Hi,



I played for a fair amount of hours in eu4, and i agree that back in 1.11, and before, you really could take massive amount of land in early game, with little counter back, once you learn about coalition-truce dancing, vassal feeding, spam claims, etc ...



In 1.12, the answer of the dev team is : massive increase of coring / annexing cost (+ 68% in first case, + 150% or so in the second case). You know what, it's not the good way to limit our conquest. Why ? Because all we do is basically tied to this ressource (Monarch Power). Expand, Developp, getting new tech, improve stability, convert culture, annex vassals, getting new ideas, inflation, war exhaustion, events, etc etc ... all of this is tied to this only resource. The 2 other main ressource, gold and Manpower, are here mainly for the warfare.



By increasing so much the cost of of coring / annexing, you basically limit the number of thing a plyaer could do in the same time frame.If you have 1000 of each MP, in 1.11 you can do much more thing than in 1.12. This not only slow down the expansion, it slow down the whole game, the number of thing a player will do. If you're low on MP and behind in tech, there's no point to DOW someone. If you lag behind in tech, you don't unlock new buildings, or gameplay options. If you don't expand or developp you having nothing more to manage.



What would be a better way to limit the early expansion ? Instead of making expansion much more costly in MP, you should have make it more difficult. How ? More rebels, more events about angry newly conquered popultion, more autonomy in new conquered lands, more overextension, limiting the vassal-core feeding, more AE while making claims, Coalitions more consistent (too easy to play around right now), make vassal more reluctant to be annexed (Like automatically raise Liberty desire to 50% while annexing and make him search for indepance support) ...



There's plenty of way to make early blob harder and limiting the way player can expand quickly. But increasing MP cost is basically limiting the option a player have, make randomness of ruler even more frustrating.



Europa Universalis have very few things to do during peace time. 1.12 make peace time even longer, and it would be a good things if you could developp your country during this time, but you can't. Because you're not at peace cuz your Manpower is depleted, or too much AE, or short of money. You're at peace because even if you conquer lands, you can't handle it. Result : you do nothing and wait for your monarch point.



EDIT : TL;DR I want to fight some enemy, not a mana pool.