Any tips for winning opium war as Qing?

[Jim Boatley]

I wanna do a play trough as the Qing, but I don’t want to lose the opium wars. Is there any way to even win against the UK?

[Lateralus]

I've played this many times and the only solution that I found was to drag England into another Diplomatic play, with say Portugal for example, then when that war ends you now have a truce with England long enough to complete the Opium War Journal Entry. It's a bit cheesy but I found that Great Qing is too weak to beat England directly that early in the game.

[Sol]

Opium War stuff can be wild due to RNG, sometimes if Russia starts willing to go into a defensive alliance the Brits wont even bother declaring war on you, othertimes the English AI may screw up with their armies or navys and not support a naval landing well, and even then they frequently leave areas like their South American or Carribean lands without any Garrison and you can get ticking war exhaustion on them from sniping that stuff depending on what wargoals you picked, and if the Brits added stuff like stealing Tibet from you as a vassal sometimes you can peace them out with that and/or War Reps later in the war without conceeding the treaty port, which is the important part for your journal.

Even with the debuffs if you can juice up your Military buffs from the Intrest group and regorganise your starting troops and generals to make a optimised army garrison your coasts you can fight off the naval landings better, moving your capitol inland also makes it so the brits cant snipe bejjing and force ticking neg war support on you.

forcing truces by messing with Portugese Macau and backing down from the play for something like war reps after the brits side with them can also work at times.

[Lateralus]

In this 1.6 patch the AI seems to be a lot more aggressive. After winning the opium war, with the method I described above, England came after me for a second Treaty port, once the truce had ended. It never did that in any of my 1.5 play throughs.

Interestingly, England already had a treaty port because it somehow took the original one off Portugal (after the opium war).
In general there seems to be a lot more RNG in this patch as well.

[Kelgran]

I am always play Qing so have tips for you:
1)Opium War i so easy if you use your navy, British Ai always tries to naval invade your capitlal, in start when British attack you have 2 flotilas with 7 and 8 ships and you dont need to add extra wargoals except recognition

2)just make 15 flotilas with one ship in each and that flotilas must have 4 admirals each and must partoling beijing port, when Britain start to naval invade you it just will kill one of your flotilas (it will take for her a lot of time) (than your flotila quickly will be repaired in port and you can send it again to patrol your capital port) and you need to made one naval invade in British african colonies and Britain will be lossing points to -100)

3) Just wait... wait and british warpoints will go nearly -90 and it will agree to make peace with you
Also recomend you in the start building more universities (to get more research points) and firstly researching line infantry (and then go to railroads) when you upgrade your army to line infatry your army projection will be around 7000-9000 so no country wont be agressive to you cause thinking that you are very powerfull ( if you not doing very aggresive expansion)

4. There sometimes Russia can randomly attack you after few yeats in the start. so i reccomend to improve relationships with Russia from the start to moment when you have line infatry after that there are no threat

5. Also recomend you not to to expand territories by war in the start if you banned opium cause you only have (if i remember correctly) 8 years to cure from opium and if you go to wars it wont count the time and you will automaticaly loose opum wars after 8 years and will get very bad debuff for many years