[ProPain]

Played a quick Holland game to get a feel for the options:

pro:
Holland is a trade and economy beast.
I was amazed by this.in no time I had 5 merchants at all CoT's I could find. Research went fast, after 20 years (iirc) I could reach all CoT's and had 5 merchants sitting at each. Getting competed away was extremely rare so I was sitting on 5 merchants that I couldn't sent anywhere for ages. Never had that with other countries

Money was hilarious because of it. After a few years I checked the ledger and I was no 5 or something in income while only on 2 provinces and not owning a CoT. Ridiculous. As a consequence you can quickly build provinces improvements.

stability extremely easy to maintain
A consequence of the high economy and low province number. Getting back from stab 2 to 3 takes 1 or 2 months. Really fast

cons
In PU from the start
The PU is a pain. When the game started I saw Burgundy had the conquer Hainaut mission so I thought I'd be out of the PU in no time. Wrong, B just sat on it's hands and I had to wait for 20 years for the Hainaut monarch to die.

This makes for boring gameplay: you can't make alliances or royal marriages and you can only declare war on your PU partner. Soon you'll have merchants everywhere. You've built all buildings you can and a decent army. At that point you can only fast forward hoping something will happen.


strategy options
I think there are 2 options
1- sit peacefully, ride out the PU and race to Conquest of the new world
2- declare war on hainaut before you even unpause the game.

Peace option
I started playing peacefully but wasnt focussing on CofNW. Research is blazing fast so my guess is when you do focus you can reach the new world ages before anyone else and block hugs coast areas.

War option
If you send a DoW from the getgo, Hainaut will have no alliances yet. Safest way to do it. You'll take a +2 stab hit because you have no CB but wth the Holland tech rate: who cares. Hainaut is onlu a one province state so annexing it is an option, chances are Burgundy won't like it though so you'll need a sizeable army to deter them. Also you'll get 4 infamy from annexation and the HRE won't like it but that's a small price to pay for one extra province and freedom of choice