Achievement: A Blessed Nation

A quick and fun way to get a rare achievement.

Introduction

In order to get this achievement, all five centers of the Coptic Faith must be owned by a Coptic Nation and have the Coptic religion in that province. Despite what the achievement description says, you don't actually need all 5 blessing to be active (but you might as well activate them since each one is in effect an extra national idea).

As long as you are playing as any Coptic Nation, you have the option to see the Coptic Faith Panel, clickable in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (usually where the Papal Authority Panel would be for Catholic Nations).
At the start of the game, Aksum is controlled by Ethiopia and Qasr Ibrim is controlled by Makuria. That leaves Iskenderiye (Alexandria), Antakya (Antoich), and Erivan (Yerevan). Those cities are in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia, respectively.

For a long time I thought this achievement would be hard. The EU wiki site thinks this is hard. I'm sure a lot of other players think this is hard. After all, starting as Makuria or Ethiopia and conquering your way all the way to Armenia, you'd have to go through the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and possibly even Persia or Russia. That's no easy task. Then I realized, I could do this achievement as the Ottomans.

To do this, you'll need to be familiar with the Estates Tab and be comfortable with letting yourself get wrekt by rebels.

Section 1: Get a Coptic Province

There's no need to restart multiple times to get the stars to align in this guide. You only need a Coptic Province. Fortunately, two of your cores (Erzincan and Erzurum) are already Coptic. Unfortunately they are owned by AQ and QQ.

I noticed AQ reliably allies the Timurids and I was reluctant to fight them just to get one core back. Fortunately, I was able to use the Threaten War diplomatic action, and AQ simply gave my province back without a fight.
It looked like they barely accepted this diplomatic action, but a big deciding factor was my relative strength compared to theirs. I'd recommend training up to your force limit starting in November 1444 to make sure AQ is sufficiently afraid to give away a province.

Now that you've got a Coptic province, you could go on to Section 2, or if you want to have a little bit more fun you could fight QQ for some additional Coptic provinces. It's your judgement call. On the one had, QQ has several more Coptic provinces, which means converting will be marginally easier. On the other hand, you'll have to fight in mountainous terrain where QQ may get defensive rolls, and the force limit in those provinces is usually only 11 or 12, with harsh winters. So you will suffer a lot of attrition.

If you choose not to fight QQ at this point - keep in mind you will eventually have to fight them to get Erivan. A few decades later you will be much stronger, and they may have been wrekt by Iraqi and Armenian nationalists. You may even get lucky and Armenia will be an independent nation, meaning you'll only have to fight tiny Armenia for Erivan. Again, it's your judgement call.

I personally fought QQ for all their Coptic provinces. I waited until they attacked Trebizond, asked Trebizond for military access, then declared on QQ and stack wiped them right there in Trebizond. Then I fought a long war, suffered a lot of attrition, had zero manpower, but got every Coptic province. When life gives you lemons make lemonade; I took the manpower recovery mission after that to at least get a nice tax bonus modifier.

Section 2: Antagonize the Dhimi

Next, we'll need to start a Coptic revolt, and to do that we'll need to interact with the Estates Panel. If you've never done this before, then now is a great time to learn, so read on.
At the start of the game, the Dhimi estate owns several Orthodox provinces in Greece. In my game, I granted them every Coptic province I had, and revoked their status in their original Orthodox provinces. This resulted in a loyalty of about 39 (the loyalty of any Estate will always trend towards 50, at the rate of about 0.1 loyalty per month). Giving an Estate provinces increases its loyalty, while revoking provinces decreases loyalty, and I believe the amounts correspond to the development of the provinces.

Our goal is to really anger the Dhimi, because they will start a revolt. Keep in mind that they must hold a province for a full year before you can revoke it, so after granting them Coptic provinces, you'll still need to wait a year.

While you're waiting a year, go ahead and destroy every fort in Anatolia. A religious rebel stack can convert a province to its religion, but only if you own no forts in the area. The rebels can seige the forts, but that slows them down. We want to make this rebellion as easy as possible, and discourage the rebellion from crossing into other countries like Georgia, Candar, or Karaman as much as possible. Go ahead and move your armies in Greece.

Once you have waited a year, we can start the Coptic rebellion. To really grease the wheels, go to the Estates Panel and ask the Dhimi for a religious tax. This will give you some extra cash, and really anger this estate. Now they're primed for a rebellion.

Next, from the Province Panel revoke their status in each of the Coptic provinces they own.

Each one should spawn a rebel stack.
Now you wait some more. Read on the Section 3.

Section 3: Convert to Coptic Faith

Now you let the rebels do their fancy work, carpet seiging provinces and changing the religion to Coptic. Make sure you destroyed all forts in Anatolia by this point, and keep your armies in Europe. Once more than 50% of your provinces are Coptic, you should have the option to "accept demands" for the rebellion from the Stability and Expansion Panel.
There are a few things to keep in mind.

Certain alliances you had may break, and certain countries that were not friendly before may become so. In my game, Trebizond suddenly wanted a royal marriage and alliance. Within a year or two they accepted an offer to become my vassal.

There's also a scripted event for the Ottomans to accept Crimea as a marche. However, if your prestige is really low it will not work, even if you pay for the option. The game will take your monarch points, ding your relations with the PLC, and give you no marche. This has happened to me once before. If you really have your heart set on getting Crimea as a marche, the loss of 50 prestige from changing religions can jeoprodize this. In this particular playthrough I made sure that I could immediately start a war with someone easy like Candar, and quickly winning the war bumped my prestige back up. You also get 10 prestige as a Coptic nation if you win a Coptic center of faith, and since I had Erivan I almost immediately got 10 prestige back after converting, so it was really only a loss of 40 prestige.

Section 4: Conquer Antioch and Alexandria

By now 3 centers of Coptic faith should be owned by Coptic Nations: Erivan, Aksum, and Qasr Ibrim. That leaves Antioch and Alexandria. Unless something disastrous happened to the Mamluks, the last two provinces should be owned by the Mamluks.

You can win both provinces in one war, but you will probably have to siege several provinces including their capital, Halab, and Alexandria. In my game they were allied with Karaman, so I started a Reconquest CB against Karaman, and fought and fought until the Mamluks were willing to give me Antioch and Alexandria. In my case it took a very long time, I ran out of manpower, and merced up with loans.

Next, convert Antioch and Alexandria to Coptic, and you've got the achievement. You don't even need to take the last two blessings - but you might as well since they're free bonuses.

I didn't talk much about national ideas, but I'd recommend religious, if only because it gives you an extra missionary plus 3% more missionary strength. If there are any national missions to convert a province to the Coptic faith, take that since that should net you an extra 1% missionary strength for 10 years. Also hire a missionary advisor if one is available, since that will give you another 2% bonus. Immediately after becoming Coptic, you can pick 3 blessings, and one of those gives you extra missionary strength. All these bonuses together will make it easier to convert Antioch and Alexandria once you have them.

It would have been much easier to only take Antioch in this war, but I wanted to get the achievement sooner. In my case I got the achievement by 1484, but you'll have plenty of time if you decide to slowly fight the Mamluks until you work your way down to Alexandria several wars later. If you take your time, it's possible that Makuria or Ethiopia will do so badly that they lose their Coptic centers of faith. It's unlikely to happen since they'll also get Coptic Blessing bonuses, making them even more overpowered relative to their Sunni neighbors, but if it does happen, you still have plenty of time to fight your way down to the Horn of Africa.

[[2tesGFR] EuroPlaette]

They have control of all my coptic provinces, but still only particulartists.

[nicholasandrewdavies]

that happens when the Dhimmi estate has control of those provinces?

[[2tesGFR] EuroPlaette]

I only get particulartists in the coptic provinces. Any tipps?

[Maicara]

Debt is a useful tool. I rarely have fewer than three outstanding loans, but in doing so I can manage my military far more effectively in the early and mid game. There really is never a point that you can't afford mercs, because while it may put you in debt the aquisition of new lands and the preservation of your manpower is far more important than getting in the black, except in the most dire of economic circumstances. Mercs and loans let you blob faster and harder without falling apart at the first sign of rebellion.

[nicholasandrewdavies]

That is a really good idea especially when the Ottomans have such a good economy anyway. I'll try that next time. I'm going for the Komnemnoi Empire achievement right now and honestly I can't afford mercs, but I may be blobbing out way too fast.

[Maicara]

Use mercenaries for sieges. Makes the attrition managable

[Bobo the angsty zebra]

You can also just mothball your forts whcih allows the rebels to take them in a single 'siege' tick

[Lodenuri]

Clueless, sometimes they can cross the border with another country and get killed

atleast that's what happened to my rebels

[Carl Johnson BR (real)]

Why not just let the Coptic fucks convert as many as they can, and let them enforce it?
+ You don't get hit by the -50 prestige hit

[The_Spartan]

You can also do it as Mameluks (LINK) . As you can see it took about 60 years to get it and i wasnt even trying hard.