So, you want to do a world conquest speedrun, and want a 'helpful' and 'convenient' guide to do so. Well, I'll attempt to help with that, with an updated guide from my guide from a few years ago which was honestly kinda bad. This will be using my last 2 public server games as Saudi Arabia and Spain as a template, so strategies may not be 100% accurate, and will probably not work for smaller countries, however larger countries are definitely usable for it (guide is mostly applicable for tiers 4 (IV) to 8 (VIII)). Anyway, to get started, make sure you are justifying all the time, unless you are in a public server, in which case do not justify on players, or at least work around them, and for the most part, if you are in a public server, just aggressively expand into the ai, and avoid threatening players too much, lest you end up in a very dangerous war, especially if the player you are playing against is very good. Patience is key for both private and public servers. There is no rule against ceding stuff to players, but there are rules against getting stuff ceded to you (because you could just have a friend cede an entire country to you, which would give you a massive advantage over other world conquest runs), so use this to your advantage in inter-player politics if you need to to gain an advantage. Allying players in public servers is key for defence and offence, and most servers 'die' before and/or approaching 2025-2030, so things should start to snowball by that point, especially if you are building up lots of troops. Going nationalism/fascism is also advantageous if you're going for a world conquest, due to gaining stability when declaring wars, and you'll be declaring a stupidly large number of wars, numbering in the hundreds. This also leads us into the war management section: how many wars do I want to be in? Try and be in a relatively high number of wars. Early-game this'll be reaching up to 3 wars, however once you have a large number of units, keep BELOW 15 wars. 15 is currently an arbitrary number, however I'll figure out the true optimum number of wars later. Why do you want to manage your war number? War exhaustion gain. You do NOT want to get to 10 war exhaustion, no matter the stability, as 10 war exhaustion causes your stability to CRUMBLE, no matter the number, stability goal, etc, and it will lose you YEARS. Preferably, stay below 8 war exhaustion, however going 8-9 is still an option, especially near the edge of the war limit. You will almost certainly get skills shortage during your run, and that's OK, it can go away via event after like 40 years. For stability, INVEST IN CONSUMER GOODS, or you could purchase them from other players, especially if you aren't planning on going in their direction for a long time (eg. If they're in the Americas and you're focusing on Europe, Asia, and Africa- which I'll be referring to as the world island (referencing an old geopolitical theory) for brevity). You also want to have maximum government spending, and if you're desperate, invest in the centre path of political tech. You should always take the first one of it at some point during your run. Going the top path is also very useful for policies, for which you should take as many as your political power gain will allow, but not at the beginning, because you still need to flip to nationalism for dat juicy justification speed and stability. "What if I'm playing as a country that doesn't start as non-aligned though?" If you're playing as a country that starts as a different ideology, if it's democracy, use a different country to flip, preferably that's easy to invade, like Cuba for the USA, North Korea for Japan, or even China could be a good option if you're both players in the region (eg. Playing Japan with friendly China player or India with friendly China player). If none of those are options, just flip to non-aligned using one of your neighbours. For socialism and communism you can just stay the same, they're good enough on their own. Please note that if you do flip, you will get a negative modifier for a few years that may put you into low stability. You can mostly ignore it, especially as Brazil or USA after flipping, due to them having relatively easy formables to buy you stability time (North American Union and Empire of Brazil respectively). Japan can ignore it through not having any releasable countries (yet), and same for India, though that also has a convenient formable. All this talk about formables brings us onto an important section with the advent of formable nation modifiers: What things do I form, and should I form any formable nations at all? So far, the resounding answer for this from me is a yes, form everything you can between wars/groups of wars, with one, singular exception (that I know of right now): The European Union. DO NOT FORM THE EUROPEAN UNION. It gives a modifier that part of which gives you stability cost to declare wars +2, which you need to flip over to fascism to counter, and WILL sabotage you in the long run, unless you can quickly form something else to get rid of the horrible modifier (minus the construction cost that's actually kinda good, so you can do some quick development, especially paired with the improve infrastructure policy, so there could be strats which you form eu, run a round of factory building and develop cities and then form something like Spanish empire for it's amazing modifier). Particular modifiers of note to me are Arab league and Islamic Caliphate, which LITERALLY INCREASE UNIT ATTACK/DEFENCE. If you can't tell, I'm pretty sure that it's op. Especially caliphate, it is legit one of, if not the best modifier in the game. If playing as a country that can form them, FORM THEM. Iberian Union also has a pretty good earlygame modifier which you should get early on, before continuing your expansion. Other key things of note is only invade one major nation at a time (don't invade the United States and Russia at the same time, or China or Russia, or Iran and Egypt, unless you're already most of a continent, or a full continent or 2), micro for specific countries (specifically Antarctica, Falklands, any starting naval invasion, Greenland), when invading islands use 60k-70k infantry unit stacks, specialisation for Antarctica, amazon rainforest, the Arctic circle (Norway, Russia, Canada, Greenland if you want less micro, Faroe islands, and Iceland), and the Middle east/north Africa- just use it wherever applicable. You should also use a boat for some specific countries to make them easier (eg. Faroe islands, Antarctica), and always build recruitment centers and develop cities if you have enough money (especially highly populated cities such as Tokyo), though at this point this is more of a generally skilled gameplay guide for pure infantry builds more than a world conquest guide. So yeah, hopefully this wall of text is useful for gameplay purposes.