OFFICIAL THEME
Excellent session today, lots of progress made. The Black Sheep's Borders have been pushed out further, to the North, West and East. I started off in a war with the Ottomans, and managed to grab a 100 Warscore Peace Deal from them, lots of money, a humilate, and three provinces for my Georgian vassal. The Ottoman forces proved to be no threat whatsoever, and after one early battle it was really just a case of moping up and looting for all they're worth. They've been pretty effectively torn apart by the rest of the region.
I then looked north past the caucasus mountains, and found a whole bunch of provinces just waiting to be taken from Crimea and the Golden Horde. I fed some to Georgia, and created another vassal of Astrakhan to replace my recently integrated Bitlis.
It was about this time that the truce with the Timurids expired, and as I moved my forces into position I noticed they had allied Sindh, who was now a minor power at best, along with Jaunpur and Bahmanis. Who are most definitely not minor powers. That put a quick stop to any war plans, there's quite a hug box going on there. A brief opportunity did emerge once Khmer got involved in a war with Jaunpur, so I released Khorasan as a vassal, hoping to take advantage and feed them back all their cores, but alas the war exhaustion never got high enough for them to decline to defend.
With expansion curtailed just a little, I turned inwards and spawned the colonialism institution in my province of Baghdad. This was a twofer really, as the province, which I spawned the renaissance in, had been sacked by the Timurids in the previous war, leaving it at 100% devastation. It's now a 50 development province, which is kinda nice. I also powered through the Religious Ideas, much needed for my horribly unified lands, and got to the point where I could actually start converting away the Sunni and Coptic lands! One unified Shia state incoming.
Opportunistic wars in the North continued, both Crimea and the Golden Horde getting blitzed once truces expired there, as well as Nogai and Transoxiana getting smacked, the Transoxiana campaign resulting in taking quite a chunk of territory for QQ itself. That left me with a border with my Mughal allies, which is useful for when we punch our way out of the Indian hugbox.
Also, plenty of fun with rivals. The Ottomans dropped out of possible rivals, I got rivalled by Ming until they imploded, Muscovy rivalled me at once point then dropped off, the Timurids rivalled me off and on a couple of times, Poland stopped rivalling me and I ended up with Spain, the Timurids and the Mamluks as my only possible rivals. Fun times.
Provinces Gained: Kizil-Su, Gurganj, Karakum, Kopet Dag, Konjikala, Merv, Charjuy
Provinces Gained for Georgia: Canik, Sinop, Kastamonu, Adyghe, Circassia, Kabardia, Kuban, Azaraba
Provinces Gained for Astrakhan: Alania, Terek, Astrakhan, Ryn, Lower Yik, Nogai, Kuma, Majar, Manych, Sarai
Vassals Integrated: Bitlis
Vassals Created: Astrakhan, Khorasan