Just a little reminder to every one beliving Ming is OP in eu4. If you go by the facts they would need an insane amount of buffs. Atleast for about half the games time periode...
1. Population, funny thing about this is that the population ratio during history remained some what the same, China had about double the population of western Europe. By game values in 1444 China has about 1.4k development and western Europe +3.4k development (depending on how western Europe is defined) meaning China should habe about 5 times as many development points as it has in game right now.
2. Technology, looking at it historicaly is rather hard for me especialy since the techs them selve and their description are rather euro centric especialy the naval and army part of it. But judging by a few of them Ming starting at 3 3 3 seems somewhat off. Like admin 12 is about a centralized bureaucratic government which fits them quite well and mil 6 beeing the introduction of hand guns making this tech also not to far fetched for Ming since they were introduced there about 200 years before. But better not open this can of wroms since this will get rather messy quickly and rather look at their in game capabilitys to buy techs.
Unless you rush institutions it takes the first 3 institutions about 150 years each to travel down to China making the amount of pp they got to spend to keep up with their techs increasingly painful. So why isn´t Ming falling behind like crazy? Must be the op advisors and tributarys right? A tributary needs atleast 33 dev to give you 1 pp/year so lets say 33 dev = 1 pp/year, since you can´t get the +3 pp/month from power porjection since there are no rivals for you and therefore no way to get above 50 Ming needs about 1.2k development worth of tributarys just to account for this bonus which every european major should have. (Sure the AI hasn´t but the AI sucks) so tributarys won´t account for too much of a tech advantage, atleast for the AI. The +3 from advisors gets pretty much set to 0 since from 1550 when the tech cost is at +100% they get canceld out by the base gain making Ming effectivly a european country with halved ruler stats at best until printingpress hits in 1650. And by this time their units soon start to be worse than the european ones by default and the Majors them self should have atleast half of Mings development and lvl. 2 advisors. But why don´t they fall behind in Tech? They don´t fight to many wars and don´t develop to much.
In the time between techs you get 624pp just by base gain and a lvl 1 advisor and since the lucky ai rather has a 4 4 4 for their leader benchmark they get about 2 techs worth of pp during the time they can buy 1 tech. So with all the pp the europeans spent on development, inflation, warexhaustion and whatsoever Ming just buys their techs and once they are at european prices again they are maybe 1 or 2 techs behind but since they continue their strategy of not doing anything they just close the distance quickly. Keep in mind that they performe worse than pre institutions from 1510 till about 1650. (+60% tech cost fix) The only thing they do better is still existing by 1650 which is some what historical.
3. Should China be defeated during the EU4 time frame? As far as I can tell it only happened once during that time frame and this was Quing more or less just replacing Ming during a hard time for the Ming. The first time europeans took a hold in south east Asia appart from some trade posts is after the EU4 time frame (sure they got India and the spice islands but the chinese sphere of influence keept beeing rather intact) during the opium wars. So Ming keeping a slightly larger sphere of influence than historic isn´t too far fetced especialy if you consider the game going full bananas compared to history once you unpause. I might be wrong here so please correct me if.
Ming was actually in pretty hard decline for most of the EU period (until it got overthrown). The Yongle Emperor (the last particularly expansionist emperor) had died in 1424, and his successors saw the loss of Dai Viet and the general decay of the military.
The Ming were never able to project significant power over the steppes; their expeditions consistently ended in disaster, with the Tumu Crisis in 1449 even resulting in the Emperor himself being captured by the Oirats. Even their less disastrous expeditions more or less tended to see an army march around a bit, run out of food and have to retreat without accomplishing anything. Their most notable military victory during the EU4 period was the long and bloody Imjin War (1592-8), which saw a Chinese-Korean alliance repel a Japanese invasion of Korea at enormous cost in blood and treasure, and left them a weakened shell of themselves.
Meanwhile, the Ming government was extremely inefficient (the traditional governing bureaucracy was essentially scrapped by the early Ming, and the various attempts to replace it never really gelled). The dynasty founder had essentially banned foreign trade, which meant that smuggling was rampant and thus largely untaxed, while many of the smugglers also dabbled in piracy, further weakening the economy. Corruption and hyperinflation further meant the economy was in poor shape even in the 15th century (before the arrival of Peruvian silver really kicked inflation into high gear).
Ming was still powerful, but nothing like the behemoth that the Qing would become.
Furthermore, the tributary system misrepresents the direction of flow of profits. Remember how foreign trade was banned for most of Ming (the ban was finally lifted in 1567)? "Tribute" missions were allowed to conduct trade during their visits. Add in the reciprocal gifts that the emperor would generally give his "tributaries" whenever they arrived to give tribute, and these "tributary" missions tended to be extremely profitable for the
tributaries, and expensive for the emperor. There's a reason that the various emperors found themselves having to place limits on the frequency and size of "tribute" missions from their tributaries.
Honestly, how tributaries should work is more or less the opposite of how they do: each tributary should have a significant upkeep cost in ducats, but give a bonus of Monarch Points. That way Ming could only afford a limited number of tributaries, and also have difficult paying for a significant army.
