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Starting off the game I intended not to bother with the Antigonids. I played (and abandoned) the Ptolemies twice before: the Antigonid armies sent against you were quite weak but occupying the area takes too many resources. Instead I declared war on Cyrene and took them over quickly.
After this, I had a few short turns of peace to build up the economy. Those were disrupted by a simultaneous attack of desertic independents (leading to the emergence of a Nasamones faction) as well as an attack by Nubia. The Nubians invaded me, I invaded them back, but at that point in the game I couldn't afford to sustain huge armies so couldn't take their capital, especially since troop recruitment and movement is difficult that far south. Aethiopia tried to attack me as well. Finally the Nasamones were eliminated, and I made peace with Aethiopia and Nubia out of war exhaustion. The two of them then proceeded to declare war on each other, which is just fine by me!
A few more turns of peace, then war with the Antigonids. I grabbed quite a few objective locations from them, and from a distracted Judea who happened to be fighting them too. They got pushed north out of their homeland but still existed in a rump state. Meanwhile Macedonia swallowed up the rest of them, then we got a really long stretch of peace.
It's at this point my economy really got rolling. I stumbled into getting some really good combinations of trade buildings, so the money and manpower started flowing in. Trading tents are incredibly powerful when all the bonuses start kicking in! With a reasonable amount of micromanagement (I didn't get too hung up on long term plans, but I just built whatever seemed to give what I needed at the time) I started accruing a lot of money. But I hadn't really figured out how to optimize the culture vs decadence balance so I couldn't quite get into the top tier. I couldn't progress to a Tier 3 nation.
In hopes of finally getting that final token in Greece, I declared war on Macedon. Now, for some reason the Romans really liked me in that playthrough. I got an alliance with them pretty easily. This is where I finally got a lot of use out of my navy which I had built up for legacy. In a long and grinding war, I took a small chunk of land in Pamphylia as well as most of Greece, barring a Macedonian holdout. The Romans weren't too useful most of the time, but they happened to have a big army with a real fighting chance that had just fought Epirus, and they handled a tough Macedonian army that was causing me trouble. At this point I decided to call it quits and we got peace. Finally I was in Tier 3!
Also, I broke my alliance with rome and used full cooperation instead. I was worried that they were too happily garrisoning all my provinces, and it seems they had enough trouble on their own. I still had a high 80s low 90s relation with them here, and would prefer they stay around so no other more bellicose power got their resources. Also, I got tired of having to see their endless civil war during turn resolution.
After that war, I further tuned my economy. Manpower was never an issue (maybe something to do with a lot of health buildings?) despite the Ptolemaic manpower penalty, and gold continued to increase, but I was a bit short on metal so I took care of that.
In another stroke of luck, Roman held Crete, which contained two objective hexes for me, suffered a revolt by independents! The Roman AI at this game was plagued with endless usurpers and foreign enemies so did not spare any army there. I looked the other way, and once they took care of the Romans, I came in and swooped up two easy objectives without having to deal with the Romans!
The Seleucids declared war on me, but they really had no military to back it up with, and with my abundant resources it was only a matter of time before I beat them back (though I only knocked about some of their armies and grabbed a few insignificant locations). Seriously, I could not spend the money, manpower and metal as fast as I was earning it! Even more conveniently, there were several objective spaces held by the Nabatenes from the game beginning, my client kingdom. As my spaces surrounded theirs, they slowly gave them up and I got two tokens from that alone. Hence, some golden ages.
After I dealt with them, I prepared for a second war on Macedon. At this point I had 6 or 7 armies ready to go, and I would have built more if only for my lack of generals. The golden age definitely helped with that, and the extra military XP was nice. It was a long war with some setbacks but eventually my overly expensive, ridiculously overfunded forces took all of Asia minor. I also got some island objectives from them.
At this point in the game, Macedon was in 2nd for legacy, so I think by beating them back and grabbing so much of their land, they were unable to keep up and I could take the lead easily. A few turns after the end of that war, the victory screen finally popped up on turn 158.
Just to see if I could, I played an extra turn and got the Romans as a client state!
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