I had no hand in the emergence of SuperPope. I didn't follow closely how he grew so powerful, but I noticed that the Iberian Wedding happened early, and I think that when Aragon and Castile merged, the Pope took advantage and jumped on a now ally-less Naples and scooped up all of their land. I'll post another pic soon, but the SuperPope now owns Sicily too.

Your Italy is impressive, I see you've jumped over and taken Tunisian territory. I'm curious how many ducats you pull in trade each month. You have Ragusa, Venice, Genoa and Tunis under your grasp. Did you take Trade?

I imagine you're plotting a war with Spain to take Sardinia and Sicily?

I've played EU IV for a few years now, and that's a lotta games, but I have never seen anything like what is going on in your game where Ottomans used to be. What's the story there? How did that happen?

My Prussia game was all going according to plan. I had occupied Cologne to take Hessen, which is required to form Germany. But then I did something incredibly stupid. And it set me back probably 30 years. I decided that I would attack Frankfurt. They had no allies of consequence and it would be easy. But I didn't notice we had a truce. Yep. Not good.

So virtually all of Europe dogplied. It was ugly. Even the great Prussian army could do nothing to stop the hundreds of thousands of troops that were arrayed against us. We ended up losing several provinces and their cores, along with vassals Bavaria and Nurnburg, which were the cornerstone to my plans for moving in to Austria. The cost in MPs, ducats, manpower and time were very high. Now that's the drawback from playing ironman. No do-overs. I always check current diplomatic status before declaring war to avoid these situations, but this time I didn't. And we paid the price, indeed.

And to put the icing on the cake, Austria gobbled up Bavaria since they suddenly had no allies. But I will not let this disaster deter us. Germany or death!