Socotra: Part 04: 1482-1489: Mostly Peaceful Expansion

I was the richest country in the world by a good margin, before I was anywhere close to being a great power. I wasn't even a kingdom until 1485 - due to endless bad prestige events, I couldn't get 50 prestige necessary. I ended up giving away prestige privilege to merchants, and prestige for conversions privilege to the clergy, and then I had to do some prestige farming on top of that.

I got to admin tech 6, and I overpaid like crazy for it as I still had no hopes of getting Renaissance. This unlocked workshops, which are normally already decent, but +2 flat good produced interacts crazy well with their +50% production income.

I did some fighting, but mostly I just bribes everyone around me to be my vassal. That's before a single vassalization acceptance bonus. My vassal swarm is already getting a bit unruly, so I'll need to integrate a bunch before I ask more countries, but there's still volunteers out there. For a while I thought that maybe vassals not taking diplo slots is a bit overpowered, but then they count their strength together against you (unlike some DLC subjects), so maybe it's not actually that OP.

Just because I'm the richest country in the world doesn't mean I have enough money, Kilwa still has 3 gold mines that are rightfully mine. But that part of the world is nearly conquered, and soon I'll need to decide to turn North or East.

But the whole Indonesia expansion, seems somewhat pointless right now, trade from there goes either to India, or to Cape, not Zanzibar, so I can't even get it yet. I think it used to go to Zanzibar a few patches ago, but I might be misremembering.

At first it seemed that Ottomans would recover and go challenge the Mamluks, but it looks like they can't even handle Albania, so I'll need to fight the Mamluks all by myself. They have >500% total warscore cost (I'll get discounts but much later), and the AE would be crazy as well.

I think I might be able to take over all of Indonesia with just bribes, but that's a slow and low priority process.

Another option is going for India as I can claim them from Maldives and Vijayanagar rivalled me.

My backup plans of forming Persia or Mughals don't look so great with this kind of Timurids, I'll likely be better off just facing the Mamluks.