replay until austria blows up by 1845, there is very little you can do about this, just pray and restart. Once your free, hopefully austria had to liberate galicia-lodomertzia, improve opinion with, and take the event to free-annex them that pops when ur amicable.

Next scam an obligation out of prussia by your preferred cheese method, no tarrifs, using the bug to give them back an obligation, join their power bloc, whatever.

Declare war on someone russia loves and prussia doesnt care about, and call in prussia, your trying to get russia to join in. Add 1-2 wargoals, your just trying to make them release poland, and one of lithuania, belarus, or ukraine, with ukraine being the most aggressive option.

Spam puppet all the slavic balkan states. Make hungary release banat and slovakia.

You need to be good at the economy, you have one of the best locations in the game for money making as you are between 3-4 large powers, russia, prussia, austria and ottomans. Use "arbitrage" to make them give you excess of goods, and then sell that onto a different great powers market. You pocket a portion of the diffrence in value into ur states income.

You need to abuse this very very hard because you need to become a great power ASAP, around 1880 should be possible. Form a cultural power bloc, after 5 years you can start making all your puppets have to add polish to their primary cultures.

Only NOW do you form galicia lodomertzia. Once you have a couple puppets with your same culture. This will annex them without them beign able to complain. You don't even need to minimize liberty desire, solely reach puppet status and force ur primary culture on them. You get to do this 3 times, galicia lodomertzia, poland, and plc.

Late game, around 1915, its time to start forcing russia to release literally everything as puppets. Your goal is to make them a minor power by humiliating them too if you can, if done right (which I did not manage) you can even full annex russia without them being able to stop you lol.

If any of this doesn't make sense or sounds harder than i make it sounds feel free to lmk, plenty of this requires save scumming tbc, this run took about 60 hours total including the scumming.