So I wanted to get 'Academical', and tried the exodus strategy, and let me tell you, this was one of my most painful playthroughs ever. I had to restart like 30 times for everything to go according to plan. After numerous tries I stopped trying to get anyone to support my independence, since no one really wanted to even with a diplo rep advisor so I just waited for Ottomans to declare, and when they did I went over my force limit with mercs to gain liberty desire. Unfortunately, they focused me like 3 times in a row after restarts, but when they finally wiped Byzantium I had over 50% LD and was able to declare an independence war, which was swiftly won cuz the Ottomans killed them. Still, I wasn't able to secure any alliances. The next step also required a lot of luck. Basically I waited a while for one of the berber nations to be weak enough for me to no cb them, and take a province within a coring range. Then I full annexed Tlemcen, who Morocco reduced to an OPM and waited for colonial ideas. It's worth mentioning that it toom another three restarts before I was able to gain a foothold in north africa before Ottomans killed me. But after I colonized Cape Verde it was easy for a little while. I colony hopped to North America, since I recently did a colonial playthrough as a South American tribe and wanted to try another part of the world. In the meantime I lost one of my african provinces to Morocco and another one I just gave up to the rebels. Everything was fine for a little while, with me owning a big part of the coastline when Spain arrived to make their first colonial nation next to me. For the first time in hundreds of hours, they for some reason decided to skip South America or the Carribean and wait straight for NA. This forced me to switch to Protestantism, because it didn't matter that I had my capital in the new world, I still would be affected by the treaty of T something. Doing that turned them hostile, and without being able to secure alliances I lost 3 wars to them. They settled for cape verde and all of my other colonies in the first war, but I was force to give up like 10 provinces from North America in the second. However after that it was pretty easy, since France trashed them in Naples independence war and after I got more land I was able to rival them. This in turn enabled me to ally Great Britain, and it was just sitting idly and colonizing from there. France somehow got a PU over them 10 years ago, but it doesn't really matter anyway since I already got the achievement and I'm strong enough on my own anyway. The bad thing is that they're allied to the Ottomans with 430 forcelimit, so my lategame plan to reclaim Greece had to be abandoned. Oh and I of course culture switched to Greek, in the very beginning, before doing anything