How to deal with the Ottomans late game

[Paradoxical]

So I was trying to search the discussion board and it seems that people say they are too weak and such. In my last 3 games which I played up to late 1600's or a bit beyond the Ottomans were unstoppable. Largest army than the next 3 nations combined with among the best army quality compared to those nations.

In my most recent game I played in the Americas and pushed into east Asia in my latest game 1701. Ottomans are fielding nearly 1 million men, economic hegemon and currently conquering into India and Africa. I was pondering playing in either Africa and India next game. I realized have no idea how to stop them. All replies to fighting them is to break them early and they are weak. If you don't play in Europe and can't weaken them...what's the play?

By the time I will be able to deal with them if I start in India or Africa they will be impossibly strong and conquering on my doorstep. My last games I was far enough away from them that I could ignore them and just marvel at their power but if I start a new game I'm afraid of getting out classed and smashed in the late 1600's.

[grotaclas]

Originally posted by Paradoxical:

In my last 3 games which I played up to late 1600's or a bit beyond the Ottomans were unstoppable. Largest army than the next 3 nations combined with among the best army quality compared to those nations.

If the Ottomans have a bigger army than the next 3 nations combined, you expanded very slowly. In the late 1600s, you could have an army which is bigger than the Ottomans and the next 3 nations combined, if you would expand at a decent pace.

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Paradoxical:

By the time I will be able to deal with them if I start in India or Africa they will be impossibly strong and conquering on my doorstep.

No, they won't. You need to learn to grow faster than the AI--to play the game better than it does. India in particular is a colossus. If you start in India and expand well, you can complete an extremely easy world conquest, which includes wiping the Ottomans totally off the map.

How?

1) Idea groups. The Big Three (Diplo, Admin, Influence) enable you to grow fast and efficiently. Take them first. Add Religious or Humanism, one or the other. Expansion is also a great choice. Avoid military groups like the plague they are until late in the game.

2) Let trade guide your expansion. Take over your entire collection node. Then take over every scrap of the nodes that feed it. Then take over the nodes that feed those nodes. And so on. Set up trade companies and/or colonial nations everywhere for extra merchants and get insanely rich. If your starting node is a bad one, conquer your way to a good one and then follow these steps.

These two steps alone, properly applied, allow every nation in the game to conquer the entire world. You can wipe out the Ottomans (and everyone else) starting as the smallest, weakest, most pathetic one province minor.

[Paradoxical]

So the answer is to either crush them early or out scale them? I'm not good enough to out scale them I think. I usually have half their army size and quality by the time I can see their entire territory. By size I'm usually only a bit behind them in dev, so I guess I need to learn how to blob harder. I usually pick up admin ideas but not the other two.

I'm legit scared to even try because I feel like I'll waste 15 hours and be in too weak a position that causes me to restart. Feels like I need to learn how to play meta to stand a chance.

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Paradoxical:

So the answer is to either crush them early or out scale them?

I only crush them early if I border them early. Otherwise yes, I outscale them.

Originally posted by Paradoxical:

By size I'm usually only a bit behind them in dev, so I guess I need to learn how to blob harder. I usually pick up admin ideas but not the other two.

The other two are just as good as Admin. In fact, Diplo is my favorite group in the entire game. Its most important power is a 20% warscore cost reduction for provinces. This makes all of your wars 25% more effective because you can take 125 warscore cost for 100 points (125 * 0.8 =100). It also gives you more diplomats to forge claims (which saves monarch points) and to prevent coalitions. On top that, you get a better Improve Relations modifier, which makes aggressive expansion go away faster. And on top of that, you get another relations slot! Etc. It's amazing.

Influence is also amazing. You want to spend as much Diplo mana annexing vassals as you do Admin mana coring. This literally doubles the rate at which you expand and is a CRITICAL component of learning how to blob harder. In combination with Admin, the Influence idea group reduces the cost of vassal annexation by 40% (25% for an idea in the group and 15% more for a policy you can enact when both groups are completed).

In short, the Big Three enable EU4 players to outgrow the AI and perform a world conquest with literally any nation in the game.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

You can beat them late game even with half their army size.
1. Be sure to have good strong vassals. That's free manpower, and they'll bait Ottomans.
2. Same with allies.
1&2 are there so Ottomans will lose some time defeating them. If an ally is weaker than you, Ottoman will likely focus on it, spent time on it and eventually forcing it to peace out, which is good for you if you focus on taking forts and highly developed provinces. Simply because the warscore will be "reset" without taking into account that poor ally of yours that made the warscore go in the negative.

3. Be rich. Being rich solves all the game problems you can have.
On that specific matter, it allows you to spam mercenaries. Mercenaries will fight Ottomans so their manpower will suffer. Mercenaries will assault forts after you created a breach in it so you'll spend less than a month sieging (great for your wars ore). And if you bait their armies far away from the forts you take, by the time they siege it again the garrison will have time to recover (so AI will spend months on it where you spend days). Have some mercenaries support big armies in big battles.
4. Be rich. You can go above your force limit past the first years of war when the Ottomans begins to be low in manpower, which should happen because you own some of their provinces, and they spend a lot of time sieging and suffer attrition, as well as rebuilding their army after each battles.
Also, being rich means you have buildings to increase your force limit and your manpower limit. This is the top priority if you intend to focus on warfare, after buildings that make you rich of course.
5. Be sure to have up to date forts on all your borders with Ottomans and another line of forts behind it on provinces with defense bonuses.

6. Your main troops wait until Ottomans manpower is close to 0. Then you enter properly into the war and begin to use your own manpower. Focus on taking forts with mercenaries while your troops wait on safe provinces with no attrition.
7. Be sure the war is long enough so Ottoman will likely accept peace deal you offer. It is very unlikely you'll reach 100. If at any moment you feel like the Ottoman recover to fast for your taste, peace out taking important provinces.

You're in for a tedious war. But AI is so smart a 10 years old can defeat it by being cunning enough. AI always make the same mistakes over and over again in all Paradox games (making the last FIFA entries much better in term of strategy and tactics). It doesn't learn. You do.

Now the idea is to outgrow every nation in the game so you can focus on whatever you wish. And the best way to do so is by taking the three ideas set mentioned. I prefer Influence as a first because I prefer to have strong vassals and save admin points early. Diplomatic is great for quick expansion, which is required for "speed run", which included some of the hardest achievements in the game like conquering India by 1550 with a Timurid vassal, taking over all Asian grain provinces by the Age of Absolutism... Not only it allows you to take more (and better) provinces the entire game, but it is perfect to have for the Age of Reformation as you can get another warscore reduction cost against other religious groups, which literally allows you to take over the world quickly during that era. No need to wait for imperialism or nationalism cassus belli. I'm not into speed runs because it bores me, which is why I prefer Influence. I have great use of strong vassals when engaging into warfare.
With that in mind, you can understand why you shouldn't have to "deal with Ottoman late game", it should be already settled.

[Server Jester]

Another idea is to wait until the techs where Anatolian units fall off big time.

In my Anglophile run as Britain when I warred against the Ottos for Cyprus, I was melting their stacks like crazy cause I was Western with perma mods and good Army Comp vs their Anatolian badly comp'd "doomstacks" (more like doodoo stacks)

Same thing happened when I had to fight a Giga Mughals, guess Indian units also fall off hard

[Tankbuster]

Also ottomans are rich so they overstack artillery like crazy so you can take advantige from that and whipe their army's

[Tankbuster]

I sometimes see ottoman army's of 150K with 90K artillery so easy whipe

[Paradoxical]

Welp, I'm going to find out. Going to puzzle out a Jewish Mutapa for the achievement. Assuming I can figure that out, I'll keep playing until I meet the Ottomans and see how it goes.

Thanks for the advice. Been a while since I played in Africa so I think I'll have to restart a quite a few times.

[Zero]

they have big armies sure, but after tech 18 or so, chances are they're weaker than yours, plus the ottos are really dumb when it comes to attrition, like i played in india once as kotte and the ottos pushed their way towards me, and then after the war, the casualties were 300k (mine) vs 1.6m ottos, with 1.4m being attrition...YEAH

[Server Jester]

Originally posted by Zero:

they have big armies sure, but after tech 18 or so, chances are they're weaker than yours, plus the ottos are really dumb when it comes to attrition, like i played in india once as kotte and the ottos pushed their way towards me, and then after the war, the casualties were 300k (mine) vs 1.6m ottos, with 1.4m being attrition...YEAH

This, the AI only knows how to doomstack in the worst way possible when theyre big

Plus, if they get really big its likely that late game theyll struggle with keeping up in tech, since big nations dont know how to dev for Institutions.

See: Ming not embracing Renaissance while all of Europe has Colonialism

[shde2e]

Lots of fortresses can also help a lot in draining their manpower. Their overstacking means they lose ridiculous amounts of manpower taking them. And you can often cancel their sieges by sniping smaller stacks or luring bigger ones away by starting a battle nearby (winning the battle is optional).

[起风了]

想对付奥斯曼帝国，我感觉应该提前下手，等到1600年往后它会是非常强大的一个帝国，相当多的人口，科技也不落后。

[red1]

Not sure this if the info being requested, but I do have a strategy for the Ottomans mid to late game. Since I am usually playing a Euro power, I rush my whole army tp their capital Constantinople while at the same time rush my entire fleet to the straights. I usually plan ahead so I have enough navy to hold the straight. Often their capital fort is not developed, but i assault it either way. Once their capital has fallen, I secure the Europe side and hope my navy holds, usually does. After that, I keep some troops in the Balkans to carpet siege. The rest I rush around the Black Sea and fight my way back on their eastern flank. If I have good allies I let them take the western Asia provinces and focus on driving toward Egypt. I always hire mercs against the Ottomans and use them as cannon fodder like for assaults. Seldom do I have a larger army than the Ottomans.

[Jouni]

Originally posted by Paradoxical:

So the answer is to either crush them early or out scale them?

Or if you are lazy you can just build a lot of manpower buildings and stack idea groups, policies and government reforms that provide army quality bonuses. Their armies get stack wiped one after another even in bad terrain and you can siege their mountain forts in peace since they are very scared to engage with your armies.