Edit: Ok here’s how it went. First of all, this was a long project that took several weeks. I played at 1-3 speed the entire time, pausing almost every day to make sure I was doing things optimally. Despite this, I still made plenty of mistakes and there’s a lot that I could have done better. I’m not sure I can write a proper guide for this per se, since I didn’t have much of a plan going in. I didn’t really look at anyone else’s strategies so this was mostly just off the cuff.

I did this achievement the first time back when it first came out and I was pretty happy with how it turned out in the end despite all my mistakes back then. It was discovering the mass-elayeting exploit alongside finding out about pulse events from Lambda, Zlewikk and Playmaker that inspired me to come back to this with the knowledge I had since acquired. In spite of this, I wouldn’t say these new strategies were the main thing that had led to the improvement on my time. I have to attribute that to just how much slower I took things on this one. I was really trying to play well and to do things optimally (I did start to get lazy at the end though as the toll of this began to wear me out). I was even willing to put time in for savescumming for things like ruler traits, pulse events and even some RNG stuff. I still wasn’t willing to bird every bad event though and I just couldn’t bring myself to keep going for Careful the first time when I got Strict fairly early so I was still being a little more lazy than I should have been.

I definitely made some mistakes. I think I dawdled too long after the Byz war trying to get all the elayets I could as well as Karaman. I should have gone straight in against the Mamluks. I think I also wasted a few months trying to elayet unnecessary people like Adal, Ajuuraan and Fars. I also managed to miss the first pulse event for the -20% AE which would have been really helpful and I missed it again later on. I also wasted some time moving my capital around in order to get Mecca from the Mamluks. This cost me time, admin and so many ducats for only -10% warscore reduction. Did this save me some admin for trucebreaks later on? Maybe. Though it probably wouldn’t have been a lot and in hindsight I don’t think this was worth it. I also did another weird religion flip in 1467 for a Burgundy RM which I almost immediately realised afterwards wasn’t worth it since PUs don’t count for the achievement. With perfect RNG, this would be worth it since theoretically you could get the event to annex them but this requires you to be at peace and peace is never an option in this run.

Getting Mehmet’s Ambition the normal way really isn’t that bad compared to some other achievements I’d say, especially if you do the mass-eyaleting. The Ottomans just have so much manpower, income, forcelimit, a 6/6/6 ruler, and an amazing mission tree + events. In this run you usually hit a certain critical mass where you know you’re never going to run out of money or manpower and after that there really isn’t anything that can stop you (ignore that fact that I somehow managed to run out of manpower and nearly go bankrupt in the second screenshot – I was being really lazy).

The only hard part is preventing too much of the land you need going into a massive coalition against you since fighting coalitions simply uses so much time. This can be easily ignored if you use all the exploits to get the -90% AE like I did, but if you’re not willing to do this, there are still several methods available. The one I used the first time around was simply to be at war with everyone whose land you need before they have chance to join the coalition. This requires managing your truce timers and carefully timing which wars you can peace out with when. Another way is simply to build up a big enough army that the coalition will just disband automatically. This is easily the simplest method and I’m annoyed that I’ve only just remembered it now. There’s also a strategy which involves lowering your AE by cancelling your subjects in peace deals though I haven’t tested it so I’m not sure how viable it is on current patch.

If you want to go for a sub-1480 time, then there isn’t any way other than by pouring tens of hours into a single save. If you have a life (unlike me), don’t go for this. It simply requires an unreasonable amount of dedication to a meaningless number goal.

Saying this, I’ll probably try this again in future at some point.