u/TheWombatOverlord

Likely means announcement of that game sometime during Gamescom?

Nearly 100 years into the game, among the various powers around Europe only 2 had any buildings generating control. One is Castile, using one unique Lieutenancy building, and Mamluks having 1 Local Governor, and neither had any real road investment around their secondary control sources. None of these had any subjects they made themselves, only really England and France had any substantial subjects and those all existed already at game start.

Low Control is a massive malus to any country. In the current patch low control heavily empowers the estates, siphoning wealth from the Crown. Not pictured here but France, Britannia, Ottomans, Muscovy have Crown Power under 10%. Essentially no Great Powers or Regional Powers have Crown Power above 20%. Even without the estates, reduced profit margins on buildings makes it much easier for constructed, profitable buildings to actually reduce a country's tax base.

Additionally the devs have toyed with changes which further aim to punish low control. Control effecting Research I believe will be gotten rid of, but it still impacts Complacency.

All of this is why Control is super important, but as the player we have super powerful tools is essentially trivialize control. Local Governors are good at creating a multipolar state, and subjects allow expansion without the negative effects of low control. If the player has access to these tools, but the AI is bad or unable to use them, any negative effect of control then becomes a weight on the AI and an advantage to the player.

Potential improvements:

AI should be much more aggressive with Local Governors, and build roads around them similar to their capital. This is the least impactful change from the player's perspective.

The second big lever we can give the AI, making the AI better at subjects. This does become tricky though, as we likely do not want countries which were historically centralized to balkanize on the first month tick. This will require maybe changing rules around creating subjects in core territory, or maybe what cores even are. Theres alot of moving parts here that are hard to get right, but it will probably mostly effect the AI rather than the player's experience.

Finally we can maybe reduce the harms of low control. I personally think the biggest harm of low control comes from estate enrichment. 1.0 the lack of control deleted money both from the player and the estates, but since 1.1 I believe, Low Control functions as an estate tax haven. Reverting that change would essentially allow the AI to tolerate its lack of skill a bit more. I think reducing the maluses from low control also benefits expansion and reduces the current necessity of coring, culture conversion, etc. This is probably the biggest change they could make though, as it effects estate enrichment and the economy very significantly for players and the AI.

What do you all think? Should the AI be made better at controlling their countries, should low control have a less punishing effect? Should they do all the above, some of the above, or something else entirely?