The reason I felt I needed to cheat was the current state of Europa Universalis V, where it is extremely difficult to keep peace with your neighbors. As a player, you tend to make your provinces rich, which causes neighbors over the centuries to start desiring your land. Unlike EU4, you aren't being told which lands, and there is no diplomatic action you can do against that. Even if they have been allied with you for centuries, they'll break the alliance and eventually attack you. The only thing that works is forming a defensive league, which the AI has less tendency to break (instead they needlessly keep voting on changing the rules back and forth). As playing Portugal is nearly impossible if Castile / Spain keeps attacking you, I used the console commands to form a defensive league with them at the start of the game.

Compared to my EU4 game as Portugal, where I ended up conquering most of Morocco, in EU5 I was actually weaker than Morocco, and only conquered Granada. I have a small vassal on Moroccan territory, but that is it. So most of my efforts have been directed towards improving my economy, and then using the gains to finance exploration and colonization. It is a sort of a cheat that I already know the Americas exist and can work towards discovering them, while the rest of the world is still ignorant about that fact.

In this game, this focus on exploration worked rather well in my first century. There are a number of islands in the southern part of the Atlantic, like the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde. In the Age of Discovery they become important staging point for discovering America. In this game, at the end of the Age of Renaissance, I control all of these islands, thus having an advantage for future exploration and colonization. I also managed to explore the way around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, discovering Madagascar. However, colonization is very slow before the Age of Discovery, and I don't have the colonial range to get there yet. The reason I was able to explore that much was some luck with events: You can send a character to explore somewhere, but normally don't have access to specialized explorers before unlocking them with an Age of Discovery technology. Explorers get a 0.5 bonus to exploration progress, which means that even the worst explorer is between twice and three times as fast as a non-explorer in the Age of Renaissance. But I was lucky to get an explorer by an event several times, and that really got my exploration much further than anybody else's.

Up to version 1.0.7, everybody always went for Centralization as one of the most important values of your nation. That increases crown power, which increases your income from trade and taxes, and keeps the estates in check. In version 1.0.8 Centralization comes with a huge negative impact on the loyalty of subjects. So I had to reverse course and am now trying to move towards Decentralization, as a centralized colonial empire doesn't really work anymore. Right now I can't even annex my vassal in Granada, as they are disloyal to me due to the Centralization penalty. It seems the idea is that countries with lots of colonies or vassals decentralize, while Centralization is better for playing tall without subjects.

I reached the start of the Age of Discover in good shape. And then the New World institution spawned in Lisboa, giving me a further advantage for discovering the Americas. I am having a lot of fun with this game, and am looking forward to see how all this colonization gameplay is going to work out.