Current size of my Zoroastrian Baluchistan --> Zoroastrian Mughal Empire campaign under MiscMod's alt-history Peace of God scenario.
For reference, here's the 1399 Zoroastrian Baluchistan start and 1399 religion map in Miscmod's Peace of God Scenario:
Baluchistan starts off poor and surrounded at all sides by heathen enemies, the biggest threat obviously being the massive Islamic Timurid empire. Luckily the campaign begins with a Timurid truce, so I quickly joined forces with heretical Rajputana to defeat the South Asian sultanates. We made short work of Sind and Gujaret, and I netted the lion's share of the provinces including the incredibly wealthy CoT of Kutch. Meanwhile Hindi Vijaynagari consolidated Southern India and was in the process of conquering Deccan. Aside from Delhi, most of the Islamic sultanates had been defeated leaving only the Timurids as the main heathen threat to an otherwise Hindi South Asian sub-continent. As Baluchistan was essentially the gateway into India, the major Indian powers saw fit to send me war subsidies every time the Timur truce was broken, which I believe was the only way I was able to survive the Timurid incursions. Eventually I allied with Vijaynagari, the undisputed powerhouse of India, and together we mopped up the rest of the central and northern South Asia including my former ally Rajputana. I shrewdly snapped up the necessary provinces to form the Mughal empire, although the fight for the final requisite province ended the decades long Vijaynagari-Baluchistan alliance (Vijaynagari was defender of the Hindu faith and Hindi Bihar controlled Agra, the province in question) and launched a bloody feud that would not end until Zoroastrian Baluchistan turned Mughal Empire absorbed the last of the South Asian provinces nearly two centuries later.
Sometime during this period, the Timurids had given up their nomadic ways (another MiscMods change) and were gradually being worn down by internal strife and a robust Golden Horde to the north. The Persians broke free, as did several other Timurid successor states which I promptly annexed up to the southern tip of the Caspian. The Persians were much more difficult to dislodge thanks to the uber rich Hormuz but being sandwiched between the mighty Jalayirids and Mughal Empire, they eventually succumbed and were finally annexed in the late 1600s.
In the West, the Kingdom of Jerusalem had conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula (and later, eastern damascus and mesopotamia, as evidenced by the Christian Syrian successor state), creating an opportunity for the Mughals to modernize fairly early on (late 16th century). I quickly annexed Najd which gave me a border to western tech country. Actually in this scenario, the Crusader states belong to the "Middle East" tech group, which while having 100% research rates are still behind in tech because they're isolated from the Western tech group. This means no sweet sweet massive neighbor bonuses due to the uber rich trading OPMs. I became acutely aware of this fact when eventually Brandenburg mid-17th century declared a crusade on me and arrived with a full 10 land and naval tech advantage over Jerusalem, and of course the Mughal Empire. Brandenburg snapped up the Vijayanagar successor states on the southern tip of India and while I was able to challenge them on the field, their overwhelmingly superior navy blockaded the subcontinent and out of war exhaustion I was forced to concede. For the next couple decades I focused my research solely on land and naval tech to close the gap then pursued a successful war that kicked the European barbarians out of South Asia, at least for the time being.
From their humble beginnings, the Zoroastrians are now masters of Persia and South Asia. Believing themselves to be the worthy successors of the ancient Zoroastrian empires, the Baluchistani nobility now, in the dawn of the 18th century, set out to finish what their ancestors failed to do over 2000 years ago: Conquer Greece.
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