Early game strategy - exploit Ethiopia

Fyi, this is technically cheese/exploity

The Ethiopian region is extremely useful for all countries, able to help a country militarily, economically, or with infamy. So here's my take on a starting guide:

Small countries:

Make sure the pops aren’t discriminated, usually through subjecthood or cultural exclusion + freedom of conscience. 

1. Place your interest in Zanj. Declare for annex Witu.
2. Move/place another interest into Ethiopia, annexing your way into Ethiopia proper (Geledi -> Marjerteen -> Warsangali ->  Isaaq)
3. Profit 

I usually don't incorporate the states at all, especially without African language/heritage traits. 

Benefits:

You will receive 149 army by taking all the Ethiopian minors (as of game start). This also saves you the effort of building armies yourself. However, most minors enjoy deleting their armies as the game progresses

I have found Ethiopia usually doubles its total GDP from 2.2 million to 4 million in 4 years, mostly in agriculture/wood. There are also 6.8 million people. This means that in 1840 if you take all the states, you will receive 4k additional revenue in minting, not including government dividends. It means a much larger snowball for later in the game. 

Problems:

Egypt is likely to intervene when you reach their border (Begemder, Tigray). To solve this, either declare and pray, get an obligation (hard), or time it with the Egyptian-Ottoman war(s). 

You may receive negative convoys due to port connections, especially with smaller countries. Setting your army’s home base to Zanj/Ethiopia will keep it at 100% org in my testing. 

You will usually receive negative infrastructure in the Ethiopian states, as you will probably reach the infrastructure cap for population. However they aren’t your main pops, so just watch them starve like the Irish.

Empowers the landowners more, as you tend to de-peasant in your states while neglecting the Ethiopian ones. Not significantly tho.

Large countries:

From my testing, this only works under 50 infamy. With this cheese, you can easily reduce your infamy without consequences

1. Make sure the country you want to declare on doesnt have a port or transit rights
2. Declare humiliation on the country (force diplo play)
3. They should add transit rights, back down against them
4. You have successfully lost up to 3.7 infamy
5. Repeat this every 5 years

This is incredibly helpful for reducing radicals when conquering states, such as with France and its ‘natural borders’ JE. Alternatively, you can use this to quickly protectorate the South American countries for mandate points

TLDR:

If you are playing in a small country, just take Ethiopia for free minting and government dividends. It’ll massively boost your growth.

If you are playing a great power, use transit rights-infamy reduction cheese to get more people in your block for mandate points