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In 1540 you could already be very big. And this definitely should not end your campaign, because the most they can take is 100% warscore which would give you a 15 year truce. in that time you can conquer much more than 100% worth of warscore. You can expand both in ways to limit the Ottoman expansion and in locations which are easy to conquer so that you can grow stronger much quicker and outscale the Ottomans
Ottomans had 200k by that point it was over. I had zero western allies except small portugal. It's over.
You don't need western allies. Strong allies in the east can also discourage the Ottomans from attacking. And from my perspective, the run would not be over at that point. But you haven't shown us any information about your situation. If you didn't expand much yet, you need to speed up expansion by a lot if you want to outpace the Ottomans. If you have expanded at a strong pace, 200k Ottomans would not be such a problem in 1540.
Some things you can do to prepare for the inevitable war:
-Develop the gold mines and get that mission that gives them +1 goods produced for 30 years. That will get you quite a bit of money for mercs.
-Unite the Horn quickly, then rush south for the Kilwa gold mines. Dev them up too.
-Ally the Ottomans. No, not a joke. You can then bring them into your war with Mamluks, take territory only for yourself, and now the Ottomans can't attack the Mamluks for 15 years. Then, the day the truce runs out, re-attack the Mams and call the Ottos again. Eventually the Ottomans will want your land and break the alliance, but this can buy you some time. In my experience, when you get the Egypt coastline or Syria they tend to be pissed off.
-Don't expand west through Funj. You can't redirect the trade from that anywhere. When you're done with East Africa, go into Arabia through Yemen and then to Persia. Those are much richer regions, and you can use the Persia node as a temporary collection point.
-I personnally like to ally a Central European power such as Hungary or Poland when attacking the Ottomans from the south/east. Preferably slightly weaker than me. Not that they'll help, but the Ottomans will focus on them and so you can occupy a lot of territory while all of their armies are sieging Hungary down. This will drag your warscore down, but only until Hungary gets peaced out. When this happens, you can try to attack the armies as they trickle in on your home front. Not appliable to every game, but when it is it can be nice.
-Little exploit: if you recruit 2 Cawa regiments and consolidate them together, you get yourself a new full regiment for 4 mil points and 0 manpower. Can really accelerate your expansion, especially in the early game.
And do not forget to spawn the institutions. Keep one province ready for each institution. Do not develop the selected Province. To minimize monarch point requirements for spawning it.
You probably won't listen, but what's broken is your understanding of the game. 40K by 1540 is pathetic. You could have passed that number as Ethiopia in a few decades or less and been equal to or stronger than the Ottomans by the mid 1500s, not 5x smaller. But you don't know how to expand. You should stick with easy, powerful nations and avoid harder ones like Ethiopia until you improve. However, since that's unlikely, here's some advice.
You need to learn to grow faster than the AI--to play the game better than it does. Once you do, you can earn any achievement, dominate with any country, and even complete a world conquest with the weakest nations in the game--which Ethiopia is not. And world conquest by definition 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 unless you're an early colonizer (more about this below). 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. Now let's look at how to apply this to Ethiopia, which is a fairly strong nation.
First, trade. Your starting trade node, Ethiopia, is terrible. You'll want to move your collection point to Zanzibar*** as soon as you conquer most of the Aden and Zanzibar nodes. Note that you want them both because Aden flows into Zanzibar, the better of the two. Zanzibar is not an end node, which would be perfect, but it's good. Zanzibar has only one exit, the Cape of Good Hope. By gaining total control of that exit, you turn Zanzibar into a pseudo end node and capture essentially 100% of its trade.
So those are your first goals: complete conquest or colonization of the Ethiopia, Aden, Cape, and Zanzibar trade nodes. Then look at what feeds Zanzibar. Besides Ethiopia and Aden, the nodes of Great Lakes and Zambezi in southern Africa flow there. So grab them. Even more importantly, trade from all of India and most of the Far East feeds Zanzibar through Gujarat. So you want to conquer India as well as southeast Asia, Indonesia, China, Japan, and so on. By the time you do some of this (India alone is enough), you'll be so much stronger than the Ottomans or anyone else that you can obliterate them at will.
Here are some mechanics that will help you accomplish these goals:
1) Set your national focus to Admin and leave it there.
2) Develop for the first three institutions. Don't wait for Renaissance, Colonialism, and Printing Press to spread to you. It takes too long.
3) Take Diplo, Admin, Expansion, and Influence as your first four idea groups. We're adding Expansion to the Big Three because founding colonies in Africa and Indonesia will be useful for Ethiopian expansion.
4) Alliances. You're going to need to deal with the Mamluks at some point to either finish off your conquest of the Ethiopia/Aden nodes or to prevent them from attacking you. Guess who's perfect for this: the Ottomans. They're likely to rival the Mamluks and will be happy to fight them. The Ottomans won't be willing to ally you at first. But as you get stronger, max out relations with them, pick the same rivals, and stack diplo rep from idea groups and advisors, they will usually will be. If you expand too much into lands they covet, the Ottomans will eventually betray you, but you won't care by then because you'll be as strong as they are and will add useful allies to that strength.
You'll have to adapt to changing game conditions, of course, so this is just a rough outline. No one can ever give you a precise EU4 guide because no two games play out the same. But Ethiopia is potentially a colossus if you grow well. It will take time and practice before you get good, but if you work at it, you will.
***An alternative strategy is to conquer the Alexandria node very early on and make it your collection point instead of Zanzibar because you can add wealthy Persia to the trade you route there in addition to India and the rest of Asia (later on, you switch to Genoa). This is harder, however, as you'll need to wipe out the Mamluks fast and then will face angry Ottomans. It's doable if you play the diplomacy game well--I've run both styles of Ethiopian campaign--but someone having major difficulties should steer clear of early Mamluk and Ottoman wars and save them for later.
What saved it was a timely alliance with the Commonwealth, which prevented the Ottos from declaring on me.
And then confusion arose in my mind when the Commonwealth called me into a war against Tunis. Turned out, somehow, the Commonwealth got a personal union on the Spanish.
Once I had wrapped up the Tunis war, I used the Commonwealth to launch a war against the Ottos.
And while I had sucesfully driven them out of Arabia and Syria/Iraq after several wars, they did keep expanding into the Steppes and Iran, even reaching into India at some point.
In between the Otto wars I did expand into Kilwa, and later into the Kongo, driving out the British, before moving north into the Niger Trade zone.
But yeah, Ottos can be a pain.
And i don´t remember, but i guess i allied Ottomans as soon as i could, to take out the Mameluks after securing East Africa - and i usually play by mission tree. And when You have Egypt, and East Africa - You´re equal to them...
In fact, they will insist the Ottomans be even stronger to "reflect their historical strength" even though the game trivializes supplying the hundreds of thousands of men they insist the ottos should have, and marching through rugged country only in select months, as was historically the case
True this. Some time ago a player came on and was asking questions about diplomacy with Russia, if I recall. The answer he got was something like, why are you doing that, you should have conquered all of Russia by now and be on the English Channel.
The guy was probably happy he had beaten Wachovia and vassalized Serbia, and here people were saying why haven't you conquered all of Europe already? Because you know, you really should have.
Much of the advice here is technically excellent, but lacks any sense of context