I'm still on my Mecklenburg run, my overall second game of EU5. It is an ironman run to be able to get achievements, and I plan to play until the end in 1836. But bugs and changes to the game did have some weird consequences to my game. For example there was a now fixed bug in which the HRE emperor with the "demand unlawful territory" ended up getting random provinces for himself. In my game that gave Bohemia a north sea harbor, and it is now rivaling England in the colonization of North America.

Having quit my first run after becoming emperor of the HRE without wanting to, I maybe should have made some different strategic choices as Mecklenburg. Instead, in between the player country having a tendency to expand faster than AI countries, and my decision based on history to make Mecklenburg protestant, I found myself leading the protestant side in the religious war of the HRE, won, and ended up as the emperor again. At least this time I wasn't just elected randomly.

In hindsight, I found out that in my first game with Holland, I had by chance avoided a country specific disaster, the hook and cod wars, which frequently triggers if the ruler dies in the plague and the heir is weak. In my second game, I made it to the Age of Absolutism, only to find that by choosing absolutism over liberalism I was hit by another brutal disaster, called court and country. I must say, I'm not impressed with the design of disasters in EU5. They consist of a series of punishing events, and don't feel as if you as the player can do much about them. If a good game is a series of interesting decisions, the EU5 disasters don't live up to that standard.