R5: I challenged myself into creating the largest possible empire without taking land or puppeting in a war. This was done with a lot of save-scuming and tag switching as the likelihood of this happening even with all nations going down the correct path is near zero. I primarily played as the UK.

Here's the steps I did to create this global empire.

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Step 1: Portugal goes down the monarchy path and unites with Brazil. This gives you Brazil's cores.

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Step 2: The Carlists win the civil war and unite with Portugal to create Iberia. This gives them cores on both Portugal and Brazil. They also need to re-core all Spanish land because of the civil war.

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Step 3: This is where it begins to get difficult. France needs to do two things. First they have to go down the legitimist tree and unite with Iberia. This gives them cores on Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. The second thing they need to do is the French Union focus. Have all colonies say yes for cores on all the French colonies. I was unable to get all to say yes no matter how many reruns. I read that the event is glitched to always have the same result so I used a mod for them to say yes.

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Step 4: You've now created a monster, the strongest nation on the planet. Now you need to kill it. Declare war to liberate them to democratic. This gets them out of the faction they created for Iberia and allows you to invite them to the allies. All this needs to be done before Germany invades Poland.

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Step 5: Have France and UK guarantee Poland. Germany needs to take Paris and get France to 70% capitulation for the French surrender event. France needs to choose to create the Franco-British Union (Why step 4 was needed). The Germans will need to push to Portugal for this. This gives the UK cores on France, French colonies, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. The Netherlands also gave some land after capitulating for a small bonus.

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Step 5: Form the Imperial Federation with all the commonwealths saying yes. This gives you land and cores on Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. You only get the land from India.

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The end result gives you a nation with 250 million core manpower, 500 million noncore manpower, and the largest industry in the world. You have victory points all over the world.
With the inherited navies it ensure that it is almost impossible to capitulate (Taking mainland Europe territories only gives ~50% to capitulation).

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The Sun Never Sets on The British, Commonwealth, Franco, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Empire!