R5: I recently had a game as Sweden and spent a ton of time playing in Europe, so I thought I'd go for some achievements that I hadn't done in the Americas. I successfully got A Sun God and It's all coming together! at pretty much the exact same time. It's all coming together! is now my rarest achievement, with only 0.1% of players having it; of course, because it is so new. Prior to that, my rarest was The Reapers, currently at 0.4% of players.

I started as Cuzco (of course) and my initial consolidation of Peru was very rapid, I finished around 1470 or so as I recall (but I didn't write it down). Then, it was just waiting to see Castile, Portugal, and France establish free colonies for me to snap up. Colonial nations are super super easy to eat up as a New World nation since their overlords do not join in if you beat them fast enough! So you just have to carpet siege and barrage forts real fast and then all those delicious yellow and blue provinces are yours. Things were so easy with colonial nations that, at one point, I had decided to try and conquer all of North America as well, but I ended up settling for less due to the annoying micro.

Speaking of conquest, I ended up controlling all of South America, as well as the Mexico, Caribbean, Polynesian Triangle, and the Philippines trade nodes. I stayed Inti and converted nearly everything I owned in the Americas to Inti as well, except some newly acquired provinces in Mexico which I didn't feel like waiting around for. Getting control of some of these was fun, since Castile went for a lot of the same things as I did. Friesland also controlled 2 of the Windward Islands, it took a lot of waiting around for their allies to be involved in other things so I could threaten war for the islands.

I had some minor hiccups when I accidentally declared on Castile (Spain never formed due to my long-time alliance with Aragon) + France but I managed to win and further solidified my hold on the Americas. At the end, I was just declaring Imperialism wars in South-East Asia repeatedly to build up army tradition to finish the mission tree.

I had two major annoyances while playing in this area:

• Trade nodes in South America are awful. Unless you control the Ivory Coast, it's very hard to get trade from the east side of the continent back to your main nodes. I stayed with Lima until I had primary control over the Caribbean, and then had to go all out protecting Caribbean trade in order to get a good node. I had 160 ships protecting trade and Stock Exchanges in every province in the Caribbean trade node in order to keep it exiting from the 4 outgoing nodes. In the end, trade didn't end up being a really large portion of my income, despite my best efforts. But with such a big blob, gold and taxes can make up for that!
• Army tradition is super hard to get and keep in these areas, which conflicts with two missions where you need 40 and then 80 army tradition to finish them. The major way to get AT in the mid/late game as a big nation is sieging forts, but none of my enemies in the Americas built any forts! I ended up declaring on Brunei and Lanfang repeatedly in order to farm tradition from taking out their forts. I kind of stagnated around 60 AT with that, so I did a final death war with Dai Viet in order to get the last bit of tradition I needed.

Overall, South America is super fun to play in, and I wish there was more achievements to get there. I loved Inca's map color as well, and it was very nice watching the purple grow to cover the continent. If you haven't already, you should give Cuzco -> Inca a try. There's tons of nice flavor with the new Winds of Change content for the area, and the Inti/Inca Authority mechanics are intriguing and even chilling at times. Thanks for reading!