Regarding the Magistrates, am I the only one is just a tad surprised at the numbers? First, let's say 20 of them come from his Colleges alone. That's an assumption which greatly affects the numbers, but since I generally don't see more than 5 a year at that sort of time without colleges i'm attempting to be conservative there.
Now:
20 Magistrates per Year, 0.05 Per College => 20/0.05 = 400 Colleges.
400 Colleges * 5 Magistrates = 2000 Magistrates spent on Government buildings alone.
He's 258 years in, so that means an average of 2000/258 = 7.75 (approx) Magistrates per year throughout the entire game.
Now, you're not even going to see Colleges getting built until Gov 23 (iirc), which i'd guess would be around 1530-1560, perhaps sooner if your tech was good and you beelined for it. To me, those numbers don't make it impossible, but it pretty much means he probably went for it right at the start and ended up spending Magistrates on almost nothing except Government buildings (which as France, Burgundy or even England he could almost certainly do). There's colonial events, which could ofcourse account for a LOT of those magistrates, but that would mean not spending any on Forts. Just trying to think what other ways there are out there to get Magistrates. Suppose the buildings are preserved if you have cores. Are they preserved on inheritance (though unless it's a player the effect would probably be negligable)?
But yeah, I do think that was planned WAY in advance. Given that if built outside the national focus, the 5 magistrates spent on getting a college takes that college 100 years to recoup - you're only going to see a major net gain if you build tons of the things and build them early. That said, if he's got 400 colleges, that's roughly 700 odd magistrates before games end, which is over 100 max trade buildings worth. And if the aim was record income, that's something that'd count for a lot. Yeah, it's almost certainly legit - was just curious as to the breakdown of those figures.