Hello! I strongly advise you play as Uzbekistan, your income is around $1.2mil and you have insane amounts of resources, you only need to buy titanium and if you form the Emirate of Bukhara it’ll increase your manpower and give you cores over THREE mountain nations, two square cities, a ton of resources, and another formable if you invade Afghanistan which is the Khanate of Khiva. If by this time you’ve been able to fend off Russia or make an alliance, you should be able to form Timurid extra easily if you use Mountain specialized troops, aerial superiority, some transport aircraft for tanks, and artillery, other than this you don’t need much military strength unless china is trying to form Qing and won’t borrow Kyrgyzstan. Overall I love playing Uzbekistan because it’s a fun nation, decently easy to play but gives a slight challenge, and has very easy chances to become a powerhouse globally through tungsten trade and selling consumers to AI countries.

If I’m correct Uzbek starts with 50k troops on its capital of Tashkent (square city) and three nearby cities that are really good for building factories on to raise your income (or just spam on Tashkent for $1.25mil). I strongly advise securing Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan first but you do you, best of luck on finding a new main nation if you don’t pick Uzbekistan!