So, to get this out of the way, i am national Thai, just got myself to play my own country(Ayutthaya) after a very long time -- like since patch 1.8 i played this one game as ayu til i got malaca and discovered that there's literally no incentive to still be ayu and not switch to sunni indo sultanate at all (their nat ideas are so great compare to ayu lol), so i just leaved it there. fast forward to the current patch, i came back bc i wanted to try my country once again with the mandate dlc. but now that i'm a bit older though, I find that not only is it boring to play in SEA, the map it self is hilariously atrocious. i mean the size of provinces, the terrain, the tropical modifier is just out of place. to be a bit more specific -- and i will only focus on thailand bc of my regrettable lack of geographical understanding on my neighbor:



-the nothern path of thailand, in game Chiangmai and Chiangrai should be mountainous not tropical, yes there are lots of trees there but the forest is of warm climate not tropical. the average temperature is 25 cc(from wiki) but if i have to choose between forest, mountain, or tropical area. i would most definitely not pick tropical. this has big impact bc historically Chiangmai is a very contested area between Siamese and Burmese state as the terrain is easily defensible and is one of a few passable terrain army wise between the 2 states ( more on this later.) A whopping -2 and plus -1 from fort would nicely simulate that.



-central thailand should be plain or farmland. ingame, it is mostly tropical with 2 provinces being farmland. the fertile flooded plain of central thailand is literally why the kingdoms there grew out to be very influential in the mainland peninsula. are there forest in central thai ? yes of course there are, but i would not expect it to be so out of proportion to this scale and most definitely NOT TROPICAL. Forest ? fine. tropical ? wtf.



-south thailand IS tropical. it is covered in rain forest pass the southern most tip of thailand to the malaya peninsula. that's where i would expect tropical terrain.



-Northeastern path of Thailand (from Korath to half of Lanxang) should be dryland. i dont mind savannah too much but again, definitely not tropical. to my mind, this come across as Paradox thinking that all of SEA is tropical rain forest. well it isn't.



-Terrains between Burma and Thailand, and between Vietnam and Laos to my understanding should be unpassable except for a few 'key' province that is the pass. kind of like the 'Thermopylae of SEA' as there are natural barrier of deep forest and mountain for most of the frontier.



-I'm not sure about this but aren't the mountain tribes north of Burma a bit too strong? they each posess like 5k army at game start. i imagine it would be a bit hard for Burmese empire to form with that.



-Buddhist religion bonus is just wtf from the mechanic to the bonus. this i'm sure has been throughly discussed elswhere, but if you ask me, i would just throw out the mechanic and just made the religion be super tolerant from game start and that's it. That for me is the only aspect of Buddhism that affect the political atmosphere of early modern SEA. i literally never heard of any major revolt that revolve around Buddhism at all. That, to me, is a big plus in it self.



Anyway, writing this, the underlying problems has come to my mind; there simply is too few province in SEA to represent it correctly. right now there simply are no any resemblance of any mountain ranges at all. i know this sounds like some crazy nationalistic demand at work but hear me out: Thailand alone is twice the size of the UK (if the wiki is to be trusted) but receive twice fewer the provinces, not to mention the whole of SEA. how can you expect to have an immersive gameplay of any SEA minor with that ? it took centuries before Thailand, Burma, or Vietnam to unify into powerful kingdoms while in game it took me 15 years to unify Thailand. i dont even want any special mechanic but god damn it just dont make every province of my country tropical rain forest please lol



i dont think my demand is too much work for paradox really. it just boils down to splitting provinces and changing terrain but please correct me if i'm wrong. mod is an option but i think these kind of thing should be in vanilla anyway.



If you want a more academic type of writing concerning SEA and especially concerning Indonesia and burma in eu4 i suggest you search in reddit. there is one where the op even site his source from academic book. it's a very good read even if you dont care too much about SEA. (i dont know if i'm allowed to link reddit post here or not)