Caliphate or United Arab League?

[BrowneHawk]

I have 3 of the best majors controlled and at the point where I'll be looking to create a mega. I played with Africa a bunch and its a pain, and by the time you form it, its a 3militech, unrest filled mess.

I formed United Arab league a few days ago and was impressed with it. By the time you take everything over, your unity is at 10, militech doesn't get torn up much so you're on par with everyone else far as militech and you end up with around 500 million pop, Gov is even around 4.

Caliphate for an extra 10k research seem to be the bigger version? Arab League has around 16 region claims where Caliphate has 26.

Due to the time it takes I only have experience with the Arabs, is it worth spending that extra 10k research for Caliphate?

So far I know if you do UAL with African union the 2 of them can be merged into a 1.5 billion people nation. I don't think Caliphate can be merged into Africa Union. That being said it was not worth merging Africa Union and UAL because the only benefit would be having a mega pop. That merger would kill UAL's militech.

So it makes me wonder if Caliphate and just skipping Africa Union/UAL is the better cheaper research option. In theory Caliphate should be just as strong as my UAL formation was, but I'm not sure, and hoping someone with Caliphate experience could give me insight.

[adobo]

Caliphate has all of North Africa, Middle East and the Asian Muslim countries. That's without eating other supernations.

[Kaien]

You should be abble to merge the Caliphate and UAL (UAL have a claim on the capital of caliphate) then merge UAL with UA (UA have a claim on the capital of UAL).

If you are going with UAL, you can integrate the caliphate into (they have a claim on their capital) after integrate the UA into the caliphate (they have a claim on their capital).

In my game I went with Russia + EU and I integrate the Eurasian Union and later I went with turkey and Turkestan and I integrate it in EU. I am thinking to release England and go to commonweathl and integrate back after absorb Australia/NZ.

[wei270]

caliphate is definily better

[Illyrien]

UAL is cheap, so just start with that, later you can release The Caliphate and just unify Egypt.

[Sinsling]

Embrace the greater caliphate. mine is up to 3.5b pop after some work of having it eat african union + indonesia.

if you're really willing to put the work in and can get the caliphate started in turkey, then you have have the eu eat caliphate after its taken everything in africa, the middle east, southern pacific.

[Ciecieji]

I treat both the middle east and africa as a kind of the 'squeeze out wastelands' that I only organize late game, for that reason I prefer merging UAL into african union to make a supernation that the AI can't mess with, it needs tons of direct investment, but that's the price of doing it last since the AI likes to spoil it's holdings into dystopias