Thanks mate, great guide and so easy. I also got "city of cities" from doing this aswell so thumbs up to you

Lord_of_Salmon: I'm honestly not sure. I lose track of what comes with the free updates and what comes in expansions. I *think* that you might need Mare Nostrum, but I'm not certain. Basically, if you have the button to increase mercantilism on your trade screen, you can do it. If you don't, you can't.

Do you need a certain expansion to do this?

Thanks for the guide! I've been dreading a lengthy Genoa or Venice playthrough to get this achievment. My mercantilism hit 100 at 1514.

Oh I see, thanks for the good answer :D

Aklin: To protect against Tidore, which is the only country who is likely to get a casus belli against you while you do this. It's likely that they'll rival you and fabricate a claim on your province, and if you have no army or navy at all, they'll probably also attack you. You can't keep up with them on military tech because you'd have to either take diplomatic tech as well or end up getting a whole lot of corruption from having uneven tech, both of which would slow down increasing your mercantilism. Naval tech advances much slower than army tech, though, so you can still have a good and competitive navy at this point even without investing in any diplo tech. Having a strong navy makes it unlikely that Tidore will attack you, and even if they do, they won't be able to get past it to land any troops on your island. There also isn't much else to spend your money on. You could save up for a level 2 diplomatic advisor, but that'd only be a small speed increase and not worth the risk.

Why would you add a heavy ship as soon as you could?

Well, I really wouldn't say the easy way. It took me around 80 years and roughly over 2 hours....but I got it plus the City of Cities achievement. So, it wasn't really a waste of time.

Nosirrbro: and you get a lot more tradepower..

nosirrbro: It's an achievement. No benefits to it beyond simply having it.