DDRJake said: From the dev diary, just above said change:



An issue in EU4 that we've long recognised is that conquest is almost always a good idea: you are able to immediately get a financial benefit from land, buff up your own forcelimit, size, trading potential, while at the same time denying your foes that land. We've been wanting to change this so that one has to consider what they conquer with a bit more forethought and with that we turn to your States.



The motivation behind both the corruption from large expansion and missionaries/culture change in states only is all here: to prevent taking more land from simply always being the most powerful thing for you to do for your nation. If you see land of a different culture group, different religion and undesirable for making a state and core, then you should have to consider if making a direct land grab is the best move, as opposed to subjugating it, forcing trade power from the owner, establishing a powerful ally there, investing in tolerance of heretics/heathens etc.



Now, some people may not agree with the motivation behind the changes, and that's fine, but not agreeing with them doesn't mean they're not there. Whenever we do so called anti blobbing changes like these, the feedback is always prominent, and we do listen and communicate with the community.



Some changes are simply unpopular, that goes for most walks of life. We didn't put these changes in thinking "people are gonna love this", we did it to break the stale strategy of direct conquest always being best. Click to expand...

DDRJake mentioned how the changes in 1.26 were done to make it so that taking provinces wasn't always a good thing. It is from the following quote in the balance change mega-thread.But after playing around a bit more in this patch (after I did a Sunni one faith WC in it ), I have come to the conclusion that playing wide (the taking provinces style of playing) has actually been buffed if you know what you are doing.This has to do with two (other) changes in 1.26:Trade companies don't count towards the corruption penalty from territoriesMing now has less tributariesYou see, in 1.25 Ming was either directly (its own provinces) or indirectly (through tributaries) in control of a lot of trade company provinces. Expanding in trade company regions was already strong in 1.25, but Ming was there to slow down your expansion there somewhat.In 1.26, less provinces are protected by Ming. Also since Ming now has less tributaries, getting Ming to 0 mandate can now be done a lot faster. This allows you to acquire the trade company provinces from Ming a lot easier as well. The ducats you get from these regions can easily fund -1 corruption payment for the rest of the game. So if you plan for it properly, your mid game can be a lot stronger than in 1.25. This allows you to take on several countries at once a lot earlier, thus allowing you to blob out of control earlier as well.So the changes in 1.26 actually have the opposite effect of nerfing the conquest of provinces if you know how to play well. The 1.25 strategy of blobbing into trade company regions for a power base to conquer the rest of the world basically got even stronger due to the Ming nerf.Ironically, these changes are only hurting the beginner/average skill level player, while making the game easier for higher skilled players. Since lower skilled players might not even know about changing the capitol to Oceania for trade companies, or will still struggle in a war vs Ming.tl;dr: Although DDRJake mentioned that his intention was to nerf conquest/taking provinces this patch, 1.26 actually buffed it. But only for high skilled players, while increasing the difficulty for lower skilled players.