Yeah, MotM entirely early on. Later on you get a Tax Assessor and Centralization inflation reduction.
Education Act, School Establishment Act, Militia Act, Merchant Shipping Act, Statute of Monopolies, Joint-Stock Companies Act, Enlist Privateers, Test Act, Act of Uniformity. Probably missing a few, but you can load up a save from the stats and check my country modifiers if you'd like.
It just makes no sense from a gameplay perspective, however much sense it seems to make from a roleplaying perspective. In addition, it puts an awful lot of reliance on other players acting outside their own interests, which is a bad plan.
At the end of the day, EU3 is a game about having a big stick. If you have a bigger stick than the other guy, you win. There are a number of ways to get a bigger stick: you can invest in growing the stick longer, you can invest in money to buy a bigger stick, etc. While all of them are important, it turns out in the end investing directly in the stick is better than investing in money as an intermediary point to buy a bigger stick.
Ultimately, what does income do? It buys you tech, which makes your army better. It pays your maintenance, which makes your army bigger.
That's it. Done. Finished. People like to have income size dick measuring contests, but since at the end of the day EU3 is a military game, and income (like anything else) only matters insofar as it, directly or indirectly, allows you to field a bigger and/or better army. As it turns out, Conscription Centres and Naval Bases are better at doing that than Customs Houses because of manpower and because of the exponential growth of maintenance when you're over your forcelimit. Much, much better.
Buying players works in theory, except for two things:
- If you were strong enough to get that going on, why not cut out the middleman and just be the person with the big army doing things for yourself? That way you aren't relying on other people.
- At some point someone will realize that it's a lot easier to attack you and take your money than it is to fight someone else with an army to be paid. At that point, you die.