Here's a run down of how i got to this point. quickly prepped for the 100 year war with france, kicked it off and took the French crown in five years. marriage-maneuvered Portugal to gain the claim throne war justification then roflstomped them with France's help. spent a few decades carving Scotland up like roast haggis while fending off western HRE coalition wars between truces. Finish conquering Scotland, feed the land to one of my puppet domains to keep the perfidious scotsmen from rioting too much. spend more decades solidifying my control of Belgium, developing the economy, generally being chill. start exploring the world via exploration and stealing maps, decide to set up tiny colonies on the islands south off of Africa to expand the range of exploration I could do. notice the damn spaniards start competing with me for the island colonies. It's fucking on, you damn Castilians. notice they're actually one of the few nations friendly with me after the decades of roflstomping the coalitions, and its heir coincidentially is around the same age as mine for me to take their throne like I did with the frogs. Portugal declares war on them before I could get the claim, worried that the window of opportunity would lapse if the war took too long and fully committed to helping the Portuguese take back their (AI mine) lost land. Barely make it out of the war with like 4 months before the claim lapses, only way to take the throne is by breaking the truce and taking a stability and rep loss. If you're basically America but in the 15th century, who gives a shit! play ball! steamroll the Spanish because it's basically back-to-back wars right after they got crushed by the Anglo-French-Portuguese alliance, and now they're a part of that same alliance. leading to right now as of this posting.

Currently Bohemia, with the HRE at its back, is the military and economic hegemon and probably the only power that could give me a run for my money. I'm thinking now that I've essentially got the both Spain and France as my attack dogs to watch over the mainland while I hide on my shitty british island behind the navy, I should spend a century or so slowly work on economically developing, annexing my subjects and the other kingdoms, and working on digesting them to become world power number 1. I might try and also get hungary into the union too so I can shove a boot right up those czech dogs arse when I'm ready to rip them to shreds. After all of that, I have no idea. it's just a long wait to see what the end is like.

Also if I can make my own protestant schismic split, I'm totally going to roflstomp rome for excommunicating one of my kings during the hundred years war then excommunicating another one of my kings when it was the schism period.