Italy Megacampaign: Part 21: 1687-1705: United Continent

German unification attempts continued and not just with HRE annexing minors. Switzerland and Friesland attacked Austria and Brunswick in world's first openly nationalist war.
Unfortunately my alliance with the HRE ended. HRE was so offended by attempt at teaching Dutch settlers proper Italian. How is that a bad thing? Well, I allied the Commonwealth and Portugal instead.

I discovered something interesting. EU4 has this mechanic of colonial wars where CNs and primitives can attack other CNs without automatically calling the overlord. It turns out that it applies to anyone who has capital in colonial region, so I could freely attack anybody I want without automatically involving Europeans. Well, in theory they could enforce peace on me, but I've never seen AI actually do it.

Taking advantage of this and a few threaten war, I got rid of almost everyone else on the mainland. Then again, where does North America end really? And isn't Caribbean part of it? Well, trade graph definitely thinks so at least.

Funnily enough, there's a ton of micro-countries now in Central America - Toulouse, Denmark, Friesland, and Provence all have their tiny colonies there.

In a rare reversal, Toulouse's CN of Alaska got overran by last native tribe of Blackfoot, and reduced to an OPM. Not bad considering Blackfoot were at mil tech 16 to Alaska's 22. Of course Blackfoot didn't have time to core its conquests.

I finally built some kind of fleet - 24 transports and 22 lights - and took pirates of Bahamas. It's been 52 years and nobody lifted a finger while pirates were raiding all over the Caribbean Sea. Then I had to build 11 lights Pacific fleet to reach all islands off Pacific coast. Maybe we should build a canal or something.

Back when I tag switched, I chose exploration, expansion, administrative and religious as initial ideas. Then I took plutocratic - and I'm still not sure which governments are allowed to have it, so I had to console check that it won't just disappear - and economic, as this country really needed a good construction spree.

There was a coup attempt against Il Presidente Massimiliano Il Pico di Mirandola, but it got crushed. A while later Il Presidente Vittorio Amadeo I Caccianemici, 21 year old 5/6/3, got himself elected Il Presidente for life.

Enlightenment spawned in North Italy, really close to almost every other institution spawn. The only exception was Printing Press in Hungary. I have no idea how I'm ever going to get it, and it looks like I need it to use coal. At least that's step one of coal of so many.

I never played this long, so I have no idea what's going to happen in age of revolution. Is it going to trigger on its own somewhere, or should I help the AI?

Is this what a Peasant Republic looks like?

Due to stupid mechanic that rebels can't enforce their demands while at war, and Italy being at some war continents away, peasants kept running the whole country for years.

The continent is quite close to fully unified, but font placement is horrible due to those uncolonized gaps.

Trade is still leaking like crazy. I'm not sure what counts as North American mainland, but Panama canal surely does, as does Caribbean trade node, as it's the only way to get money from Mexico.