Which was the historical situation, unless I'm very much mistaken. Absent the factions, or some other throttling mechanism a.i. Ming was a devastating juggernaut that overran central Asia (and sometimes more) much like a.i. Castille generally runs over N. Africa in the current patch.
You're very much mistaken. Ming did, or tried to do, a ton of stuff right at the beginning of the period - in the 1399-1425 period. Then it went downhill. In EU3, it's the opposite: they can't do anything at the start of the game, but once they've got the magical "sliders" into position they can kind of sort of play, although still in terms of raw power the average OPM in the HRE leaves them in the dust. Start the game, make your first slider change, leave the computer on while you have lunch, come back and make your next slider change. Secondly it's the opposite of history in the sense that in real life, early Ming had the political will to expand, but it's armies and navies proved incapable of holding their conquests (armies), or too expensive to be practical in the long term (navies). That has the potential for game play that's both fun and historically accurate, with interesting choices - imagine if you could build Zheng He's fleet, but have to consider will the rewards be worth the cost? But instead of that, with that HUGE opportunity for mixing historical accuracy and interesting game play, Paradox put a ton of resources into making a mini-game that's the opposite of both.
If you study Ming's ahistorical expansion in versions of EU3 prior to
Divine Wind, it shows a lot of flaws with the way Paradox models countries, and particularly Asia. For example, there's a general issue with EU3 that making your country bigger makes it not just more powerful but more stable, even in the 1400's. Now Paradox spent a lot of effort making Ming unplayable, I mean, sorry, not technically unplayable, just mind-numbingly excruciatingly boring to play and totally uncompetitive in multi-player. They could have spent that time adding game systems that dealt with the fundamental issues - why does our model make a huge country in the 1400's extremely stable? maybe we should give huge countries, especially huge countries with low government tech, stability issues: not just Ming, but any huge country. That would also make the game more fun for all of the single-player players, who normally just quit half way through the game because it gets so completely unchallenging as your country gets larger.
Paradox, and their supporters, keep saying that Ming conquering all Asia is the problem. Then you actually study the problem yourself, and notice that almost all of SE Asia (still) starts the game without forts in their provinces. Surprise, surprise, Ming quickly expands across SE Asia. Yes, just fixing the forts wouldn't solve the entire problem by itself, although it does slow down AI Ming some (mostly because they lose troops to attrition while sieging forts in "tropical" provinces with huge armies
hmy
. But fixing this is the obvious first step to fixing the bigger problem, and there are more steps like it. (Maybe all of Mongolia should have more nomads than
the Crimea? Maybe we should revisit East Asian cultures and see whether China+Manchuria+Korea+Japan are actually as culturally homogenous as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark?) If you can't be bothered to fix it, if you can't be bothered to pay enough attention to the vanilla EU3 setup in east Asia to
notice it, you have no business saying "this huge anti-fun anti-historical accuracy code is the only way to stop AI Ming from expanding ahistorically."
