bavaria is very important because it has a mission giving CCR, allowing me to core in only 6 months for a while. manchu has some semi-useful missions giving siege ability and some other military stuff like land maintenance which is kinda useful
thanks! mostly its just hordes being very strong. i did a big writeup on reddit (linked in the video description) if you're interested in some more depth
to farm innovativeness, AI never picks maritime so you can get free innovativeness by picking then and then deleting it if you have a few thousand dip points lying around like I did