Last game on 1.24, netting the Sweet Harmony, Choson One, and finally Turtles all the way down achievements. Now it's time to never pick Naval and Maritime again, although it probably would still have been way more crippling to take the Mandate of Heaven to boost the ship durability. Other than those two, the idea groups that I had to pick weren't that bad, either - Explo, Humanist, Offensive, Quality (with Admin thrown in as my 4th idea group).
Having a god king in 1444 really is a huge boon, since it allows you to attack the Manchu tags pretty aggressively as soon as you get the technological edge on them, even making a 1 vs 2 war against Jianzhou and Korchin as an opener easily doable. As soon as I've dealt with them (and taken the Buryat gold mine to fix my economy), it was only a matter of catching up to them Ming and eating their other tributaries as long as they would let me. First war against the Ming was around 1600, and even though I wasn't really consistent in shortening my truces with them, I had them annexed in 1680. EoC is one hell of a CB. After that, I only had a couple provinces left to take for Choson One, including a random Confucian province in the middle of India, presumably because I was allied and married with Bahmanis (who had conquered almost all of India at that point) for my first war against the Ming. Otherwise, I was just going for some general blobbing and nice-ish borders while I was waiting for the 7th idea group to unlock.
About America: I secured Alaska and California fairly early, but didn't go for Mexico fast enough, so Spain had already eaten more than half of the Maya and Nahuatl land and gotten themselves a very beefy CN. I was worried that it would attack my CN at some point, but I think they somehow got into a debt spiral and you can see the result.