Norway strategy

From EU3 Wiki

It may look as if that you are fairly powerful, but it is more difficult and when you have to deal with your poor provinces, terrible manpower and slow tech rates you will be as powerful as a nation half the size of you.

You start in a personal union with Denmark and at war with Sweden. You have no other choice but to participate in danish wars until your personal union ends which is to happen when their (and yours too) king dies.

Don't attack their armies right on, wait till attrition weakens them significantly. Also, Sweden has a great starting general that is very likely to pay you a visit, try to avoid an open battle with him, just focus on taking back provinces he already conquered. Garrisons in them will be low, so 2-3k big stack of infantry will be able to succeed in winning an assault against them. Use mercenaries for that purpose and disband them as soon as they fall low in numbers.

You can't afford any colonial effort, you also can't afford wide research. Your extremely low manpower and land force limit also deny you from any serious conquest and the only thing that will keep your enemies out of your country is huge attrition penalty for marching into Scandinavia. So to beat any enemies that come to you, you should patiently wait till they die out naturally and then try to get white peace.

In the matter of becoming at least a regional power you have no other choice but to start trading in as many trading centers as you can.

Base your armies on cavalry, infantry is useless for the first 150 years anyway. Focus your research on trade and goverment. Ignore researching and building any navy. Costs too much and is not worth the effort.

Take trading National Ideas and build your wealth basing on those. If you manage to get Shrewd Commerce Practices and National Trade Policy and won't fall behing in Trade tech research, you are sure to be able to keep 5 merchants in all important centers of trade in the world (17th page of the ledger shows which are the wealthiest, early go for Lubeck, Vlaanderen and Andalucia, then move to others). Using attrition as your defense and trade as your source of income you can choose between uniting Scandinavia under your rule (which needs quite numerous wars all over the place, huge mercenary armies and quite high inflation to be able to finance the operation) and moving towards wealthy minors in the Holy Roman Empire - OR - take Quest for the New World and get yourself a piece of land in Americas. Go to USA for big natural growth rates or using mercenary cavalry conquer Aztecs or Incas for manpower and gold. Either will give you enough citizens and wealth to be at least a significant country back in Europe. Convert any center of trade you take as your first priority. You don't want that nasty 15% penalty to your merchants competitiveness that you get if you own a center of trade that is not of your state culture.

In the matter of your domestic policies ("sliders") you want to move towards Free Trade and either of Offensive (for unitification of Scandinavia) or Naval (for becoming a colonial country).

In research you can ignore Land and Naval tech, you can also ignore Production as you don't produce much anyway. Focus on Trade and Goverment and use your cultural superiority to dominate the old continent. For your advisors choose either guys that boost your Trade and Govt. research rates or guys that raise the number of merchants you get per year.

Really, disproportion between what you can get from taxes and production and what you can get from trading is so high that Norway can't really afford ignoring trade if it ever wants to be something more than a vassal of Denmark or Sweden.

Also, ignoring Production research should happen only after you get level one in it that allows you to build workshops and thus improves your tax incomes a lot.

Keep your stability high, +3 all the time preferably, this gives you +30% more tax income and 3 merchants extra per year. Hire advisors early and avoid falling down later in the game.

Try to avoid any alliances, you don't want to be dragged into any wars that AI is waging as your tiny armies and fleets won't earn you a lot in those.

In the middle game you want to swith to either of Administrative Republic for its bonus to comepetiveness or to Administrative Monarchy if you are colonizing heavily and want to earn more from that. Bear in mind though that switching to Republic denies you from being the Holy Roman Emperor.