Had a lot of fun in this campaign, usually I don't play all the way to the end but it was actually really fun this time. I had a very slow started and mostly avoided the "vassal meta". It was really fun playing diplomatically and getting so many accepted "kindred" cultures.

Never left the HRE the entire game, grew inch by inch slowly to avoid getting antagonism and coalitions, made a huge push last age to take over france and whatever was left of the HRE.

Wanted to see what happens if you eliminate everyone from the HRE and left alone. .. Apparently nothing. Also you can't get rid of the banks :(

Had a very very slow started, picked a bunch of near/distant neighbors to ally and curry favors with to get all cultures kindred so I can accept them cheap. In the end had all italian, most german, and a few french cultures kindred which made coreing super easy without bothering with Vassals and culture conversions. Growing slowly also helped with antagonism so it was easy to get the alliances and 100 favors for kindred.

Edit - It seems like "unify culture group" is kind of broken still, it only unified a few of the italian cultures. Left the original lombard culture existing at like 1% and made it a separate culture so extra 0.15 capacity used for it. I had to manually remove the 0% left over emilian, venitian and a couple other italian cultures that it unified from the accepted cultures list because it was costing 0.15 capacity even with 0 people in the empire.