfect sense, and eventually it will be great for trade.

I allied Korea, and I thought I'd use them for some casual Manchuria conquest, but it turns out they took inward perfection, and it would cost them 1 stab to accept call to arms, so they have -50 reasons to accept. At least I found the world's worst ally, even worse than England. And in any case, I can't make trade companies there, so it would cost far too much gov cap right now, and I'm really low on mana.

I wanted to do colonization towards Malaya, but natural colonization with being friendly to the natives is unbelievably slow, so I started politely asking the natives to relocate somewhere else, and taking some land for extended coring range.

As most of my conquests are Animist and Hindu, nobody really cares - Sunnis in West Malaya hate them anyway, and Hindus in India are too far to be bothered.

Renaissance reached Cyprus, and that's where it stopped. Normally Cyprus-Mamluks relations are friendly, so it should quickly spread from Cyprus to Egypt, but Mamluks allied Cypriote rival Karaman, so Cyprus doesn't like them, and that completely stopped spread of institutions over sea tiles. At least until Ottomans beat Karaman so hard they stopped being a valid rival for Cyprus. Current projection is that it will reach first Mamluks' province in 1506, decades later than it should.

I hoped it start spreading to East Africa by now, and also that colonization would get me to at least the Maldives by now. Oh well, I'm not that far behind yet.

Ottomans have enough Renaissance present that they could just press the button, but they won't take the loans for it. Poland and Denmark both with Renaissance and beating up Muscovy, so there's a small chance it might spread this way as well.

Right now my plan is to keep island hopping to East Africa, setup a CN in Australia (for free Colonialism, but only after I get Renaissance), and keep pushing in the Malaya. There's definitely a major conflict between reaching Europe for institutions, and getting border with Ming before it collapses.

Japan has 4 monuments, but they're all very weak. I started upgrading one of them to level 1, it just gives +0.5 prestige, another gives +0.3 legitimacy, another +50% prestige from battles, and the last basically nothing until tier 3. These are very weak bonuses, but the point is collecting all monuments, and it will add up.

South part, I got Brunei and Dai Viet as allies, Ayutthaya and Ming as rivals, Sulu into tiny my trade league, and Bali as vassal (so I don't destroy their monument by conquest). I'll want Majapahit as vassal for monument as well.

Short term I just need colonial range to reach Egypt. Long term I want 2 gold mines, all South-East Asian monuments, Malacca node's great trade, and land route to China.

North part, I got Kamchatka for extended range, but Manchuria plan got cancelled as Korea wouldn't help me, and I discovered it's part of the same subcontinent as Japan, so no trade companies allowed