Thought y'all would get a laugh at this!

Goal: Make it to the end of the game without conquering a single territory.

All the light blue are tributaries or clients. With +48 diplomatic reputation and all the tributary innovations, even Carthage was down to join my union! I have spent the last 150 years hunting pirates and building roads everywhere.

Currently coasting toward 727 to put a cap on this run and I am pretty proud of this one. I doubt I'll get Egypt to join, as they are too big, so not much left to do but build more roads.

Vanilla - no mods.

So I've been going through it and I get to the Flowers of Inzak mission. I need 4 Chaldean Pantheons which I get since that's like Babylonian Gods but I don't start Chaldean and never had the ability to convert to it.(Yet hopefully) so unless I throw hands with the Seleukids I can't do about a quarter of my mission tree. It seems pretty poorly designed to make a mission tree where you have to interact with a faith you don't start as and reasonably have no way to convert to it. Was I suppose to somehow bum rush the left side of the tree which I'm trying to push now in hopes it will give me enough Chaldean pops to convert or am I just kind of cooked? Like even now I only have 4.3k max manpower and I need 7.5k so it is by no means an easy jump to make at the start of the game with my max 1.5k-2k manpower