Prussia/Brandenburg Guide

**Brandenburg** and after a short while into the game **Prussia** is a nation which can snowball very quickly into Europe's top military power. It's army counts 18 brigades (one metastack and one mobilized stack) and 21 mobilized units. It also has a 3 transport ships. Although it starts as a Secondary Power, after forming Prussia it'll quickly gain Great Power status.

## Overview

**Forming Prussia**

The nation of Brandenburg starts in the Austrian sphere, but can quickly become a gp upon forming Prussia. To form Prussia, all the player has to do is **either** **ally Austria or research the Devine Right Of Kings (1700)**. Forming Prussia will instantly annex your substate of Ducal Prussia and significantly increase your amount of recruitable soldiers. Forming Prussia will grant you cores on Swedish Pomerania

**Expansion**

Both Prussia and Brandenburg can get cores on The Rhineland, West Prussia, Northern Saxony as well as Silesia. The infamy on decisions that give you cores is usually scaled, which means that if you already spend infamy on a region that decision won't force you to spend additional infamy for coring it.

Prussia gets additional decisions to one-time increase it's soldier pop amount, gain some pop growth as well as a unique ability to be able to **permanently recruit up to 6%** soldier pops instead of 5% in all it's states thanks to the **Reforms Of The Soldier King** decision.

Prussia is one of the two nations besides Imperial Russia that can trigger the polish partitions, which require researching **Rights And Liberty (1730)** and PLC to be in your sphere of influence.

At game start it ownes a small colony in the Gold Coast of Africa.

Prussia's Absolutist party, as one of the few at game start, provides additional buffs to research.

## Forming Germany?

Prussia is the most likely candidate to form Germany, although this by itself doesn't mean the formation itself is easy. To Form Germany, Prussia needs to leave the Holy Roman Empire as well as own or sphere the owner of all the German cores. Although Germany doesn't start with cores on alsace-lorraine the task of taking over all those cores will still take a lot of time, so forming Germany should not necesserly be the go-to goal of a Prussian player.

It is important to note that dismantling the Holy Roman Empire will prompt an event granting all germans the other german culture as accepted (So if a nation starts with primary culture of north german, it will gain south german as accepted, and vice versa), which makes expanding into south of Germany a much better idea.

As of the current patch (1.6) the player does not gain any nation specific flavor by forming germany, which is likely to change in future updates.

## General Strategy

Initially Brandenburg starts off relativly weak compared to it's neighbours but grows rather quickly. Initial goals of a Brandenburg/Prussia player should first off be the immediete formation of Prussia, best done by allying Austria, later the expansion into the Northern German states should be prioritized, as well as the attempting to partition PLC. Once big enough, roughly owning all of Northern Germany Prussia can begin thinking about forming Germany, provided that France is not big enough of a threat. Although before that point, it is generally more beneficial to stay on friendly terms with Austria, rather then try to kill them.