Overall, 7th best (interestingly enough, both historically and in-game). Not bad for my first game.
I mainly focused on trade, but that also led me to a lot of empire-building. Managed to get all of my tech up to speed by the 1750s, which is nice.
Early game, my alliances with England and Castile kept me safe, and I focused a couple of wars on taking the Moroccan coast. Castile quickly warred Aragon into submission and created Spain, while England themselves got hit very hard by the 100 years war, and had to release Cornwall. This quickly spiraled into total destruction, with Scotland and Cornwall dividing up England between themselves and Ireland uniting in the chaos. Around 1700 Scotland managed to create Britain by removing Cornwall from the picture (forming a historical Stuart dynasty, in fact).
The early game as Portugal very quickly forces you to learn about the trade system. You have a trade center with huge potential - Seville - but in order to really get it going, you need to pull in trade from Africa. I was the first nation to start building colonies, and I started with several outposts along the African coasts, designed so that i could use my Merchants to pull trade around the Cape, up to the Ivory Coast, and from there to the Mauritanian Coast and finally to Seville, where I could reap the rewards.
There was also, of course, Brazil.
Brazil is kind of a unique trade node in that it only has outward flow. That said the trade only goes in one direction - Ivory Coast. So it added to my already growing trade power.
By this point England was gone, so I allied with France and broke my alliance with Spain. This also allowed me to take Andalusia and Gibraltar from them, which boosted my trade power in the node even further.
Side note: see all those Latin American states? They were all part of Spain until about 20 years before the end, where I beat them so badly that I forced them to be released.
With England out of the picture, Spain and France were the only other early colonial powers, and they mostly focused on North America; eventually the Netherlands joined in as well. I managed to snatch Cuba and the Bahamas before they could get to it, but I couldn't get Bermuda. The USA is Portuguese in culture; I colonized New England early on, but had no real use for it once France and Netherlands boxed me in, so I let them go when they revolted and I made them my ally.
One thing I have noticed is that the colonial powers really do not seem to like conquering the natives. They are sort of content to just colonize the empty space and leave the native civilizations alive. Not a single American civilization was ever fully conquered in the game.
Eventually I managed to make my way out east and into the Spice trade, which was nice. Never got around to invading India or China, but I did get Ceylon and Taiwan.
After 1700, Spain and France exploded with their colonialism. France got Australia (and much of Africa) and Spain got New Zealand. I guess they hit the point where colonial range didn't matter any more, because they didn't have any midway-points. Speaking of midway, I got to Midway Island first, as well as Hawaii, Tahiti, Easter Island, and Micronesia.
When France went revolutionary, they got really dangerous and became my rival. It was then that I learned the meaning of "economic warfare". 80 frigates and a merchant sitting in Seville, sucking away half of my glorious trade income and sending it to Bordeaux. It took an embargo from both me and Spain and some ships pulling trade back from Bordeaux just to get my trade income back to a reasonable level. Eventually they left me alone, but every few years they kept coming back to mess with me. In particular the embargo does not seem quite powerful enough... if I own the provinces and I'm keeping their ships out, why are they even able to get anything? Smuggling, I suppose.
They also managed to inherit Austria through personal union, which has to be screwed up because they were a republic. They must have had the royal marriage before the revolution (Marie Antoinette I suppose?) but that should probably be canceled with the change to non-noble republican government. Seems broken, perhaps Paradox will fix it.
Overall, a fun game, and it taught me the basics. Thinking of something simpler like Poland next time. Or maybe try to form Brandenburg->Prussia->Germany.
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