Hey,

Quite new player who doesn't really understand what he's doing. I've decided to try play as the Ottomans and I watched the first 2 min or so of a youtube tutorial just so I know what to do in the first couple of minutes. My opening strategy was something like building a tonne of light ships to blockade my enemies, increasing my force limit then invading other nations in Anatolia. I financed this with that estates thing where I can take out 5 loans immediately.

This went quite well and I managed to complete a few missions, I took over all of byzantium, athens and grabbed kosovo in the process, as well as most of Anatolia. Things started going badly when I invaded Albania. I had a claim there and thought "what's Venice gonna do?". I soon found out that they dragged Austria into the war as well and those two stomped me. At the same time I occupied Dulkadir but the Mamluk's enforced peace so I stopped. If I didn't have a fight with the Western powers at the time I probably would've tried to take them on tbh.

So throughout all this I permanently had 0 manpower reserves and I'm not sure what to do about that. I was also haemorrhaging money constantly with no idea what to do to stop it. I read something about debasing currency and thought fuck it why not. Got myself 1000 ducats while bleeding 8-12 per month.

I ended up aborting the playthrough because after the Western countries wiped out my armies I realised I had a very long process on my hands of rebuilding my army and navy and they'd likely ask for provinces that would set me back a long way in peace deals.

So what I want advice on really is how to manage my economy better? I don't know what corruption is or what the consequences are and was pretty much planning to debase my currency forever lol. This seemed to be fine for expansion but at some point I'd probably want to consolidate my empire and start improving the economy "properly" instead of taking loans/corruption. As I said, I don't know what corruption is but it doesn't sound good.

Another thing is, how do I use my Janissaries? Can't find the option anywhere.

And should I be converting provinces to Sunni? Greece is still Orthodox and I'm not sure what the consequences of that is.

I'm pretty much just ignoring a lot of the game systems at this point and it seems to be working somewhat okish. In fact, I didn't build a single building the entire time. I'm not sure what the return on investment is for any of that stuff so I pretty much just didn't bother.

Gonna try again and this time I won't be greedy and attack anyone allied to a grown up nation that I can't take on.