Quote Originally Posted by Monk View Post
Poland-Lithuania is one of the 12 major factions available for play.
You begin as a constitutional monarchy with a few decent provinces and some very underdeveloped ones. Your two principle problems with be that you are initially totally landlocked and everyone around you either isn't Catholic or isn't a pushover.

In the first few turns Prussia will probably want to swap some land with you, if you can get East Prussia out of the deal go for it. You will likely quickly get involved in war with Sweden and Courland -- Courland is a pushover, Sweden not so much. I took the southern Baltic states and then sued for peace to let Russia deal with them otherwise, 30 years later they were still at war without much progress either way.

Once you get your initial turns out of the way you have three pressing problems, those being Russia, Prussia and Austria. Your border with the Ottoman's is distant but lightly defended, however if you choose to expand that way you must keep a good relationship with all three of your neighbors. Russia in particular will be the elephant in your room as the border is vast and they will have every advantage for 15-20 turns.

Austria is easier to handle as you have to go around the Carpathian mountains, meaning you have only two points of contention with what would otherwise be a nasty border.

Prussia may seem weak but they start with a large standing army and will likely pick up an annoying alliance or two.

I went with an envelopment strategy with Austria, including an overland invasion of Venice and Southern Italy, and would have finished off the Ottoman Empire at this point except the game started crashing every turn, so I ate the diplomatic problems and went to war with Austria instead.



You get Uhlan lancers early in your cavalry tree, these appear to be slightly better but not particularly useful for anything but harassing roles and removing unprotected artillery; even militia can likely absorb a cavalry charge effectively enough to remove the unit from play so they're not as worth the cost/upkeep as much as in prior games.

The naval start is horrible but assuming you can kick Sweden off the coast or repress them altogther you can very easily defend the entire Baltic with a single fleet thanks to the way interception works. You will likely at some point be at war with factions that trade with Britain or the United Provinces -- there are juicy trade lanes right out there by the English channel that can be very profitable to raid. You won't get a fleet out in the trade areas early enough to get a decent cut.