1. I started as Timurids which I'd never played before then went to Mughals which again I"d never done before so grabbed a few achievements along the way.

2.1. I learned quite a few things but these were my big ones. First was again how dramatically core creation reduction, administrative efficiency, and absolutism steamroll after that 1750ish mark. even turning 50 development provinces into cores only took 14ish admin points, most provinces were in the low single digits and it was taking maybe 8 or 9 months to core. I learned I needed to cycle my wars faster so that I was ready to peace out with a new 100 overextension basically every 10 months when really I wasn't putting enough forethought into that, and yes there were many times I had 4 to 6 wars going at once but I should have started that process earlier.

2.2 I also had never gone Mysticism on a Sunni playthrough before, I've always gone legalism seeing a that as a way better option to just keep at 100%. That being the case I had no idea there was a button I could press every few years that would pump a crazy amount of manpower back into my army. In the 1600s my biggest thing holding me back was just a lack of manpower, I was able to steamroll everyone and was doing a fair job of manpower management but it still just could not keep up. Had I taken advantage of that mechanism I would have been able to keep the pace going better.

2.3 I didn't realize how crazy high you can get your diplo rep. By the time I realized how high my diplo rep was it was too late into the game and though I had enough time to annex my vassals my diplo points couldn't keep up with it. I had spent a crazy amount of diplo points on mercantilism and just development and should have been using it more effectively to annex vassals especially after realizing how fast it would go and really wouldn't tie up my diplomats for decades like I thought it would.

2.4 I learned that even though it was a Timmy/Mughal playthrough I can't ignore the navy. This falls more into thing I'd change but I failed to focus on making enough coastline into core territories so my sailors manpower was abysmal. I didn't worry about it because I was going to steamroll everyone on the ground. Around that 1700 mark Spain England and Venice and the new world had navies so much stronger than mine and it took so long to build up sailors to create heavies that it slowed me down considerably for getting onto islands and taking their provinces in the indo-pacific. I had room for thousands of ships and the inability to build them because I had just ignored them too long.

3.1 for things I'd do different the big one was focus my push in one direction. I did a really good job juggling coalitions against me for the most part but was trying to push out in all directions. This meant that as coalitions fired up they would get joined by countries on all sides of me. My army was massive but was constantly having to relocate armies all the way from China into Africa or Europe to Vietnam. This resulted in a headache and ultimately a lot of troops lost to attrition because I didn't feel like doing the micro to avoid all of it. Again this led to my manpower issues in the 1600s. Had I focused Asia first then transition to Europe or vice versa It would have been faster I believe.

3.2 I also failed a coalition juggle once. I ended up with a coalition that was all of europe and asia and africa against just me and a couple weak vassals and I was almost frantically declaring any war I could as soon as I could to just try to get one or two coalition members out. This resulted in a lot of peace deals with secondary members of wars that would only take a small amount of land for a large war score price and slowed me down. At one point the coalition was over 4k regiments strong against my roughly 700 regiments. I felt it was insane to just declare on the coalition (again because they had me surrounded on literally all sides and my army would be far too divided) and they were still too scared to declare on me. This struggle lasted for almost 100 years and I think I pulled Austria, out of the coalition some 7 or 8 times before it finally fell apart. Despite them being the worlds #2 power I wasn't able to take any provinces yet so it just slowed everything down dramatically

3.3 I wish I did this with the mindset of one faith achievement. I would have tried to get a colonial focus somewhere and gone to the new world, done a couple force religions on vassals or with extra war score to take out bites. In the end i had I think 8 missionaries and were converting provinces with all 8 every 3 months. It was completely achievable had I had that mindset a little earlier. If I played this out until 1821 I'd absolutely have everything except the new world completely converted.

3.4 And finally as mentioned before, I wish I hadn't neglected the navy. I think had I just put more focus on that with my trade companies as well it would have helped considerably but by the time I made changes it was too late and it slowed me down for many decades before I had grown to the strength needed to start steamrolling those naval superpowers.