My Sardinia-Piedmont game, shortly after integrating my PU junior Castile. Aragon, Cologne, Brittany and the OPM Nevers enclave are my vassals.
I'm running a minor mod here which gives Sardinia-Piedmont the Italian national ideas, mostly because I didn't want to replace that lovely blue with the murky green of Italy! Otherwise, things are as in vanilla 1.7.3.
This has been an interesting game. Castile turned down the Iberian Wedding, and Aragon went on to integrate Naples and take a chunk out of Castile. My own gameplan involved rapid expansion into Italy to build up a power base to hold off France, while taking as little HRE land as possible (obviously, I failed this particular goal...). I took Provence and Avignon early when the opportunity presented itself, but this turned out to be a mistake, antagonising France who declared war soon after. I managed to get away with ceding only Avignon, but the war massively slowed down my Italian ambitions.
I didn't form Sardinia-Piedmont until 1596, since Sardinia had gained independence and allied themselves to France very early in the game. Espionage ideas - which I'd taken for the hell of it since I hadn't actually tried them before - turned out to be very helpful, as sabotaging France's reputation led to the Sardinia alliance being broken!
In 1649, a succession war broke out between France and myself over Castile.
This was a tough fight. I had Bosnia, Brittany and Bavaria on my side, but they had France, Castile and Scandinavia. Both sides were being driven into the dirt, but England and Austria both declared war on France after a few years and this gave me the edge I needed to pull off the victory, forming the tongue-twisting nation of Sardinia-Piedmont-Castile. I like to think people would just call it the SPC...
Castile were hostile for most of the following years, although they did get vassal attitude briefly when I returned their cores from Aragon. Nevertheless, they never did declare an independence war and eventually I was able to start annexing them. Needless to say this took a long time, what with 180 base tax to integrate, but it made it all the way through. I've since won a war against the French-Polish alliance with relatively little difficulty, so I'll probably be leaving this game here (though if the save somehow works in Art of War, I'd quite like to make the Germanic lands into a client state).
It's been a lot of fun and I love the many little quirks of this campaign, like diplo-vassalising Nevers just to piss off France, the fact that Byzantium and Morea rose up in Greece of their own accord, nations like Crete and The Knights being independent, Bosnia's sheer will to survive and nice borders, the strong Gelre and the
massive Egypt. Even that awkward Aragonese province in Italy that took 70 years to finally remove <3
