The amount of time taken to flesh out national ideas is just something they do as a side project to main development, I like that they do it because it adds depth to the game instead of leaving half the world with the same dull "national ideas" idea set. it doesn't take much time and it gives them better reference to actually improve the big tags because of the understanding of historical events, allowing them to feed this context of interraction back to the "important tags"
Also quite a lot of the new ideas come from suggestions, at least lately. The development team barely have to lift a finger to implement these.
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