Originally posted by Sindai
And if you want some easy wars, you could always butter up Turkey then ally with them before going after Persia. Persia wouldn't last 5 minutes. Heck, Turkey usually blasts them pretty badly even if you don't do anything to encourage them.
When playing Russia your best friends are Sweden, Poland, and the Teutonic Knights. You should take great care of these countries because you can get a war with them (and their allies!) at a cost of one BB and zero stability.
What you are looking for is alliances between these countries and RotW countries. If you see one of these, you just found a way to eat an entire country at essentially no cost.
What you do is DoW on the country you have the CB with, then completely overrun the other country. That gives you the chance to get 3 provinces + 250 ducats in the settlement with that country. Repeat this process until the ally is gone.
If you can only get one or two provinces from the RotW country, you can get the AI to accept a peace agreement by running over the CB country until you get 6 stars, then asking for the provinces you've taken from the RotW country in the peace agreement with the CB country.
I'm talking about this in this thread because if you get a case where Poland is allied with Persia, you can take Persia nearly for free.
Persia is wonderful. Almost all of the provinces have no revolt factor, many of them allow you to build a lot of guys (Tabriz), by taking these provinces you prevent the Turks from getting them, they are mostly very rich provinces (spices, etc.), and as has been stated elsewhere in the thread, they are a decent road to India, and from there to Indochina, and from there to China.
When playing Russia, you get to walk to Siberia, but it would be hard to invade China from Siberia, since you can't make a decent number of troops over there. So it's hard to get around China, and Indochina and India remain invisible to you. If you get a ship explorer, you have to get it over there, and that's hard.
Siberia really does kind of suck, but it does end up being a positive thing that's reserved pretty much for you alone.
Going through Persia takes a long time unless you want to get a pretty massive BB, so the best way to get over there
in force is to trade maps with people and establish a few colonies in Africa so you have a place to rest your ships. Another way is to go around the tip of South America via the Falklands, but that requires some luck.
It is possible to get to India so fast with Russia that you can eat almost the entire thing before anyone else is there, and if someone does get there first, you can blast them by taking advantage of bad RotW alliances they make.
It does not cost a diplomat to request to exchange maps.
bruce
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