This was my attempt at South Africa, released on day 1 by me from Great Britain.
My game was very interesting. I started off as South Africa and really had nothing going for me; I was a monarchy as well, so I also received 0 immigrants, and had a primary culture of British and an accepted Boer culture. Better than I would be as a Boer republic, but overall, I was still in a hard place, and without immigrants. My first step was to ally with the Zulu; I used them to annex Traansval and Oranje for me while I did my best to amass militancy, followed by passing as many health care reforms as possible and bee-lining prestige, POP growth, and research techs. From there, I built up an army that was smaller than the Zulu by the time I declared war, but one badass general pulled me through(+4 attack, I think?). From there, I built up an even bigger army and built 10 steamer transports. Portugal was a GP for a time in the early part of the game, so I started plotting war goals. I declared war for all of Mozambique and Portuguese Lindi. By the time Portugal yielded I had occupied everything short of continental Portugal, East Timor, and Macau. Everything, and I do mean everything, else was occupied. From there I proceeded to use my sole national focus to colonize the parts of the African interior that I could colonize. At this point, I was a GP, so I got Madagascar out of France's sphere before the Merina monarchy decision was fired by France and annexed that also, as well as annexing Oman. I beelined Nationalism and Imperialism before 1870 and began researching Machine Guns as soon as 1870 rolled around. At this point, I still had only 1 national focus and had only South Africa and Zululand as states; I hadn't gained any states that I didn't conquer outright or had cores on since the beginning of the game. I started by colonizing Somalia and then worked my way from the Cape up to Nigeria. I was rushing irregulars around the jungles like it was nobody's business and manage to block off the Eastern Sahara and the majority of the African interior from Great Britain, my colonial rival.
Oh yeah, and sometime before I started colonizing, I forced an anarcho-liberal revolt and turned South Africa into a republic and passed all of the previous reforms I had. Still no immigrants though.
At this point Portugal was stubbornly in Britain's sphere and I lived in terror of facing a war against Britain that I couldn't win at the time, so I backed off of annexing Angola and instead annexed Yemen, Ethiopia, and Abu Dhabi. I had plans to conquer Nejd and Hedjaz, but they civilized before I could go for it. Around halfway through my colonization of the interior I started noticing that some colonies were assimilating to British and had naturally gained enough bureaucrats for statehood. I also got my 2nd NF around this point. I happily added more states to South Africa and finished off the interior, gradually adding states. My industry took off, I had a ton of soldier POPs(I'm fairly sure that it's a glitch of AHD's as to why 70% of a province converts to soldiers), and I was the most prestigious bastard out there. I was the tech leader for most of the game and nabbed all the prestige and research techs before everybody else, and had easily double the prestige of 2nd place, and more than 2nd through 4th combined. As my industry soared, I scoured for new targets, and as luck would have it, Egypt(my sphere) was declared on by the Ottomans, so I nabbed Tripoli from them. Did I mention that I owned the Suez and destroyed approximately 70,000 Turkish troops with only 24,000 men throughout the course of the war? In hindsight, I wish I had gone for Cyrenica as well, but ah well. I then went for Sokoto and annexed them over the course of two wars. From then on, it was mostly peaceful, until I realized that Egypt was screwing with my borders. So, I stopped trying to keep them in my sphere, and soon enough, the Americans got me out of there. I knocked everybody down to neutral, banned the Americans, and declared war for all that Egypt was worth at around 1930. The only thing that stopped me from taking everything but Cairo that wasn't nailed down was because I got impatient and stopped bothering with finding excuses as to why I was ripping chunks off of Egypt.
I ended the game with about 2700 prestige, 10,000 military score(I started spamming dreadnoughts once China civilized. They were in my sphere, and I had all of the army techs by the time they did so, so they were #1 in military technology. That annoyed me, so I put on my game face and spammed dreadnoughts), and about 1700 industrial score. I was #1, #3, and #1, in order of prestige, industry, and military. I also ended the game with France and Italy in my sphere; I'm not sure how obvious it is, but Austria was a BEAST. They were a solid #3 and knocked the UK down to #4, and the US was #2. Prussia got relatively wrecked early, yet they recovered late-game and managed to bump the UK down to #5 by the end, which got me laughing a bit since they had so little prestige, it was all industry. China was #6, with 2000 military score, but close to no prestige, and their industry was just starting to take off. Mexico was a solid #7, and had an impressive military and were #4 in industry. Their prestige was crap though, because they never managed to force Colombia to release Panama in all the wars they declared. Russia had just reclaimed #8 after not being a GP, for approximately 80% of the game. They were also doing a climb up.
As to what happened to France and Italy, Austria. Austria was a terrifying beast that managed to take down Russia, Italy, France, Spain, and the Turks, AT THE SAME TIME. Oh god were they scary. They would own Provence and the Franche-Comte were it not for the UK white peaceing when they were the alliance leader. Austria was at the gates of Paris atleast 3 times by my count, probably more. I was just an opportunist and managed to sphere Le Big Blue Blob and the little GP that couldn't(Italy).
Final Notes:
-Johore civilized, drew immigrants like crazy, industrialized, and took Bali off of the Dutch. They were awesome!
-That South America is beautiful
-I had a population of 19m POPs by the time the game ended, which was quickly approaching Austria's level. Huzzah for population growth! Also, approximately 7-8 million British POPs.
-The only reason I didn't annex Hedjaz and Nejd was because they civilized just as I was about to create a CB. Lucky fools.
-I spent the better part of 60 years trying to get Portugal out of the UK's sphere, but no dice.
-The only uncivilized nations remaining were Siam and Egypt
-I was allied to the US when the British declared war for a Far Northern Canadian province that the US colonized. Thanks to me, the US got enough warscore that they demanded British Columbia.
-Baden was #11 and for a bit was higher than France. They had an industry score of 700!
