Ming 1.35+ WC Guide

This has been so fun that my first impulse was to reincarnate the game from 1444 and start all over again! However as an adult and it having taken me about 40 hours to complete a single game… that’ll have to wait till next month!

I just completed my Ming WC in 1.35+ with in November 1820, barely 2 months till end game. I’m so goddarn happy I made it, I left the pacific islands - Tonga, Vanuatu etc till the last and the natives had built Level 8 forts there ;DI wanted to share some highlights since there aren’t any good reading guides for Ming 1.35

Money Incomes scales once you start investing enough and with such a good base to start with, I had the max of 1 million ducats by 1700. The trade company investment which does +0.30 local goods in ALL provinces in the state is severely underrated. In a 5 province state that’s 030 x 5 = 1.5 goods produced.

I had 72 merchants by WC, but sadly, my merchants could not travel in time to the trade nodes so I could get ridiculous income figures

Unrest Being obsessed with unrest reduction and stability as only a paranoid Ming emperor could be, I managed to stack -27 unrest reduction globally. Rebels were not a thing unless I went over 150% OE. Unfortunately with the revolution continuing to spread every couple of months, that was +25 unrest in a couple of new provinces every month.

Stability Cost Reduction From pretty normal buffs, I ended up with -75% stability cost. During truce breaks, where I get to -3, it only costs me 40 admin points to stab up 1 level. So going from -3 to 1 takes me only 160 admin points. Well worth it since I was earning 15 admin per month

Idea Cost Reduction This is where Ming shines as it has 2 buffs, Open China and Confucianism that gives you -10% each. In total I managed the max of -90% idea cost reduction though if you count my buffs, it reaches -115%

Dev Cost Reduction Ming also shines here due to lots of unique buffs and monuments giving dev cost reduction. Ming specific buffs include civil registration, palace bureaucracy, harmony and those river dams. In the lowest dev province, my dev cost is just 3 ADM points. I’m not sure if it’s a multiplier but additively, it’s also over -100% dev reduction.

Siege Bonus This is so important because it feels like you spend 90% of the time sieging. I picked every siege ability possible to give me an 85% siege bonus and with age of revolutions +3 stacking and infrastructure idea +2 stacking; with 50 artillery sieging, I get +10 siege to forts. Forts Oh yeah, I managed to stack +15 fort defence on Beijing. This means that Beijing was essentially a level 15 fort. I got this from various bonuses like the Great Wall, and the buddhist scrolls from Korea. Some buffs were a one time buff which get removed if you’re ever sieged.

Starting Strategy: 1. Chill the first couple of years, complete estate requests and keep their happiness equilibrium high while seizing land. You start off with the eunuchs having 50% land share. Do not implement single whip law no matter how attractive it sounds (+50% tax income), it’s a bum deal, their land is protected from seizure that way. 2. Drill your regent, and hope he dies. Ming’s king was originally a 1/1/1 with something close to a 0/0/0 heir. With 1.35, the king remains the same but the heir has improved to a 3/3/4 - this is decent tbh. 3. Continue chilling out on speed 5, turn your fort maintenance, army and navy maintenance down to 0 and count those ducats coming in. Our focus is on getting some cool bonuses from finishing Ming’s mission tree as well as dealing with the +25% autonomy malus. 4. You start the game with 90k troops. Your strongest neighbour probably has 25k. You might want to get rid of 20-30k troops. Keep in mind though that you start the game with one of the weakest armies. Your strength is completely in quantity, not quality; until you get military ideas. 5. Ally Bengal and Chagatai. Change the focus of all tributaries to send you admin points. You get something like 50 admin points every January this way. That’s an easy +4 admin per month. You need that however, to make up for your 1/1/1 ruler. 6. Hire 2/2/2 advisors. Don’t get +3 because it’s +5 gold/cost going from level 2 to 3 and it makes more sense to have +15 gold/month income at this point. 7. Restart the game every time you get a flood event. It’s devastation, it reduces your dev, a hit to mandate and -2 stab each time. In terms of admin points to get back to square one, it’s maybe 200-300 admin points each time you get the random flood event. No shame in that at all. I noticed that the occurrences of flood disasters became much less once I got level 2 river dykes and became non-existent once I got level 3 river dykes. 8. You want to check out your mission tree, you start from 3 places and they’re basically revolving around the themes of: (I) conquest/tributaries, (ii) development/trade/yellow river and (iii) your estates

Early Strategy - Exploration: 1. I like going for exploration as a first idea, followed by expansion so I can beat europeans at their own game. I’ve noticed that Spain/Portugal/England are poorer at colonisation in this patch. 2. Wait till you have 600 splendour, then declare war on Oirat with the goal of sizing Mongolia as a vassal (a huge vassal!) after you get your transfer vassal at -50% age buff at 800 splendour. 3. You want to remove one of the north East Asian countries as a subject to get their coastal land for exploration range to Alaska. Take your time with this. In my game, Oirat had Haixi as an ally, which had visualised Nivkh, so that worked out really well for me. 4. Build your spy network on the 3 Kamchatka nations, you need the one in the furthest North east region to leapfrog to Alaska. You need that and at least 3 ideas in exploration for the +50% colonial range. 5. Before you can get into Alaska, send your explorer to unsettled provinces in SE Asia and make as many provinces as you can tributaries. Set their focus to give you admin points. 6. Native policy should be aggressive. This gives you +20 colonists per year. You start with something like +45 colonists/year so that’s a substantial increase. You’ll need to have a couple of armies on the SE asian countries though, their natives range from 2000-5000 in strength and you’ll need at least 2-3 armies per province. 7. You should finish 2 provinces in the SE asian region btw your colonial range hits Alaska. I like taking one province in the spice islands, and another in the west Malaysian region which gives me range into the Indian Ocean. 8. Once you get access to the Americas, you should have access to expansion ideas due to you getting so many admin points, as well as having gotten a 2nd colonist from exploration ideas. You should be able to have about 3 colonists, and have the economy to maintain 5 colonies at the same time. 9. By the time Jan 1500 rolls around, you should get the exploration origin, keeping Europe in the dark ages. 10. After setting up your first colonial nation (Alaska), keep in mind your CNs need about 10 provinces before they start to get wild. Otherwise, they’ll just stagnate and not expand. 11. However, my focus on colonialisation after getting exploration, would be to split my colonists between getting range to S. Africa, preventing Spain/portugal from entering the lucrative south East Asian trade region; and getting colonial range downstream to Mexico and then Peru, where a ton of gold mines await. 12. Colonising and conquering Mexico is imperative. Once you ave Mexico colonised, you should be getting 500-600 ducats in gold shipments per year. That’s about +50 ducats per month. You’ll also be denying that to Spain, so hooray. 13. Try to position your colonists effectively. If Spain/Portugal are slow, you can slowly expand horizontally across Mexico till you hit the American gulf region, effectively blocking the Europeans from expanding into the central and west coast of America. If you succeed here, they are restricted to the Caribbean, Brazil, and East America. 14. Ignore Australia even though it’s sitting right in front of you. It’s almost a totally irrelevant allocation of your resources. Focus on colonising the entirety of South Africa, hopefully Portugal hasn’t colonised cape coast yet, and every single island in the Indian Ocean. Portugal/Spain won’t have range to get to SE Asia, and they’ll have to colonise-caterpillar through Granada to hit the pacific islands to get to SE Asia/Australia. 15. Try to conquer the Incan nations too. They give very decent gold income (+300 a year), although I’m not sure if Beijing is downstream from Peru. You’ll definitely get Mexican / Californian gold treasure fleets though. 16. Don’t forget to set your naval policy to Chinese treasure fleets. This gives you +50% more gold income and +10% more colonial range. 17. Get the Galápagos Islands too, and the Society Islands. Spain/Portugal uses 1 of this to leapfrog through the pacific. 18. Don’t forget to get micronesia. It has a monument - Nan Madoll that gives you +colonists per year and +naval tradition.

Early Strategy - Conquest 1. After steam rolling Oirat with your ally Chagatai, invest excess prestige over 100 in sharing maps of Central Asia. Your next target are the Tibetan regions to fulfil one of your mission tree to-dos. Don’t be afraid to vassalise a couple of these small bois. You should have a ton of diploma slots available especially after getting strong duchies which gives you +2 diplo slots after you get 2 vassals. 2. You wanna get next to timurid and Uzbek asap. Attack Uzbek first, and free one territory that belongs to Kazkh, giving you reconquest over a huge swathe of territory. I think you would have reconquest over 2/3 of Uzbek that way. 3. At the same time, timurids might have integrated all its vassals by now. Try freeing a province from Transoxia and do the same thing. Timurids have a strong military but you should vastly out-tech them. When I had level 10 military ideas, they only had level 7. Steam roll them and then free Khorasan and Afghanistan too. Leave India alone for now, your priority is to check Russian and Ottoman expansion. 4. Continue snaking your way west, feeding excess useless provinces to Mongolia, on your way to Muscovy. You want to prevent them from being able to Siberian expand, so get Golden Horde / Kazan as one of vassals to take a ton of their territory. If they don’t have all the pre-requisite provinces, they can’t form Russia which keeps them weak. If you get Golden Horde, ottoman will desire many of those caucus territories so they’ll be looking for any opportunity to attack you (like when you get the crisis of the Ming dynasty). 5. Anyway, neutralise Muscovy who usually has no allies, and all’s good. They’ll be on par in tech with you and have pretty strong armies, about 50-60k usually, but did I mention that you start with 90k armies? I didn’t even need to train a single soldier from 1445 till mid 1550s. 6. By 1550s, you should have all the exploration goals I mentioned earlier, as well as having snaked your way across central asian to nip Russia in the bud, as well as keeping the Ottomans from expanding into Timurid territory. A nice border to keep the ottomans would be the basra - central caucus mountains vertical line. Build a row of forts there. It’s going to be a death trap for any western invader. I’m talking 4 forts deep so they’re going to spend years sieging you and never get into your soft Chinese underbelly. I’ve already typed for more than an hour, such is my love for EU4, but let me know if you want me to continue this guide for the mid-game and late-game in my same style - I’ll continue editing my guide tomorrow!