Your 3M video trilogy is definitely the best WC tutorial hands down. But I found it a quite satisfying experience and I don’t have much shame, so there you go. The disaster would start ticking starting from the Age of Reformation once you pass a reform. I agree that Ming, despite being big, has enough flavor to make a campaign feel fun, whether a WC or just an achievement run. Colonize Alaska, Taiwan, Australia in that order. The -20% core cost and unrest reduction from the Mandate help a bit, but Ming's still going to be playing catchup compared to Yuan, Mongolia, default horde ideas, Mughals, and even countries like Italy. Have fun! When declaring war on someone who is allied to your tributaries, your tributaries will have crosses indicating that they won’t join the war. Exploration ideas are essential here, again. Other relatively chill WC nations are Western European colonizers that can spend the first half of the game fighting natives and underteched nations in TC regions. It will hurt your manpower, but I feel it’s worth it. Omg, I just realised Reman senpai noticed me. Once you control Malacca you can steer trade towards it instead. Ottomans might be the best nation to do world conquest, but I think Ming is actually the easiest one for beginners. AE reduction. I know it's not optimal play, just not my style. Did you wait with even the smallest wars until you had a technology advantage? Orthodox Ottomans with Religious + Quantity ideas can wreck face on another level especially with a couple of strong allies. It will help you massively late game and make expansion easier. AI likes to attack your tributaries when you are busy with another war. Money in this global trade network can flow between trade nodes in unidirectional trade routes as well as terminate at end nodes. Again, it is not necessary, but I think developing the gold mine is a good choice since you anyways need to develop for Renaissance. And once this disaster is over, it won’t be triggered again. The most important thing of battles against AI, both land and navel, is combat width. Many of you might be thinking: Why even bother bragging a Ming World Conquest when it starts as the No.1 great power and thus offers no challenge at all? During this disaster, every once a while you get events that a peasant rebellion is going to happen, you get 5 mandate to take it and you just need to kill it asap. Terrain is especially important here because nomad get better shock phase on flat terrains and worse on non-flat ones. It's just I (and probably many other people) am not used to horde style, especially the early game economy. So don’t get fooled by the crosses next to enemy allies. You should almost always take +harmonizing progress from events. The most obvious and important reason for a casual WC: Ming starts as the No.1 Great Power, so you can (and you should) take it slowly. This is written as a "casual" WC, but A WC with Ming would be a lot harder than with a normal nation. I was planning on a step-by-step guide on how to world conquest playing Ming. This means if you don’t want to wait, you can let them be unloyal and refuse to give tribute. I forgot to mention the basics to build factories and workshop everywhere you can. Thanks for your patience for reading it. Be careful about offering tributary status to nations in new world after 1650 as colonizers will attack them and you will get dragged in. Usually it’s around the 3rd reform, so you can safely pass the 4th and last reform without the disaster. Use mercenaries. And finally, check your mandate after every war or after you diploannex a nation. Let’s see what will happen. With no military ideas taken early game, you are likely to have too many military points. So you can get -95% reduction easily, and this means you pay 1/20 of the normal price. Ming starts with its best provinces assigned to Nobles, or say Qinwang aka princes. The -25% and -50% cheap advisor from estates is calculated multiplicatively, so you still get 1/20 of the discounted price compared to a normal discounted one. Start with full combat width and then reinforce, you can win most land battles if you are not terribly behind on tech. But in the beginning, you need to block off the downstream of Beijing. It allows you to use level 5 advisors very early due to the advisor cost reduction, and to use level 3 advisors from the beginning of the game. Either improve relations with prospective tributaries or current tributaries. The gold mine state (Hunan) also has a trade center, which means you can upgrade it to level 3 to get development cost reduction, and +33% local manpower for the entire state. Cancelling tributaries gives 5 years truce, unless your trust towards them is zero. A place to share content, ask questions and/or talk about the grand strategy game Europa Universalis IV by Paradox Development Studio. Shu declaring independence and taking basically all of North China caught me off guard, as did the proceeding two rebel states in the South. That’s the way we are going to start our conquests. To be on time you need to be constantly at war, coring and annexing vassals, with high overextension.