You wake up tmrw in 1836 at the head of the Austrian Empire

>appease Hungarians
>liberalize society
>construct a national identity based around the Empire rather than particular ethnic groups
>industrialize and modernize heavily
>bro up with Prussia and Russia
>when 1848 comes around make concessions in the heat of the moment and gradually back down on them later when the revolution dies down
>when 1854 comes around, help out Russian bros instead of backstabbing them
>if victory, divvy up the Ottoman Balkans between Austria and Russia
>if defeat, well at least we're still friends with Russia
>WW1 doesn't happen because of lack of Balkan tensions
>even if it does, Germany + Austria + Russia is pretty unstoppable

I'm gonna double down on this. How many people realize the tensions in Austrian empire had religious and not ethnic roots?

>Balkan tensions
>not inevitable
Yeah, no. Russian Pan-Slavism supersedes facts and reasoning.

And, frankly, German-Slavic relations are guaranteed to be shit in the end. France is the only real friend, besides Germany, that Austria could ever have.... and at least France isn't going to get mauled by every other power quite like Germany.

Russia adopted panslavism only in the 1870s, user. They didn't give a fuck about it beforehand, it was a fruitless effort of some autistic Czechs.

Announce support for German nationalism and unity, give more autonomy to Hungary, Bohemia etc., promise them independence for fighting in my wars fot Germand. Push hard for German unity and if succed, just give independence to the rest of the empire and fund a greater German empire with Vienna as its capital.

>Announce support for German nationalism and unity
That means either getting subjugated by Prussia, or war with Prussia.

>Wanting a German empire despite knowing that it will lead to catastrophe for everybody involved.

>Note: You cannot kill yourself
Huh, so I really am Franz Josef

Or just weasel your way into the Zollverein and start undermining Prussia economically with an early industrial revolution.

>push south until bordering Greece, create Byzantium 2.0
>federalize the empire
>side with Russia to put down Hungarian rebellion, crackdown on Protestants
>alliance with southern German states and Hanover
>invade Prussia in 1848, retake Silesa
>create German empire, but maintain Bohemia, Tyrol, Venetia and Littoral
>give independence to Kingdom of Greater Hungary with Galicia, install family member as monarch
>give independence to Greater Serbia with Habsburg monarch
>give independence to Croatia with Habsburg monarch
>create Romanian Habsburg puppet state
>create Bulgarian Habsburg state
>Danubian coalition allows retaking of Constantinople and Byzantium 2.0
>permanent alliance with Russia, Greece and Danube
>WW1 comes, Greater Germany, Russia, Greece and Danube crush everyone

no way to appease the hungarians without pissing everyone else off. only works if kossuth is kidnapped and murdered before 1848

I need some damned heirs already!

Dismantle the empire, release bohemia, give independence to Italian regions, break ties between austrian and hungarian crowns, cede Vorarlberg to Switzerland, partition Austria into 4 or 5 smaller states all independent, submit to the Holy Roman Emperor whilst also giving off all the royal treasury to superior switzerland

fuck austria

kill all slavs and romanis

Austria wasn't down the bin at that point. They did everything really fine until Crimean War Suppressing the 1848 revolutions in Vienna, Hungary, Germany and Italy brought everything east of Rhine to their sphere of influence, despite what Prussiaboos think.

Just alienating both sides of Crimean war by staying neutral was the mistake.

So exactly what they did?

>Not colonizing dai Nam and chink land that has tropical wood and mass producing luxury furniture

Fuck all of my immediate relatives

DUDE GROBGERM LMAO

Federalize

You don't think they converted to Protestantism because the Austrian government was Catholic?

>Survive until 1846 or so
>Create a Tripartite kingdom of Austro-Hungaro-Croatia
>Give autonomy to Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Northern Italy
If possible, pursuing an union with Bavaria would be useful.

Release my non-German lands (except Bohemia) as puppets and form the South German Federation. Stop there because I don't want filthy Prussians in my nation.

Give Styria to the Kingdom of Illyria and allow Illyrian state yeomen to enact the use of Slovenian on all levels of education as well as in administration. Do the same in Bohemia and Moravia. Separate Croatia from Hungary and appoint a local military governor, a Ban of Croatia, and use Croatian troops to crush Hungarian opposition, then establish a Croatian army which is to be used to police the Ottoman border and keep the peace in the Hungarian part. Officially detach Transylavania from the crown of St. Stephen and make it its own kingdom. Make Upper Hungary its own administrative unit and allow the use of Slovak in education and administration. Possibly create three regional armies, an Austrian-Bohemian-Galician-Illyrian one, a Croatian one, and an Upper Hungarian-Transylvanian one, and do all of this to placate the Slavs, give a reasonable amount of power to the Germans, disenfranchise the liberal nationalists, and to cow Hungary to Vienna, thus saving the monarchy.

Build fabric factories and conquest china.

Lets drink palinka!Fuck the gypsies!

I genocide the Hungarians and other ethnic groups slowly, rearm the military, form a pact with Prussia and find me some Otto von Bismarck, bang me some Princess pussy.

No, they were Protestants before the Habsburgs were even fully in charge. In Hungary in particular, the Catholic Hungarian noblemen who became the magnates were given favors by the Habsburgs who made them extremely rich, and in turn they increasingly became more culturally German, to the point there was almost nothing Hungarian about them other than the family origin. This angered the Protestant lower noblemen in Hungary who were poor as fuck, and soon a religious issue became a nationalist issue when "Catholic" became synonymous with "German" and they started pushing for independent Hungary. People like Kossuth were exactly from these impoverished Protestant houses.

>Note: You cannot kill yourself
Well, shit

Make it into a republic with regional governers over the different cultural regions
Nothing personnel monarchists

>C*tholics
>Creating Byzantium 2.0
Better a Turkish fez than a Papic tiara

Nice try, Achmed

That's what the Byzantines told the C*tholics you retarded heretic

>idol worshipper cuck
>calling others heretics
Oh I'm laffin

>cash loving pedophile destortionist separatist P*pal scum denying he's a heretic
Keep laffin

>worships idols
>claims not to be a heretic
Damn, this is some next level denial

>thinks it's idol worshipping, when he worships the same saints and depictings in the icons
>coats his balls in gold before he makes his 3 year old brother/son bless them

Why not colonize ooga-booga land instead?

Decide to make myself a calilgula tier legend and run this empire into the ground a century early.
Insane debauchery, reckless invasions and massacres, retarded reforms, and eventual murder at the hands of bodyguards.

>all this talk of appeasing nationalists ITT

You do that later, don't need life-rating techs for Chinkville regions that possess a trillion resources.

>Germany Austria and Russia unstoppable
This would be a laughably bad deal for Germany especially since you've potentially alienated the Ottomans, who were the only German allies who didnt totally shit the bed.
Russia was one of the least prepared to fight and the army was fucking shit which is why they got smacked around by the Germans, so what makes you think they would be any good now that you've added the logistical nightmare of getting Russian soldiers to a western front? The Russians could barely get a proper defense going in their own god damn country and their only successes were against the one army in all of Europe worse than theirs, the Austrians.
The only thing that would really help is if Italy didnt switch sides and the Germans could use all their allies as cannon fodder to make the British and French weak enough to destroy on their own.
If Austria couldnt defeat Italy even with Cadorna in charge, what good would they be against the western front?

Germany struggled logistically so much in WW2 because their allies were so shit that Germany had to basically do everything anyway so in your WW1 scenario it would go much the same way without a semi competent ally in the Ottomans.

>the Ottomans didn't shit the bed
Yet they accelerated the loss of all their land

cede dalmatia, south tyrol, veneto, Trieste, and istria to italy and then kill myself

>Ottomans
>didn't shit the bed
No other country got BTFO as hard as them. And the ONLY purpose of allying with the Ottomans was to contain seal the access to the Black Sea in order to contain Russia, that goes out the window with an alliance with Russia.

>completely shit the bed
Not saying the Ottomans were great but compared to Austria they were more competent on the battlefield.
Imagine if Gallipoli had been a success and the Ottomans fell much earlier. The German effort in the east would be considerably more difficult and chances of victory in the west would evaporate.
The Ottomans werent great but they werent incompetent either

Grant more aid to Maximilian in Mexico
Try to erase Hungarian culture and replace it with mine
Befriend Napoleon III and try to stop German unification not done by me, grab some Italy, because why not

fair enough about the Black sea but my point isnt that the Ottomans were this mighty force but were able to hold their own on the battlefield and when Galipoli came around they defeated their enemy and kept the war going. Austria provided absolutely no benefit to Germany and Russia was so utterly useless on the battlefield that they would actually hurt the German war effort should they be an ally.

Prevent the marriage that made Wilhelm being born from happening.

t.Niggerfield 1 player

This isn't eu4, vassal swarm won't work irl

what?
What are you even saying? That the Ottomans didnt win that battle, Germany wasnt counting on success in the east for a chance of victory in the west, or that the Istanbul falling so early wouldnt be a disaster?
How do you even get to be this stupid?

>not immediately marching for Rome to show those pesky wannabe latins who's boss
Weak

what is NATO if not a vassal swarm?
UK, Poland, Estonia and all the others are just America's marches.

I'm saying the Ottomans were irrelevant to the German primary goals.

Russia would engage Britain in India.

>i have never read a book in my life the post

I cant imagine a scenario wheret that goes well for Russia.

Counter-acting the nationalism without resorting to fucking murdering everyone would be hard. Maybe keep trying the spread of German as a lingua franca and embracing everyone as Habsburg. Do something about those damn Polish nobles exploiting the fuck out of the ukrainians, but the biggest issue is always gonna be those damn hungarians...

...

They would try to spark a mutiny among the native Indians, it's a breeze from there. The actual British army was always dogshit.

I dont think the independence movement was really strong enough in 1914-18 for the Russians of all people to convince them to start a revolution. The British army isnt something to shake a stick at but a i agree they arent that great, but they may as well be literal gods compared to the truly awful Russians.

>the actual british army was always dogshit
I must strongly disagree

>their only successes were against the one army in all of Europe worse than theirs, the Austrians
Russians destroyed the Ottomans too.

neither is shitposting about a video game.
go back to your john green videos kid. Even this board is too much for you.

t. Anglo/Angloboo
It's an objective fact.

Im not english, I just strongly disagree about the fact that the most accomplished empire ever to exist had a shitty army

fair enough but claiming that the cacausus campaign was this great success that crippled the central powers war effort is tough. Galipoli wasnt a massive sucess for the central powers, but had they failed it would have been a huge deal. If the Russians failed in the Caucausus it wouldnt have utlimtately made a difference except that a few ten thousand more armenians would die and the communists might take a tad longer to bring them into the soviet union.

Look, either fuck off or debate me. It's not like you're not some turkaboo muslim trying to glorify the huge failure of the clay giant

Perfidious Albion. After using the Austrians as a freaking 20 year long bulwark against the French, they abandon them as soon as Napoleon is gone.
I need that image where it shows Austrians being sent over and over and over against the French and losing over and over.

>Im not english,
>the most accomplished empire ever to exist

They built that empire with their navy, that army was always a fucking joke.
>If the British Army landed in Europe, I'd get the Belgian police to arrest them.

you blatantly ignored everything i said in previous posts so i have no idea why you think im the one avoding a debate.

>muuuh Russians were awful
This meme again. They were awful against the Germans who had the best army on the fucking planet, and destroyed everyone else.

>destroyed everyone else.
Yeah, everyone else being the Sick Man of Europe and fucking Austria. Hardly anything worth of note

>get's rekt by Japan

More autonomy to provinces.
Spend more to modernize army.