Or rather, you fail to see my point. You think that random = bad. Somehow, but not entirely.
Random is not fundamentally bad. Putting a crucial resource in a strategy game on a relatively infrequent RNG call such that any one incidence of said RNG call can have a glaring impact on the outcome/progression rate is bad.
Part of the neighbor bonus' design is to function as a catch-up mechanic, precisely to offset some of the large advantage conferred by being lucky while someone is simultaneously not lucky. In order to remove that or nerf it, there needs to be reasonable justification for doing so.
Though, in real life, randomness is everywhere. You cross the street; there's RNG god rolling; perhaps you'll stumble for the worse. That's part of life, and you can't deny the fact that, while rulers where not personnally behind the construction of every building in their nation, a bad ruler impacted heavily the efficiency of its nation, because he was a poor decision maker, or because he was only interested in parties and women.
First of all, the game is not real life. If it were, you wouldn't have hive-mind control of a nation for ~400 years.
Second, stumbling is not "random" lol.
Third, poor rulers had a funny tendency to wind up killed quickly, having their effective power curtailed, or otherwise get minimalized in this period. There are some exceptions where some idiot kept power too, but that was far from the only thing that happened. Given that you're playing as a power above the ruler, one guiding the course of a nation's history, it makes sense that you can opt into a risky tradeoff of some variety to steer how the nation deals with a potentially awful ruler. The choice on how to handle it should not be trivial; the game has far too many trivial choices already.
None of this is, however, justification for further nerfing nations that already have a poor ruler in the gameplay sense. They already are unlucky and are already suffering; the neighbor bonus provides *some* regression towards the mean. Some. The existence of random factors is not an effective grounds for argument in altering this from a gameplay standpoint in favor of making the game more luck-based, when it is already arguably ahistorically luck-based given the player's actual role in it.
Why do you need to control everything? What do you effectively and entirely control in real life?
This question is a junk red herring and not worth discussing. I'm arguing from the standpoint of what makes the strategy of the game more engaging or not. Removing the importance of player choice (regardless of RNG presence) does the opposite. When you have a relatively large number of RNG checks across a game, over time player choices still create separation, despite unexpected turns. When the outcome hinges on few, you have a game where the game itself decides who wins; deliberately pushing a strategy title in that direction isn't a defensible position, as you're actively reducing the importance of the game's strategy.
Why I'm sitting here constantly speaking out against buffing something I use regularly is beyond me.
You do wonder what happens if someone...say...culturally annihilates 300 base tax worth of stuff lol.
