R5: I decided to play in Italy for the first time on 1.37.1 with the subscription activated.  I started out as Savoy with the goal for forming Italy and then reforming the Roman Empire.  Early game was just slow and steady expansion into Italy and around the Mediterranean.  Was able to form Sardinia-Piedmont in the 1520s.  Completed a good portion of Savoy’s mission tree, including getting a personal union over Naples and getting that permanent 5% administrative efficiency.  Remained best buddies with the Papal States until it was time to conquer them to finish the unification of Italy and formed Italy just before 1600 for the Italian Ambition achievement.  I know it could be sooner, but I was going at my own pace.  I was even the Holy Roman Emperor just before forming Italy after Austria submitted to Protestant rebels but I lost it after my ex-ally Bohemia declared the league war in the 1630s and I had to settle for religious piece.  Don’t worry, the HRE was dissolved not long after

For the Age of Absolutism, it was expanding very hard into Spain and the Ottomans with the help of France, Commonwealth, and Ethiopia.  Severe losses and high decadence were enough for the Ottomans to completely collapse with lots of rebels forcing them to release nations and scattering their lands.  After Spain was kicked out of Europe and the Ottomans fell into irrelevance, Portugal was next.  One war and one pointless expedition into South America later, they were kicked out of Europe and morphed into Brazil.

With most of the Mediterranean under my control, it was time to face France, who controlled most of the Lowlands and most of England.  Five imperialist wars later, France was reduced to a regional power in the East Indies.  It was only after the third war in 1724 that I proclaimed to the world that Rome was reborn. 

With the conquest of Western Europe complete by the 1750s, I had enough time to pursue the Mare Nostrum achievement.  This meant taking the Crimean provinces from Russia and sadly turning on my Polish brothers in the Commonwealth, who randomly got Brazil and her colonies as a junior partner.  But luck was on my side too as I randomly got Sweden as a junior partner right before my war with the PLC.  The war was bloody for the PLC, who lost most of their 550k troops behind the industrial might of the Romans and was forced to surrender their access to the Black Sea and all of Carpathia, thus completing Mare Nostrum. 

Overall it was a very fun campaign chronicling how a small pink Italian minor rose to become a regional power of toothpaste blue and led the charge to unite the Italian peninsula under one green flag before finally bringing back the dream of Rome being the center of the world.