Watched bits and pieces of Florryworry recently (who seems to have gone off the deep end) and all the mission stuff seems ridiculous aka you get huge amounts of claims and even cores sometimes easily. So blobbing seems way easier than it used to be.
Seems like that was the moment the game released, tbh. At this point in time, there's 2 mods I'd recommend people to play depending on their preference. MEIOU, which minimizes mana as much as it can and goes the simulationist path with pops and the like, and Anbennar, which takes nu-Paradox design and brings it to its natural conclusion featuring loads of map painting and ridiculously strong missions trees, but accompanied by bucketloads of flavor (so that playing a country is aking to following a story). Paradox clearly fell in love with Anbennar to the point where they copy stuff from them, so that's where the game is gradually moving towards.
institutions are, in essence, the old tech groups in MEIOU – they reworked the spread mechanic, and getting one as a non-westener was difficult to the point some savage AI was unlikely to achieve it (basically, you had to pass various reforms in your country to allow for such institutions to be adopted, said reforms requiring a high degree of state bureaucracy and control, which take a long time and concentrated effort to raise).
try anbennar mod. only few selected nations can really blob, and when you do, you're struck with absolutely cataclysmic catastrophes, most of whose can take you back to square 0, or further back.
no, that's just common paradox behaviour. they do the same with stellaris, copying mods and selling back their features years later. i don't follow, but i can't see why they shouldn't be doing this with hoi and ck too.
depends. i recall some versions where getting them as westerners had the lowest probability. it must have been around when players were forced to have half their advisors spawn as females. everywhere through the world. totally accurate.
Can still be a bit useful to reduce coalitions in a region if you have the diplo slots available.
The coalition system is a poorly designed mechanic that often makes conquest-focused gameplay miserable. To succeed, you have to resort to exploiting the system by carefully timing your attacks and striking nations before they can band together again. It also forces you to constantly wage war against different culture groups to avoid triggering larger coalitions. This approach makes map-painting more of a tedious grind than an enjoyable or challenging experience.
Oh I spent most of the run doing this, albeit only around the Med, it's just that towards the end I needed to pick up the pace. In the end I still have 80 years left as Rome, so I probably didn't need to speed up quite so much. The AE would take about 300 years to tick down at this point..
