best faction to turtle with?

[ArtistofWarfare]

Indeed, bordering the Milanese war factory is never a good thing, since they field very similar city roster except more devastating (or annoying ) crossbows, + it's 2 vs 1 (Milan, Genoa vs. Venice), unless your navy can quickly reinforce from Ragusa. If you ever secure northern Italy it becomes less of a hassle to defend

Well, I had a good Italian campaign going on MTW:VI back in February before I got my new PC ...which is a Vista and wants nothing to do with MTW:VI.

I would imagine in this campaign, I will approach the beginning of the game similarly. I do not need to flex muscle early, simply create the potential to do so. So I start with a digging in, getting an early start on fortifying everything that is mine to start, and making it impenetrable. Plus, with this campaign map I can go about doing so far more in depth.

While I'm doing this, I like to put the majority of my resources and efforts into establishing myself as a naval power...or "the" Naval power. I like to quickly get to the point of saying "yeah, you have the #1 Navy on the map". This way, in the situation we're talking about, step 1 of any war would be to completely destroy the enemy's entire navy and blockade all ports. Just reduce their sea trade and naval capacity to zero immediately.

At that point, planning for army mobilization and ground action would come into play. But in my experience, dominating the seas early is a trump card advantage that an enemy just can't do anything to negate. Once you control the seas, it takes a monumental effort from an enemy to remove you.

edit- I've also found that in doing this, and providing your allies/neutrals with massive amounts of trade that you are doing one of the few things to actually strengthens diplomatic ties between yourself and other factions.