Just because both things involved vassals
doesn't mean they're at all similar...
I would like to thank you as well Pewt. This was eyeopening for me as a SP player.
It can be difficult enough to manage an SP game without pausing -- trying to do a colonial/naval campaign must be a nightmare. The nations that concentrated on Europe tended to do better -- is this common, due to the attention/distraction effect of trying to look at the whole map vs Europe alone?
Since I do SP, the European states are not much of a challenge, so I have not played them much at all.
All the optimizations you did - (religion changes, then back to get various decision options -- selection of NIs to get specific events) are things that clearly matter in MP, but are just piling on in SP.
Are there any advice guides for MP newbies so they would not have to spend months with the game trying to discover these tricks for themselves. If one does not know them, it appears that newbies would be simply non-competitive in MP.
I agree with the comment above though. Friends providing "forced" religion changes, "forced" vassal release, and wartax opportunities in phony wars seems like a very "gamey" misuse of the rules, but seemed to be a key part of the tactics in the game -- objecting to another "gamey" misuse of vassalization as somehow ruining the game strikes me as odd.
Commenting on game history -- Pewt, as an outstanding player starting with the most powerful nation, you were at risk of all the other players ganging up on you at the start, just to remove you as a threat. It looks like you decided to expand only slowly, and do so in the smallest possible provinces, so you looked less threatening on the map, while building your provinces up to the max. This made you much stronger relative to visual dominance than your rivals, and was good psychology. Was that deliberate?
Sweden, Brandenburg, Haansa, Viyanagar, Holland, Chagtai, these are all minor powers, while Burgundy is a major one. Why no Burgundy? This surely helped Pewt tremendously.
Netherlands you made a major blunder in backing France in its early war without securing some ironclad deal. Your only hope for survival in Europe was as the naval arm of a European land power (Austria or France or Prussia). Bitterness over losing your rich euro provinces is sour grapes over poor diplomacy.
Ming, Viyanagar, and Mughals are all pretty powerful non-euro states, and had players, but were eaten without difficulty. It looks like tech catchup is just too difficult in MP.
Italy was well played -- except that they stayed out of France and Austria after their bloodbaths. Pewt demonstrated how easy it was to gut a major power that had bled itself dry, and Italy could easily have done this to him.
Pewt seemed to pay more attention to the land tech step transitions than his opponents, and this ended up being decisive in several sessions.