First time I've reached the end of the 18th century, I'm GB and apparently the world's foremost superpower judging by the ease with which I can handle Castille and Scandinavia combined. Europe has been pretty peaceful for about a century except a couple of Castillian-Scandinavian wars and one war between me and Castille that resulted in everyone else DoWing me out of opportunism.
I think that Castille might be the most interesting country on this map because they ate Portugal and Granada early and reduced Aragon to just Barcelona and its 2 Mediterranean island provinces but then stopped short of taking over. Much later they colonised almost all of South America and apparently relocated their entire army there because when I looked again Aragon had taken about 3 Iberian provinces and Portugal and Granada had re-emerged and occupied the entire peninsula (unfortunately they couldn't get a good peace deal because of the extent of Castillian overseas territory). All of the South American colonial nations were released after a war that I declared against Castille (actually for the express purpose of releasing those nations). At some point they went Protestant.
Scandinavia formed and colonised, I later forced them to release Quebec, Canada and Denmark. They also inheritted the remnants of France once I'd reduced BBB to about 6 provinces but through some espionage I managed to get the Cosmopolitaine Nationalists riled up enough to take back some of that land and reform France. Scandi is HRE because I went republican, also they're still Catholic which turned them from my best friends to biggest rival when I converted.
No Russia, Lithuania and Nogai dominated that region pretty early on (with some weird Lithuanian conquest in the Malay peninsula occurring at some point in the mid 17th century as far as I can make out
). Ming reached the Caspian then spectacularly imploded (literally 3/4 or more under rebel control), releasing the Timurids (who did nothing, but I figured their existence so late on is notable)
Milan just needed Roma to form Italy but for some reason gave up on that and conquered most of the Balkans and seized some Scandinavian colonies in SA aswell. They went and ruined it by repeatedly DoWing me and while they held their own marvelously against the OE, I took a string of provinces between Brescia and Liguria (I later got Provence off Castille). With Lombardia cut off from the rest of Italy and nationalist rebels appearing suspiciously quickly (almost as soon as the British withdrew from a province in fact
) a lot of Italian states quickly became independent and Milan as a major power was as good as over.
The other thing I enjoyed was my vassal, Brittany, becoming a colonial power
. A massive help in wars against Scandinavia. I force-vassalised them very early on (in my second war with France i think) but they were just so helpful as an ally, turning up in India, Africa, Canada, Scandinavia and Iberia that I just couldn't bring myself to diplo-annex them.
