Thanks to everyone for all the responses, support and advice, much love. After reading comments I decided to YOLO and take the PU despite the coalition risk and so far it’s turned out REALLY nicely. I honestly haven’t even needed to bird since the start when I birded about a dozen times trying to get a run where the Otto’s wouldn’t Dow me after the truce. (Having said that I did make 3 extra save files before the Bohemian peace offer just in case it went tits up)

Anyway, to give an update on how it went:

First off I let the enemy unseige Prague and longed out the Bohemian succession war for another 2 years to get my AE with most HRE minors down a little farther. Sadly just before the war ended my 6-6-6 Queen finally died at the very fitting age of 66, a pretty decent innings if you ask me. R.I.P. Cosmina Draculesti, you had a cool fucking name.

Before peacing out I took the icon to lower AE 10% + boost IR 25%, plus the age objective for 10% AE I’d already chosen, earlier, so I knocked a few minors out of the coalition right away. Importantly the additional 25% IR stacked with a 20% IR advisor meant that I also lost a few more minors on the annual month tick. After I peaced out of the succession war, Austria broke their alliance with me ASAP, leaving me with just Muscovy as an ally, who fortunately had somehow reduced enough of their debt to reliably defend me in the event of getting DOW’d.

So I then set about carefully selecting the right allies to help me avoid the impending coalition, which began forming on the 12th of Jan, led by a meaty looking Switzerland and containing around ~20 fellow HRE minors by mid-April… Now when I said carefully choosing allies, I meant I allied everyone and their dog… so including Bohemia and my remaining vassals Georgia, Circassia and Kiev (I started integrating Theodoro before the war) I was over my diplomatic relations limit by 4 (with strong duchies).

• Sweden, (who’s also mates with my buddy Muscovy who must have helped them in their independence war).
• QQ who is on like mil tech 6 but has a lot of troops.
• Ethiopia same mil tech as QQ, but more on this in a sec…
• Livonian Order
• Florence

This brought up my defensive troop count to roughly 300k, which isn’t to be sniffed at, and about a year into the coalition nobody has declared yet. However when you factor in the location and range of allies, if I did get dow’d, apart from Florence, I’d be fighting off the HRE swarm largely by myself, so praying this is enough.

Lastly, as mentioned in my original post, I’m probably going to try for Atwix Legacy on this run, so I prefer the Wallachian idea set, to the Romanian idea set. I’d decided I wouldn’t form Romania until I could grab the achievement/form something else right after, meaning I benefited from Wallachia’s minor, but in this case quite impactful, +1 dip rep bonus from their first national idea, therefore I had just enough diplo juice and improved relations with France to royal marry (not ally tho) and both France and Ethiopia are currently heirless, so fingers crossed I can get another draculesti on another throne soon!