All Missions Run

tl;dr: I formed 77 tags and finished 1489 missions, finishing my very last mission in September of 1820, finally making the late game tense and interesting!

This after action report will be a bit of a novel. I'm going to first go into my starting nation pick, some of the most frequently used mechanics I employed during this run, and then briefly mention some of the more imposing roadblocks in routing this campaign. From there, I'll start at the beginning and work through the history nation by nation, explaining notable facets of gaining the formations or certain missions. For the record, this is with limited nation formation enabled.

The first obvious question when partaking in a campaign to get as many missions and tag formations as possible is: Who do I start as? One might think a powerful nation, or perhaps a nation that starts out with a large amount of missions. Consider a nation like Gotland, that has a solid mission tree and can also form Denmark which also has a large mission tree. While that sounds like a fine choice, those mission requires require a significant amount of game development to complete -- Denmark requires getting a significant portion of Africa, India and Malacca. I felt the time going that route would so greatly impact some of the other things I must accomplish that it would leave me in a compressed time state and would, in particular, make some other nation formations extremely painful. If I decided not to finish them all then I would have undercut the reason in choosing them in the first place

What I landed on was not what you would expect: Cherokee. Yes, that's right, a North American Totemist native that doesn't even start as a federation leader or with a tier 3 reform unlocked like, say, Coweta. The upside of a native is that, when played well, you can dominate the entire Americas before colonizers have much of a foothold. Starting as a Pagan religion, it would make it easier to transition to other Pagan religions, like Maya and Inca. Cherokee has a fair amount of missions and can allow you to be High American tech -- a solid military advantage in the early half of the game. They also have a tech cost mission that, when combined with other events, can allow me to be technologically superior to Castille when I meet them. Starting native also allowed me to have Indigenous ideas, a very powerful idea set. More on them later.

Perusing the mission trees of all the possible nations (and correcting quite a few wiki entries about what is and is not formable or gives missions), there were going to be two recurring issues. One, there are a number of missions that require you to have a valid rival. On the flip side, there are also a number of missions that require you to be either up to date in tech or up to date in institutions. The worst of all? Prussia. It not only requires you to have a valid rival but to also have the enlightenment embraced. That one mission tree would decide much of the course of this game. It restricted my ability to blob out because I couldn't get so big that I would lose rivals. The solution I found was to simply stop embracing institutions, which allowed me to still have a ton of land and keep rivals. It means I couldn't go after mission trees with tech/institutions requirements in the early game, but I could focus on all the ones with rivals. At one point, I had only embraced 4 institutions while my rival embraced 8 -- I had a mana cap of 2997. I was frequently concentrating development and exploiting development just to keep my dev low enough to stay rivaled.

The consequence of the above (and other reasons) is that I formed 61 of my tags after 1700 and 31 after 1790. It was a bit of mad rush at the end.

My national ideas were Indigenous, Administrative, Influence, Diplomatic, Offensive, Espionage, Court, and Humanist. Occasionally I would pick up Exploration's first idea for a mission and at the end I had to pick up Naval and Trade for a mission tree. Pretty simple reasoning for the picks: war score cost reduction, CCR, siege ability, and AE mitigation. 

The reason this entire run was really even possible was because of the amazing Nahuatl religion and the Cholula Temple event. First, as any Pagan religion, you can send a missionary to an Animist province and, if unrest > 0 and other rebel progress is < 30%, you can flip to Animist the next day regardless of religious dev amount. The Cholula Temple event is an event that can fire when you're a non Mesoamerican Pagan that can change your religion to Nahuatl. Additionally, as a Pagan, you get decisions that let you switch to any non-Pagan religion that you have a province of for the low cost of 4 stability. You can select the decision for each religion group, so you can have multiple religion switch events up at once. So, for religion switches, I could simply flip to Animist via missionary rebel progress, wait or bird for the Cholula Temple event, change religion and do what I needed to do, then select the Cholula Temple event option to go back to Nahuatl, able to repeat that again as needed. The temple event stays around for four months, which is more than enough time to, for example, not only become the HRE emperor but drop it again in that time period (using Dutch Monarchy into Elective Monarchy). 

Additionally, Nahuatl and Mayans can make Mesoamerican tributaries that work like tributaries but are treated more like subjects in a lot of ways. In particular, you can annex them. You don't even need good relitions, just below 50% liberty desire. What's even more broke is that as long as you have 5-10% annexation progress, you can release your mesoamerican tributary and the next month, magically, it will become annexed. This is clearly a bug but one I would take full advantage of. 

There's also the Question of Faith pulse event that can fire every two years. By fulfilling some easy requirements (2 stab, 90 legitimacy, a few others) you can get the "A Question of Faith" event to change to the religion of your ruler. By using the Elective Monarchy (and knowing how it works) in combination with the Dutch monarchy reform you can get a ruler from a different religion quite easily. This does require some birding but it is mostly the only realistic option for huge nations late in the game when you can't do the above Nahuatl shenanigans. 

As to the mission themselves, I would suggest reading the wiki entry for it first (https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Missions). Essentially, missions occupy slots (columns) and rows. And with some chicanery, you can combine mission trees or get missions from formations that normally don't have any. If a nation has a culture requirement but no capital requirement, then if you have your capital in a region that gives missions based on capital location (the four Africa mission branches and two Indian ones), you get both the culture missions and the capital related missions, with the culture ones taking precdence if there is overlap. If a mission tree only has generic missions in a slot, you can potentially change those to different ones as well by fulfilling the requirements for different generic minor trees. 

Morever, if you have a mission tree that has a branching preview in it, you can swap between the choices and if you change culture between those swaps, you will suddenly pick up missions from that culture (or other requirements). You can form Austria, that has the branching mission, then move your capital to Tokyo, culture shift to the Togoku, and take the Shogunate reform, then select one of the tabs (not the checkmark, just the numbered tabs) and you will find yourself with both the Austria missions and the Japanese Daimyo missions. Or just switch culture to Powhatan and click a tab, boom then you get those with the Austrian missions. You can do this as much as you want before accepting the branch. This only works for cultures that are not tied to a nation formation. That mostly applies to ones listed under "General Missions" on the wiki page. However, if you form a tag that doesn't have missions, such that you have a new tag but with the previous tag's missions (like Austria forming Algiers, for example), then if you click the tab it will imediately switch the missions to just the ones available for your current tag. So in this example, your Austria missions would suddenly shift to generic missions only, as that's what Algiers has by default.

I'll start a comment chain that doesthe chronological breakdown (some elements may be foggy in my mind, as this run spanned many months and many restarts). You can assume that I am very often predevving, prebuilding, and warring to make sure I hit requirements for future missions. A lot of time I would melt the save and test out formations just to double check out how my prework was going. That stuff really isn't worth writing about, though. If you want to read that without going through a mass of reddit comments, go here: 




Cherokee: They start with 15% CCR in their traditions, which is an immediate help. I formed a large federation, using a bit of restarting/save scumming to get better alliance networks that would allow me to invite more nations. I had 13-16 nations during this run, which is a lot, but really quickens the federation progress. From there, it's pretty steady conquest for a long time. You generally want to only take land (that becomes tribal land) from cobelligerents as increasing AE will make it more likely for your federation members to leave. However, they can't leave while in war, so as long as you plan your wars out and occasionally restart a bad tick, you can keep them locked in with you forever. Eventually, you want to settle down and start taking land. Here, it can be worthwile to start annexing migratory tribes, always keep an eye on the AE. It helps a lot to give land to federation members when you can, as you'll get that land back when you combine the federation and it won't cost you AE. Cherokee has a mission for 10% tech cost reduction, there's a totemist pulse event for another 10% tech reduction, and then culture flipping to Powhatan will give you an event for another 15% tech cost reduction when you see a non UK colonizer. I timed these to be active when I reformed off Castille post 1500 (thus getting two institutions) resulting in such low tech cost that I was able to have higher tech than Castille when I was done (since I could save up a lot of mana being two institutions behind). 

A NA native also allows for the longhouse reform farm, the best reform farm clearly. One you settle down you want to put all your money into building longhouses. When you form the federation nation, it's worth taking loans to make sure every province you have has a longhouse. With enough of them, I was able to complete a full Theocracy tier of reforms by around 1515. 

Maya: I reformed into a monarchy from Castille and set up for the Question of Faith event (first I killed Castille's colonies then made sure I neighbored Huastec). This allowed me to easily become Mayan (RIP my beloved Totemist ancestors). Here it must be noted a particularly annoying aspect of Mesoamerican religions: If you are a reformed religion or non Pagan religion and become a Mesoamerican religion, you start off already reformed. If you switch to a second Mesoamerican religion, the icon and reform benefits completely disappear. Forming Maya requires two passed Mayan reforms and an Inca mission requires to be fully reformed, so the only way to route this is to get two Mayan reforms, form Maya, get the remaining reforms for Maya missions, then switch to Inca before fully reforming, where you will then have to pass the 5 inca reforms. This is maybe the biggest reason why choosing a nation like Gotland wasn't really an option -- I'd have to become native which is possible, but painful, and would happen much later on than I needed it to.

Maya has a mission that, when completed, resets three other missions. But it isn't just limited to those three, it essentially refreshes your entire mission set. That means, if you switch to a culture that has missions associated with it, you will then get those missions. I was able to get Pueblo and Powhatan missions this way.

Maya is also annoying in that passing each reform reduces your country to 15ish provinces. At this point, I have all of North America and digging into Mexico. I can't lose all that. That's where the Mesoamerican tributaries come in. I create one after I pass each reform and 10 years later I give it most of my land, start annexing, and then once it gets to 5-10% annexation progress (depending on size), I release the tributary. The next month the annexation completes and I get all the land back. A nice bug. I do that when passing all the reforms, so I end up being Mayan religion for 60ish years. 



Inca: While doing the Maya reforms, I grab all of Central America and Incan land and switch to Animist to form Inca. As mentioned before, I have to go through the process of passing all five reforms, which aren't nearly as bad as Maya, but still take about 25+ years because of reform cooldowns. 

Dalmatia & Iceland: Dalmatia requires you to have less than 11 provinces and Iceland requires less than four. Here again I use the mesoamerican tributary exploit to give my land away, form the nations back to back (releasing the former Dalmatian provinces as a vassal), then get all the tributary land back the next month. Neither nation grants missions, thankfully. 

Israel: There is a series of events that can occur allowing for a Jewish province to appear in Macedonia. Using PDX.tools, I had been keeping track of that as well as the Jewish provinces in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia converted them all but fortunately Otto had the events for Macedonia and left them as Jewish. I took the province in a war and used the Nahuatl religion flip to turn Jewish and form Israel.

Jerusalem & Latin Empire: When I did that last flip, I also selected the event to become Catholic, which I do, then form Jerusalem. It was a bit of time crunch as I had to do this before the Age of Absolutism started (a formation requirement). I actually birded Global Trade spawning a few times to make sure I had enough time. Latin Empire comes from a mission event that you have to be Catholic for -- I used religion flips a couple times to fulfill easier parts of the this mission tree as the requirements would change based on religion.

As I start going into all this conquest and nation changing, I do make two giant vassals out of my North and South American lands. This way I don't have to worry about accidentally forming colonies or having to always move the capital back to the Americas. 

Timurids: In the buildup to forming this, I had the republic reform that allowed a general to become my ruler and I gave the surname Timurid to all that I created. When my ruler finally died, it was guaranteed that a Timurid would take the throne, thus fulfilling the formation requirement. Fortunately Timmy wasn't very strong or held together so getting the land required to form them was fairly easy. I prioritized Timmy because their T2 reform that allows for razing. While it is 50% reduced mana gain, the main thing was for less coring cost and to have lower dev for keeping rivals. Mission tree is pretty straight forward with conquering, devving, and building but there's a lot of it so I spent nearly three decades as Timmy.  

Lubeck: They have one of the most painful missions in the game: Tend to the Towns. Every owned province must be at least 10 dev. At this point, I was so big, the mesoamerican tributary trick could only do so much, since I couldn't reach all my land with a tributary. I used a combination of vassals and a lot of devving to get to the point where I could meet the requirements. This mission alone is why I stayed as them for 26 years. I considered doing Lubeck before Timmy but I think ultimately I made the right decision as the razing was just too important, especially as I was taking high dev German land as part of the Lubeck missions.

Netherlands: My next choice because they have a powerful mission tree which is pretty easy to complete, including the very strong 25% siege ability advisor. Conquest at this point is easy and straightforward so anything I can do to make it faster is welcome.

Sardinia-Piedmont: They have a mission requiring an ally with a bigger army, which is why I waited until now to form them. At this point, I had enough professionalism that I'd get all the manpower back from deleting my army, which is what I did to complete the mission requirements (my army was 5x larger than anyone I could ally at this point so there was no other option). They also have a mission where you have to ally your ally's rival and have 120+ relations with both. That would only get more difficult with time so I needed to get it done now. They also offer good bonuses (10% dip annex cost, 10% goods produced, 5% admin eff). 	

Austria: The missions themselves are straightforward and fairly easy. Because I'm High America with my capital in the new world, I am able to get the High American missions along with the generic missions, completing all. Austria has the branching preview missions but at this point I really don't have a use for it (though I do pick up the small Maori mission tree and easily finish it). The reason I did Austria at this point, when I didn't have a high need for the branching preview, was I thought I would be doing Prussia soon after, to finally be done with their evil rival/enlightenment requirement, as it was the 1700s now. You have to form Austria before Prussia -- you can't do it the other way. As we'll see, that Prussia formation was held off for a while. 

Hungary & Austria-Hungary: Strong mission tree with CCR and siege ability and a natural complement to Austrian missions. You need to be Austria or Hungary to form Austria-Hungary, so I take care of that too. Funnily enough, I use the religion flip to become Emperor for Hungary missions, not Austria ones. I use the Dutch elective monarchy IA farm to get up to finish the second centralization reform then give up the Emperorship later. Its capital movement restrictions are too much of a pain to deal with.

Georgia: I use the religion flip to turn Orthodox and repeatedly state, consecrate, and unstate some orthodox land to finish "Beacon of Christendom" which requires 100% patriarch authority and Defender of the Faith.

Ireland & Two Sicilies: Easy mission tree, no impediments. 

Silesia: Tag formation, no missions.

Kurland: Now it's going to get a bit juicy. Kurland has branching preview tabs that pop up but don't actually affect any of the missions. That means I can complete the entire mission tree and still have the preview tabs to play with (this is because it shares with Livonian Order, I believe, which does have options that get affected by this). This one is going to be my workhorse.

Though I had been planning to forget about the native missions I was unable to get, I realize now I have a chance. Guamar, whom, for whatever reason, I had keep guaranteed for close to 200 years, was the only native country left on the map. Austria, back in the 1550s, when I wasn't even paying attention to them and couldn't even see the HRE, had won the Great Peasants War with a major victory -- to my understanding, the difference between a minor and major victory is simply RNG when done by the AI. These two facts allowed for me to pull what is known in the speed running community as a Dithmarschen (as that's usually the country used). Essentially, you fight a native and have them release a country in the HRE, which makes that country native. You need a peasant republic to neighbor them and try to facilitate the HRE native to want to declare war on that peasant republic with the Crush the Peasantry CB that can only exist if the HRE had a major victory in the GPW. I had a lot of trouble getting this to work, so shout out to _Arwys_ for the help. For some reason, I would have the Crush the Peasantry CB but the native HRE would not. Couldn't understand it. Somehow, making another native HRE country next to it allowed the first native HRE to get the CB against the peasant republic. I have no idea why that was. Now I needed to get that native HRE to declare on the peasant republic. It's worth noting here I didn't have any Peasant Republics when I started out with this but I was able to release East Frisia and bird their choice of T1 reform -- because they had been a Peasant Republic at one point, they still had access to the reform. I also had to make sure their culture was different from the native HRE so that they wouldn't use Nationalism as a CB. I also birded the native HRE ruler personality so it would be militaristic. Eventually, I believe I went to war with East Frisia, the peasant republic, and finally the HRE native joined in with Crush the Peasantry CB. I quickly annexed East Frisia and thus was in the war against the HRE native. I took the capital and took a losing peace deal wherein I accepted the government change, which turned me into a native. 

And all this was possible not because I planned it at all. Guamar being the only native left alive and Austria winning the GPW with a major victory were RNG that I benefitted heavily from. It would have been painful to do a restart but I did already wipe nearly 200 years of this campaign when I realized how the branching preview tabs worked, so maybe my masochism would have won out. Glad I don't know!

Now, as a native with a branching preview tab, I can switch to the various native cultures and complete their missions. I don't start out with any reforms enacted, which means I actually have all my provinces, instead of being reduced to a single province tribe with a ton of tribal land. If that hadn't been the case, I don't know how I could have staved off bankruptcy, as I need time to build and dev for the various missions. That's one reason why I initially wasn't going to try this native flip trick -- if I had known I get to keep all my land until I'm ready to reform, I would have planned better!

I finish the couple of Powhatan missions I couldn't earlier, then move through Northeastern natives, Northwestern natives, Plains Natives, California natives, Southwestern natives, Navajo, and Dakota cultures. Northwestern natives has a mission, "Show Military Strength" that I could not figure out how to complete. It seems straightforward: "Have two allies with less than half of our country's military strength." I figured that would be instant but even though Iclearly outmatched my allies in every possible way, I could not finish it. I though maybe it was bugged and worded wrong and deleted my entire army and navy as a test as well as reducing professionalism and prestige and nothing changed. I couldn't find what would trigger the completion. *shrug* I'm unable to complete two Dakota missions as it required being reformed and I'm not ready for that yet. 

Golden Horde: I reform into a horde from being a native -- after picking my T1, I had to let a day tick, and then everything became tribal land and I was able to pick the T3 to stay migratory and thus easily able to pick the horde reform option. GH has a lot of missions and also conveniently has another branching preview tab. Because I'm now Nomadic tech by virtue of having reformed into a Horde (the Tibet Horde event won't make my tech nomadic, btw), when I reform into a monarchy, I can become Chinese tech (because I switched to Animism for the reform (https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Technology#Switching_Groups). 

Malaya: Now, as Chinese tech, I can switch to Filipino culture and get the Filipino and Malay missions with the use of the preview tab. I form Malaya here as one of the Malay missions required you to be Malaya (the tag itself does not give missions). It requires some religion converting so I have to stay here a bit. 

Tuscany: Now, for one of the most satisfying parts. Right now, Tuscany formation is bugged and you don't get Tuscany missions when forming them, because you must be either Tuscany or Florence (I believe). However, by forming Tuscany while having the Golden Horde mission tree branching preview, when I select one of the tabs, my mission tree instantly turns into the Tuscany one. This does mean I miss out on completing the actual branch missions from the Golden Horde tree but I was already going to miss their Pax Monoglia one (that requires the EGT Great Mongol Empire to be formed), so I wasn't too sad about it. Tuscany has some nice modifiers and this marks the end of the most intense phase of mission hijinx. 

Yemen: Straightforward with a couple of needed religious conversions. This does unlock Thassalocracy for me, which is very useful as trade protectorates are easy to make and can even be used on HRE members. Being a trade protectorate gets rid of their desire for your provinces so it's a big relation boost usually. 

Armenia: Not a hard tree, but it does require certain provinces to be a certain culture and/or religion. The great thing about these missions is that they flex based on whatever your current religion/culture is. So, by changing those, you can fulfill requirements based on what currently exists in those areas. I noticed all the required religion provinces were all Sunni so I flipped to Sunni and was able to complete "Coptic Restoration" by being Sunni, haha. I then made a large culture my primary, which fulfilled "National Awakening" and "Resettle Ancrestral Lands". I had already made Tigranakert into Nahuatl so when I flipped back Nahuatl I could finish "Rebuild Tigranakert". Armenia is also nice because it gives you a decision to move your capital to Tigranakert. This decision doesn't even require it to be stated, so it could be useful for getting out of the HRE or getting out of an area with high dev provinces for a culture flip.

Romania: Romania only has eight unique missions, in slots 1 and 5. So, if I move my capital into one of the four African mission regions, I will get missions from slots 2-4. I choose West African missions because they have no slot 1 missions and their slot 5 are shared across African missions, so I'm able to complete the full tree. I go with Sunni for the religion path. 

Ruthenia: Straightforward and easy. 

Mamluks: Fairly easy tree but in an earlier run I didn't realize you needed to have enacted the Unify Islam decision to form The Caliphate. In that earlier run, I was already EoC and that blocks Unify Islam so that caused a big backtrack. A nice waste of 20 years of game time, heh. This tree gives a new golden age which is very welcome. 

Tunis, Macina & Algiers: Tunis has a mission, "Sponsor Piracy," that pops an event where you can release Algiers as a March or release and play as Algiers (losing all your history, modifiers, and rest of your country). However, if you pop this mission, then form a different country like Macina (because Tunis is blocked from forming Algiers), then form Algiers, when you choose "Let him rule over Algiers" you instead become a pirate republic with Barbarossa as your leader. A pretty handy way to become a pirate as a large sized nation. Unfortunately, you don't get the missions as part of this event. 

Tibet, Dzungar & Ilkhanate: I had a vassal U that had Tibetan mission land and was converting it for me as the mission tree requires a lot of land to be Vajrayana and doing a Question of Faith setup would have been a pain here. I annexed U and religion flipped to Vajrayana to form Tibet. Tibet only has missions in slots 2, 3, and 4. So, since I was a pirate republic, I was able to get the pirate missions from slots 1 and 5, and, oddly enough, slot 3. I don't know why I could get slot 3 pirate missions here, perhaps because the first Tibet mission was in row 2, but I'm glad. That does mean I will miss out on pirate missions from slots 2 (4 is just the generic ones). Not too bad. 

Here we need to time things right as well. Tibet has the event to become a horde but it won't work if you're EoC. However, Tibet also has a mission that requires you to be EoC or EoC to be gone. So, I fired off the event and formed Dzungar then formed Ilkhanate (no new missions for either). I didn't really want to be restricted to the Celestial Empire reform so I also triggered and held "The Dalai Lama takes control" event, which has an option to become a theocracy if not EoC when the event pops. After that, I then completed a war I had going for the EoC to become Eoc and finish the missions then accepted the event to become a theocracy, kicking me out of Celstian Empire reform, and then switching back to Monarchy to pick a different T1 (usually one with Tonali mechanics).

It's worth noting that I had to be careful that my vassal didn't complete too many missions as the horde event is globally unique so if they fired it I wouldn't be able to. Luckily the original AI Tibet or other nations with the same tree never grew much and wasn't capable of firing it either. 

Dai Viet: First, I have to religious convert five provinces. No tricks involved here, just exploit dev, convert to Nahuatl, then convert to Vietnamese (fortunately I have 50% time reduction). I have to do this now because I'm going to lose those provinces shortly. Dai Viet has "The Northern and Southern Dynasties" disaster which I trigger. To help it pass faster, earlier I used the Dutch Elective Monarchy trick to farm for a bad ruler. Yep, no 6/6/6 here, I was aiming for 0/0/0! I eventually settle for a 0/0/1 after many birds, getting to 16 progress a month. Eventually it fires and it sucks: Part of Indonesia and all of the Malaccas form a separate country, simply so I can be transformed into the Tonkin tag. I reconquer all the land (having predeleted the forts) but this is why I had to culture convert first -- now those provinces have separatism as I lost the cores. 

Dai Viet's "Purchase Western Arms" mission is rough right now as it requires a country with Western/Anatolian/Eastern tech with a capital in Europe to have a province in the East Indies. Unfortunately, I've killed most of the colonizers and I have Portugal as a vassal but their capital is no longer in Europe. I ended up killing a 2PM Spain in the Falklands, then release them from a province in Iberia, then attacked them to make them my vassal, then returned a province they still had a core on in the East Indies (lucky it wasn't gone yet). 

Now that I'm the EoC comes a painful phase. The EoC missions (which I don't have yet) require passing 15 reforms. It's 1770 so there's zero chance I could do it by passive mandate growth. Instead, I make sure I'm fulfilling the requirements to start the civil war disaster. Fortunately, they partly overlap with the Dai Viet disaster, as having a really bad ruler helps. Since I was able to accept and complete the Dai Viet disaster at the same time, I don't lose my civil war diaster progress. It starts in July 1773. Now, every single month until I have 15 reforms, I will be birding until I get an event that gives mandate. This takes a long time. It is painful (though, not as bad as I feared -- I feel like the chance of getting an event I wanted was something like 20-30% but maybe that's confirmation bias). I do what I can to raise passive mandate growth but it can only help so much. I do this monthly birding for approximate 15-20 years... yep. 

Tripoli: Not sure why I formed them now. Maybe was max on mana and wanted to take care of a capital move or to make a future primary culture acceptance easier. No missions.

Lan Xang & Champasak: I move the capital to the Horn of Africa as Lan Xang has generic missions in slots 3 and 4. Thus I get slots 3 and 4 of Horn of Africa missions. I chose them because I felt like the others I could accomplish more for and Horn missions were interconnected such that I couldn't complete any more if slot 2 was there as well (I would have need slot 1). I still get six missions completed from that part. Lan Xang has a civil war disaster related event that turns you into one of three nations. I set up the conditions and become Champasak. I tried to see if I could set up a chain and get all three but there was a flag that gets set that prevents it. Unfortunately I had to accept Lan Xang's national ideas as the mission "A Million Elephants" requires it. I also need to make sure I don't have any animist provinces so I release Tonda, give land to vassals, and do some conversions to meet the mark for "Convert the Polythesists." I take back some of those provinces since having animist provinces is required for my religion flips. 

Prussia: At long last, I deal with Prussia. I'm now 4 institutions behind my lone rival, Vijayanagar.  As a test, I decide to embrace up to the enlightenment and much to my surprise, I still have my rival. With that being the case, I decide to take care of Prussia even though I have some other mission trees that require a rival -- Vij is big enough to stick around even with only 1 institution difference. Before I form Prussia, I briefly become Emperor and then lose the emperorship so that I stay a member as the HRE generic missions on the right side of the mission tree will only get added to the mission tree if I'm an HRE member but not Emperor. Otherwise, pretty easy mission tree, and my AE reduction is maxed and has been maxed for a while (I've birded for Just Causes event a few times), so taking all this HRE land for the Prussia missions isn't going to hurt me too much for future emperorship taking. 

Mali: Fucking Mali. Sigh. They have a mission that requires a 450 MTTH event to fire and it is globally unique. Thus, during the entire time Mali was alive by the AI, I had to do constant melted save checks to ensure the event hadn't fired. This honestly wasn't the worst since it has such a long MTTH; I would check once a year or after a bunch of activity. It only fired once even though Mali lived quite a long time and I only lost a year of boring Maya play time to revert back. However, once I became Mali, that 450 MTTH event decided to bend me over and have its way. I would do 4 month intervals (since I had my Cholula Temple event up and the mission required me to be Muslim) repeatedly. I would have probably skipped it except for the fact its completion guards a mission that triggers a mission swap -- so yet another way to get a misssion tree I wouldn't otherwise be able to get. I had to push through and eventually got it. 

Kitara: I decide to take Kitara national ideas to replace the Lan Xang ones I had to take (15% CCR, -20% Unjustified Demands, 25% culture conversion, 10% ICA -- really quite nice in general). This places me in Central Africa so I finally select the Malian mission that does the mission swap and I get the full Central African missions (though that means I lose one Malian mission). At some point I used QoF to become Fetishist and thus get the Fetishist missions here. I get in a war with Vij because I need 100% war score against a rival. This is the last rival mission so I take a big chunk of their land. 

Siam: With CnC and Civil War disaster done, I have the two disasters required to form Siam (the Dai Viet disaster didn't count, FWIW). I finally annex Portugal because I can't have any Western countries owning East Indies land for "Siamese Revolution."

Manchu: Forming Manchu with an Asian capital and being EoC gives Eoc missions. At this point, I have all of my reforms, so that portion goes fairly quickly. I use QoF to switch to Tengri off my just annexed Orochoni vassal that I then released and instantly declared on to give them independence -- I must seem like a very odd ruler to them. That allows me to complete "Formalize Ritual Practices" which required either a Tengri decision or Confucian with 80 harmony and there's no way to quickly get harmony that I am aware of. 

Bulgaria: Bulgaria only has three unique, easy missions, leaving slots 2-4 open for another mission tree. I move my capital to the Cape to get Eastern and South African missions. I finally complete the slot 5 African generic missions here. "Nation Influencer" finally forces me to embrace the last institution and tech up as it requires me to be up to date -- this is why I'm doing this one last of the African regions. There's another mission, "Zheng He Reversed," that I couldn't complete. It requires the country with the most trade power in Hangzhou/Canton/Beijin to have 150 opinion toward us. I tried releasing a big country but all my modifiers and surrounding trade was so powerful they still weren't the most powerful trade power. I would have had to release too much land, most of eastern Asia in fact, to make this work. It's a shame the mission doesn't account for you being the greatest trade power in the node. 

Switzerland: Pretty simple mission tree that requires a religion flip and converting Geneva to my faith. 

Marathas & Deccan: I form Marathas so that they flip me to the Indian tech group, which will allow me to eventually get generic Indian missions. Deccan has quick and easy missions.

Nepal: Even though Nepal doesn't have unique missions, their formation does a mission swap, so I have my capital in North Indian and go Hindu so I get North Indian missions with the Hindu Indian branch. Those require a handful of provinces to be Hindu so I set up the missionaries beforehand to complete after I went Hindu but before I had to accept the Cholula Temple event.

Delhi: Simple, easy.

Punjab: Had one Sikh province remaining and use that to convert via the decision. Punjab, like Nepal, has no unique missions but does do a mission swap so can produce what I set up for it. I put my capital in South India to get the South Indian missions with the Sikh Indian branch. Here, I have to stay Sikh as there's too many provinces to convert for me to be able to hold the Cholula Temple event. 

Scotland: I choose Scotland as they have a relatively early QoF pulse date in April, which I use to go Totemist, then Animist, then Nahuatl again. 

Orissa & Rajputana: Both simple and easy mission trees. India kind of gets hosed on interesting mission trees, I've noticed.

Morocco: Straight forward missions. I do restart as I need to complete them quickly enough because I need to form Kongo before its QoF pulse date.

Kongo: This was a tricky one. Normally with how powerful Kongo missions are you don't really want to wait on it. It requires you to be on par tech and institution wise with Europeans, so I couldn't have done it until I was done with rivals. Moreover, I'm insane and wanted to do both the Catholic and Fetishist religious branches of the Kongo tree. The Catholic branch requires it be the dominant religion, the ruler be catholic, the capital be catholic, and 100 provinces in Africa be catholic. With Portugal and a Kilwa forced to be Catholic, those vassals got me to the 100 Catholic provinces I needed. Unfortunately, the Kongo mission tree starts out Fetishist, but you get an event one day after you form Kongo that lets you go Catholic. The event "Kongo and the Europeans" *says* it will lock the mission tree when it changes the mission to catholic but another event "The King of Kongo Converts" can pop that will give you a second chance and you can choose the Fetishist branch. These are low time events so you really do have to have all the Catholic stuff done in advance. So, I make sure I have all the Catholic requirements fulfilled, get the catholic tree from the first event, then bird for the second event to pop. When it does, I complete the Catholic tree and accept the event to get Fetishist missions. I also trigger a QoF during this time to switch to Fetishist. 

The Fetishist ones kind of suck. They reguire all of the Niger and Guinea regions to be Fetishist, which I've already done when I was Fetishist for a period a few years back. The bigger issue is that the third mission says I cannot have any owned provinces that are Christian. So, I spend the next seven years converting (with the Buddhist cult, great projects, and being a theocracy, I have a lot of missionaries and plenty of missionary strength). I convert entire areas and outlying provinces to Fetishist and when I'm ready I give the rest to vassals (unfortunately, I put them in the HRE, which I shouldn't have done, but at the time I thought I would only be getting them back when I formed the HRE -- I later annexed them and had the bad relations hit hanging around being a bit annoying). 

The amusing thing about this is I get +1 missionary from both paths, simultaneously being the "Defender of the Old Ways" and "Catholic Fortress of Africa." Sorry Kongo, I'll sell anything out for a mission completion. 

Mossi: Easy mission tree. They have an event that enacts a T1 reform which could be useful but not for this campaign. I do take Celestial Empire reform real quick to get the CCR decree then switch back to a Nahuatl T1 when the event pops (after I do the missions requiring it). I have the Fetishist African religion branch here but I can't remember if it was already completed or if I did with Mossi. Either way, it's done now. 

Hausa & Sokoto: Hausa missions are easy but Sokoto adds a slot of new missions, the last one requiring all of the Sahel/Niger/Guinea regions to be Sunni. So, I stay Muslim and get into converting mode. I go theocracy, state everything and turn on missionary edict, get an inquisitor and I birded for zealot on my last ruler. Luckily all the Fetishist conversion was long enough ago for zeal to be gone. For the first time ever, I see one month conversion estimates (though it's closer to two, it's just rounded down). The highest missionary strength percentage I see is 56.7% and I have 12 missionaries at work. Wild! I initially skipped this mission as I thought it'd be too much, then decided to restart back to it. Then my first attempt took three years. Preparing better got me down to less than two years to convert those three regions.

Egypt: Since my conversion went so fast, I can form Egypt because I see their QoF pulse date is 1/1/1814, nine days after my last conversion. Sometimes it just works out. I get a Totemist ruler and switch back to Totemist with the QoF and then eventually Animism and Nahuatl. 

England: I was worried about England for a long time as well as my mana reserves. England has missions that require a certain number of agendas be complete. With the Pirate republic formation, Horde formation, and Indian tech group change, my estates have gone missing mutliple times. And, unfortunately, once you lose an estate, the game loses all stats record of your agenda completions. However, even though the Jains are essentially a Burgher substitude, the England mission tree just saw that I didn't have Burghers and gave me the easy version of the requirements for "Acts of Parliament." I was able to get enough nobility agendas in advance to complete "A House Divided" as the Indian tech group didn't get rid of that estate.

I switched to a Republic briefly to lose the English Monarchy and realized that any mission that unlocked a parliament act now gave me 25 adm/dip/mil mana. If it unlocked two, I got 50 each. The mission tree doesn't indicate this would happen so it was surprising. I figured this meant I wouldn't get the actual issues and meess things up but when I went back to English Monarchy, I had them all. This really helped out my mana situation at the time as I was worrying I wouldn't have enough for needed capital moves later. 

I do have to wait for 40 Man'o'Wars to be completed but when I do I'm able to complete the English version of the mission tree, holding the event that takes you to the GBR or Angevin path until I'm done. I stay off English Monarchy to get easier requirements for two missions then switch back so that I'm not turned into the actual Angevin tag when completing "The Angevin Kingdom." The rest of the mission tree is pretty easy. I do take the HRE emperorship briefly to complete the two HRE related missions and then quickly drop it to someone else. 

Hawaii, Nagpur, Viti & Greece: I form these while waiting for things to finish for the English/Angevin missions. None of them have missions.

Poland: A number of these are locked behind the Commonwealth so I do what's unlocked. I had to wait a while to form this as I had the Krakow area building prosperity for a mission. This was an annoyance for the previous tag formations (I had to dev a lot to get the culture percentage high enough but fortunately I had a ton of dev cost reduction) so I was glad not to have to keep it stated after this. England had a mission like that too, which is why they ended up being done closely together. And yes, I did bird the month ticks to ensure I got +1 each month. At this point, I was immune to  the mental and emotional damage from birding. 

Nubia & Livonia: Just finishing tags up, no new missions. 

Zealandia: Oh, a fun one. Colonial formations cause you to lose all vassals and land in Europe/Africa/Asia. However, a workaround is to give it all to a colony, typically in the Australia area, as you annex all colonies when forming a colonial nation. Because of lack of planning I had to kill my Australian colony (since I had no land to move my capital to New Zealand), then release Sunda as a vassal, give them land so they would form an Australian colony, then kill them to get it. I then used that colony to give all my old world land to. This was a really boring process of clicking the grant province button and moving the mouse over and over. I also fucked up the first time and gave them provinces in New Zealand that I needed for Zealandia formation. Ahhh. I put a zzzz prefix on them the second time. Once that was all given, I clicked the decision and got it all back. Interestingly enough, tributaries in the new world stayed with me. 

Aotearoa, Somalia, Shan: Just forming tags, no missions.

Croatia: Last one before the EGT. "Reclaim Bosnia" required Bosnia and Crotia area to be all of the same religion and they had zeal so I couldn't convert but luckily they were all Christian from when they were a vassal so I just did a quick religion swap to complete that mission. If I didn't finish them earlier, I do have the two mission European mission minor subtree finished here. 

France & Roman Empire: Ah, the end game tag, finally. Why France as my EGT choice? It has the most missions, of course! 

There is a trick to get the Angevin Empire tag by starting the Acts of Union issue before changing to an EGT that doesn't change the T1 reform, but I couldn't do that here as the French Revolution would take me out of being a monarchy. 

France fortunately has branching mission preview tabs. I take the Shogunate again, get their missions from the tab flick, and finally complete them all as I now have the mandate (I believe I had done some earlier when I was Kurland?). I also switch to Dakota culture to get the last two missions from that tree. 

Most of the French missions are not too hard and I've already done most of the prep on them. The main focus is getting the French Revolution started as fast as possible. I take 26 loans, start some wars to get 5+ war exhaustion, placate rulers to go under 0 prestige, triggers rebels on top of my capital (which I moved to since it had revolutionary ideas already), and raise absolutism to 80+. With that, I get 13% progress a month -- not too bad. Side note: I think the french revolution is one of the few ways to truly and fully get rid of the mandate if you have it. 

The revolution mission themselves are not terrible. I have to dev up a lot in the low countries and wipe out two OPMs there as I needed to gain 160ish dev in a short time. Having to get 50 revolutionary zeal worries me as it basically only comes in any quantity from spreading the revolution and I don't have a lot of war targets to hit. However, eventually I get the Napolean event and that ends the revolution and maxes out my zeal -- I didn't even know about that. Though I guess most people aren't well versed in revolution mechanics and events, heh. 

The last thing holding me up is making sure I have 35 barracks in Italy (I forgot to prebuild that). I drop Espionage and Offensive to grab Naval and Trade for two of the missions (possibly the worst idea groups, thanks Revolution!). 

Then, in just the way the real French Revolution ended, I adopt Aztec traditions and went back to my pagan roots. This kicked me out of the locked revolutonary reform so that I could later become the HRE emperor. Like with England and Poland, I had to have Mexico prosperous but that was the only real concern. The rest was mostly just devving and dealing with the horrific mission tree view now. I take High American tech at the end so that I can complete the Obsidian province mission and create three large Sunset colonies for the final Aztec mission I had left. 

I had to become Emperor one final time, which also involved getting four electors to like me. That was a little tricky as there was only one elector and I had to release them as Catholics while I was Catholic or I couldn't get the opionion high enough fast enough. Some trial and error and I managed to get four with high enough opinion. I used Dutch Elective Monarchy to get IA and finish the third reform (bye Napolean!), banking two IA events. I then used the Join Empire button for 100 more IA, taking the 4th reform, and used that long held Georgian decision to take me out of the HRE and put my capital in Tigranakert. I switch back to Nahuatl one last time and formed the Roman Empire. Once again I could use the Join Empire button and since there was still about half the land not in the HRE, I got 100 IA (I didn't even need those banked events). I was ready to Renavato Imperii.

HRE: The last tag. The missions were pretty straight forward. I now had way too much unrest reduction to switch Animist so I went Catholic to take DotF and complete the last couple missions. With the use of trade protectorates, I saw I was down to two countries away from a world conquest in September 1820. I figured I might as well try. I attack Kazakh which is a quick war and then Kilwa, which is entirely on Madagascar. Fortunately, they just have a level 1 fort and some troops and with a couple restarts, I'm able to get transports in, kill the troops, and carpet siege fast enough to finish the last war and WC on 12-28-1820. 

In closing, this was an epic campaign that I had a ton of fun with. I know a lot of people don't like EU4 missions but I do and I certainly have had my fill of them now. There were some mission subtrees that I just couldn't get, even though I had setup (like Alcheringa and Coptic) because they weren't culture related or because it made more sense to choose a bigger tree and there were only so many nations I could use to get fresh missons from tag formation. With Coptic and Alcheringa occupying slot 1 and most of the other trees using slot 1, there just wasn't an opportunity for them. Others I couldn't change the tech group to or just had no possible nations to form them with (like the Arabian mission minor tree or Berber missions minor tree). Likewise, I couldn't get the Sunni Indian religion subtree because I was all out of tags to do so with. All in all, though, I think I was pretty successful. 

Complain that the late game is too boring? This is the campaign for you. And now I am done with EU4 (probably... maybe... we'll see).