Portugal broke its alliance with Aragon, so I instantly declared on them. It's just them, their Brazil and Mexico CNs, and France, and France was fighting Austria-Hungary in Florence-Mantua trade war.
It was going quite well, so I attacked Aragon in separate war as well. They were only allied with Genoa who'd dishonor, and France, which was already busy.
I peaced out Portugal without any trouble whatsoever, and took their minor islands and some land in Iberia. After that Aragon's rival Mamluks asked to join my war. Sure.
Aragon was a slightly bigger problem as they had galleys, and I didn't, so they used that fact to land on my Mediterranean coast. Fortunately Mamluks had some galleys, and Aragon foolishly sailed theirs into open Atlantic to get sunk by me. And as if that's not enough misfortune for them, Castile declared reconquest war on them as they were down.
I took their gold mine, and all provinces needed to form Andalusia Portugal and Aragon held.
Castile did not appreciate my success and instantly broke our alliance. I could crush them, get remaining provinces, and form Andalusia, but my AE is already just barely below the level of coalition stretching deep into HRE.
I missed my chance for an easy way, and when I finally decided to declare, they were allied with Portugal, Pope, Venice, and Poland was Defender of the Faith. Oh well. I got England to help me somehow. We were outnumbered 82k troops and 17 heavy ships to 198k troops and 34 heavy ships. That is, slightly harder war than the previous few.
I started by kicking Portugal out of the war. Next came Pope's turn, but it turns out Pope's and Venice's galleys are pretty good against my ocean going fleet - and they also have tons of heavies somehow.
After that I had to wait really long time for AE to tick down, and for Poland to get tired of defending the faith.
I thought it would be fairly easy to avoid coalitions, but somehow most Catholic countries had -40 or -60 opinion of me due to the new counter-reformation system. Couldn't they like, just hate the Protestants? I had to spend far too much money on bribes, but with so many gold mines I guess it's not that bad.
I got myself a colonial nation in Colombia, and big network of allies - England, Brittany, Tuscany, Tunis, Mamluks, Kilwa, Brunei, Majapahit, and Ashikaga. I don't expect any of them to be useful except as coalition deterrent.
In 1538 I finally did the second tag switch and became Andalusia. That moved my capital to Europe, and I control about half of Sevilla trade node now, which isn't the worst trade situation.
Now I need to switch to Eastern or Pagan religion, get border with Ming, and take the Mandate of Heaven. The easiest one would be Fetishist as a third of my country is Fetishist. It's fairly bad, but then again, which Pagan or Eastern religion isn't? Arguably Shinto is fine, but that would be really hard to get from my current position. Or I guess I could go Fetishist into Inti, now that would be something.
Ming has been stuck with Crisis of the Ming Dynasty for very long time now. Rebels are nowhere near strong enough to defeat it, but Ming isn't strong enough to defeat the rebels - it's been out of manpower for decades, but it just uses merc armies which refuse to get properly disabled by my modding. I think I could help push them towards collapse.
A slight problem with this idea is that Catholics still want to coalition me, so if I send all my armies and navies to fight Ming, I can get surprise coalition war. It's really difficult to - Portugal, Castile, and Aragon are 3 of 4 needed coalition members and that AE is never going away so they just need to find one more anywhere in the world. If I conquer one of them, rest of Catholic Europe will join the coalition, as I can't really outdiplomat -60 penalty due to Counter-Reformation on top of all the other penalties. It feels like it's stupidly high penalty.
Perhaps all my alliances will deter them from declaring if coalition actually forms. If my allies even accept call to arms that is, I suspect many might not.
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