Jiangdu starts as an OPM in 1444. You have an immediate death war you need to press to reclaim a bunch of cores – take all the loans. Then you need a lot of allies to fight the bird-riders to the north. After that, your armies will carry you. A lot of the missions require army tradition to be 90 or 95+. A reminder that you can gain tradition by fighting, or sieging forts. Reduce autonomy like crazy then provoke extra rebels to fight to build tradition.

I paused here – considering my campaign effectively won, even though I didn’t fight The Command yet. By numbers, our armies would go toe-to-toe on numbers, but I’m ahead on tech and have good generals. I expect it would be an attrition war, one that I can win. After that there’s no regional threat so it would have become just truce juggling. I’m in the #1 great power position already, so the challenge is done.

Fun run if you like militaristic type tags in EU4. Pretty straightforward mission tree, but you’ll effectively be done your final mission when you hit mil tech 16.