First game in Divine Wind, playing my favourite since HTTT: The Hansa!
All states (aka. complete chaos)
Hansa and Hanseatic Vassals
Tunis and some states in Turkey were my first extra-european acquisitions. After that I got an urge to secure Jerusalem (or, as it and the surrounding region is now known:
Holy Land(TM) Hansa World Shopping Region). The region from Alexandretta (renamed - can't recall what the original province name is) to Alexandria has all the trade buildings - far better developed infrastructure than anything in my German holdings
German expansion was a lot more difficult than it used to be in HTTT. Damn that Unlawful Imperial Territory crap. I went in and out of the Empire a couple of times to trick the system, but eventually I figured I was big enough to go on my own as long as I was careful to keep track of imperial developments (my largest push came just as most of the traditional Emperor states crumbled and lost authority, and the leadership passed to a tiny Bohemia).
At one point I realized I had like five years to acquire the last provinces required for the Form Germany decision if I was going to get cores on them before the end of the game. Accrued some serious BB on that little crusade - like when I had to annex Brandenburg because they wouldn't take a vassalization (the reason I'm now stuck with a bunch of unruly Canadian colonies).
Japan I started fighting for the fun of it. I had colonized Hokkaido and got a border core on the Japanese mainland so I just went for it to see how it worked. Turned out it worked pretty terribly. The many-states-in-one thing really doesn't work very well, and among other things I had to reload my save every time I wanted to sue for peace. Quite annoying. Right now, I have Japan (Kyoto) as my vassal, but obviously I can't do crap with the daimos (I would love to be able to sponsor one of them with western tech to get a unified state, but alas...)
I've used my Japanese pacific assets to set up base on both sides of the bering strait though. Gotta cover all those potential trade routes! ("Hmmm... Panama and Suez look like places that could benefit from a decent cross-country canal. We'll just hold onto these until we can do that..."
)
Most of my vassals are countries that foolishly declared war on me. Most impressive was the Mamluks who - without fail - declared a war of opportunity on me whenever I declared war on someone else. They usually lost a province each time, but couldn't vassalize them like I did with Korea, the Indian states, Algeria, etc.