Why do you dislike common sense? Parliament being half assed?
The click-button-to-add development system is totally wrongheaded. So are forts. Neither has been fixed and they make the experience unbearable (IMHO). 1.11.4 is the last version with neither, as well as the vastly more interesting old buildings system.
A million other halfbaked features since then make the game topheavy and bloated beyond belief. The AI in 1.11.4 can basically handle all the systems; AI diplomacy and expansion proceed in a mostly sane and competent (by strategy AI standards) way, and the gratuitous bankruptcy cycles and collapses that have plagued more recent versions are rare.
Finally, a bugbear near and dear to my heart, it is still possible in this version for New World countries to use the colony-seize trick to westernize by ~1520 and bypass the decades of waiting for the AI to randomly decide to drop a neighboring colony to yours. Makes playing in the New World not only tolerable but fun.
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