I just beat the game as Poland last night, had a completely different strategy though. Germany was actually one of the last European countries for me to go after. I realized pretty quickly the game considers Denmark/Sweden to be a land border, so Poland is considered not to have sea access to the Atlantic Ocean and therefore can't colonize West Africa (which was my original plan). Figured the first thing I needed to do was resolve that, so went south. Took out Slovakia, then Hungary, and the plan was Serbia but Croatia got involved defending Hungary and was weakened so took them out instead, to breach the Mediterranean. Took Belarus, then gradually most of the Balkans (kept Greece and Romania on board for a while as both had extremely high ally scores with us). Took Libya, started working on North Africa, then parts of the Arabian Peninsula, which skyrocketed my GDP and could steamroll from there. Us, USA, China, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia were in kind of a 6-way stalemate at the end (two-tiered stalemate, us/USA/China all about equal, and Japan/Indonesia/Australia all about equal) but when I went to work on the smaller nations, it gave USA and China no one to attack but each other, and they eventually whittled each other down enough army-wise that I could put the finishing touches on by just going after USA (I already owned Canada so it was an easier land border to go through than going after China). In the end, only 4 countries were left - us in 1st, China still at about 55% completion, USA still at about 35% completion, and Indonesia as the one smaller nation I hadn't yet gone after when I noticed USA/China were low enough.
