- The Trade Conflict CB no longer allows you to take land, revoke cores, or release vassals/nations in peace.
This seems sensible to me. Why should people be able to abuse what is supposed to be a trade mechanic to get a free CB to grab any province you want? Making "transfer trade power" not take up a diplomatic slot also makes this CB actually worth using for its intended purpose (for trade-based nations at least), although that could arguably still use a boost.
- Implemented a new system called "States & Territories", where states gives most benefits of being non-overseas, while territories have autonomy and is considered to be overseas for many rules.
I think the idea isn't a bad one, although I think it's not being very well-implemented (although moving to "areas" rather than "regions" may well be somewhat better). I also don't like the hard cap it puts on expansion (a soft cap would be better, to make further expansion less beneficial rather than almost entirely pointless).
- Added Corruption, which is impacted by being unbalanced in tech, having overextension and lack of religious unity. It can be combated by investment in the budget. Corruption impact minimum autonomy in a country, its ability to do espionage and all power costs.
I think this is mostly OK, although I really don't like how it railroads you into spending points on techs that you have no use for, and how it makes taking techs ahead of time even less favourable (and, therefore, essentially makes choosing when to spend monarch points on tech even more of a no-brainer than it already is). Fast expansion should be penalised, though, that simply means that expanding requires more skill.
- Countries with very few forts relative to their size (and less than 10 forts total) now have their unfortified provinces worth more warscore when occupied by enemies.
Don't see the problem here. It's ridiculous that you can gain a military benefit from having fewer forts. The whole point is that it should be a trade-off between defensive capacity in a war and economic power.
I really, really don't like the AI cheat on fort maintenance, though. Giving the AI what amounts to a 20 gold per month bonus in income in the late game just because it can't handle mothballing forts effectively (even though human players still pay half for mothballed forts) is ridiculous, not to mention that mothballing border forts is an extremely dangerous thing for a human player to do as well. A human player taking
absurd risks with fort mothballing will still be spending way, way more on fort maintenance for a smallish country than the AI will, and that is just simply unfair.
If the AI can't handle the mechanic, there needs to be some sort of compensatory effect to make it more balanced. As it is, the AI fort maintenance reduction is nothing more than a stealth boost to the AI's economic power relative to humans, and a pretty big one at that (particularly later in the game, when fort maintenance increases).
