Chill Iran

Seeing as I had zero energy to get Persia into any trouble, I went ahead and just watched the great powers massacre each other on speed 5. The germans had dismantled the french along with their japanese/chinese and italian allies, and the ai generated map was absolute trash, so I got my RP on and console commanded a decent peace treaty. Germany then got into a fight with Britain for world domination, and 90% of the war took place in Africa. Here's a still from that period, though land was constantly changing hands.

Japan stayed loyal to Germany and fought the British with their KMT puppet. Obviously the British went ahead and stomped them, which probably cost Germany the war.

As Iran, I just sat out of conflict as much as I could and tried to keep my economy from imploding. Had no interest in expansion and just played tall while ignoring my sheik puppets in the gulf. I cheesed a conquest of Azerbajan despite it being friendly with Japan and Germany by conquering all the provinces at the same time.

Accidentally selected the systematic extermination decision at one point but our minorities recovered.The only militants who were ever a threat were afghan nationalists and so the country had very little reforms. Despite no school system I was still able to get decent literacy though.

I was only able to recover # 8 spot in industry in the last 10 years, as our experimentation with laissez faire ended in depression. I had no sphere leader most of the game but ended up under the UK, despite this I still had so many shortages in supplies that I was constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. Was #1 supplier of airplanes, which were in high demand, but the game didn't give a shit. Oil and start-and-stop subsidies saved my ass.

Germany was king for a while, but the decades long great war with the UK diminished them quite a bit. The US got involved in nothing and ended up becoming # 1 as usual.

After the first great war (France, Russia, Netherlands vs Italy, Japan and Germany), where I consoled Italy into gaining Tunisia and controlling a french-based algerian client state, Italy decided to ditch Germany for the UK so they could gobble up the italian minors under the german sphere. I also split Congress Poland between Germany and Galicia, since Galicia performed suprisingly well and I figured a socialist Germany would be more lenient on a polish state.

The UK didn't dismantle Germany but I had them take over a bunch of their colonies anyway because otherwise the 20 year long great war would have been way too anticlimatic. I let Germany keep the areas with substantial german migration. Cote d'Ivoire is a puppet of Germany cuz I thought it'd be cool.

The AI gave Japan Primorye by itself, but I added Kamkatcha and a Yakut puppet state because they completely annihilated the Russians in the first great war, paving the way to Moscow through Chinese corpses. I felt like they deserved it.