So I figured I'd start a game as Brandenburg with the new version the other day. I'd played as Muscovy before then and had not seen anything particularly odd happen with them in my playthrough and so had no reason to expect anything here.

However, things went very very odd right off the bat. So as Brandenburg I sold the province that Poland wanted from me to them in order to improve their opinion of me and then allied with Bohemia. As soon as the war declaring ban was up the following year, Poland immediately declared war on me anyway and attacked without any support other than their vassal Masovia. Bohemia and their vassals then proceeded to rofl stomp them so hard that I was able to get back the province that I sold them plus 3 other provinces and got Poland to give me Masovia as a vassal.

I then declared war on Magdeburg with help from my vassal and my ally Hidlesheim and proceeded to fight a fairly inconclusive war in which I was only able to get the province of Magdeburg in the peace deal. Then Bohemia declared war on Poland after Poland got beat up by Lithuania and I peaced out early in order to get some territory but this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ off Bohemia and they broke their alliance with me despite me having +200 opinion with them.

I need some time to finish coring the territory I'd won and let my manpower recover but as I was getting ready to contemplate starting some new wars, the Teutonic order warned me against starting any war. I thought that I'd be screwed by having to wait like 20 years without the chance to expand but apparently the AI was determined to give me a helping hand.

Out of nowhere, Stettin declared war on me halfway through the TO's warning against me. I guess they didnt have enough favors built up yet because they attacked me on their own without any support from their allies and with the help of my vassal and my ally I was easily able to beat them and vassalize them.

Then a few years later, Meisen declares war on me out of the blue and again attacks me without any support from their allies except for Thuringen, which they had as a PU. I then beat them very easily and take 5 or so provinces from them.

Then Mecklenburg declares war on me a couple years after that with only the support of Holstein and their PU Oldenburg. Again, I beat them fairly easily while they are alone and vasslize both Holstein and Mecklenburg. By this point, TO's warning is now up and I, without even trying, get elected to be Holy Roman Emperor.

And these were just the things that happened to me. There were some other reaaaallly bizaare occurences elsewhere. Like Bohemia somehow managing to get PUs with Poland, Lithuania AND Hungary with Poland eventually managing to break away.

Another fairly cool thing that happened to me thats unrelated is that I declared war on Werle and their allies and in the middle of the War, Brunswick gets a PU on them and gets dragged in. They also had Luneburg as a PU but for some reason Luneburg wasnt dragged into the war and I eventually won the war and got Brunswick as a vassal. So now I have 5 vassals and my vassals in turn have 3 PUs with other non-vassals effectively giving me 8 vassals for the price of 5 which I then use in combo with help from the TO which I allied once I was emperor to break the back of 2 coalitions that attacked me and which I used to take 3 more provinces and gain 3 more vassals. Vassal spam intensifies.

In any case, getting back on topic, the ironic thing is that none of this would have been possible if the AI hadn't been stupidly aggressive and attacked me even when they had no chance of winning. Idk if this is some fluke occurence or something that is legitimately worth looking into but I figured it was worth mentioning here