Firstly, I wanna say this is one of the best mods I have ever played on any game. The lore events and sandbox is even greater than vanilla, and the replay-ability is endless. However the sandbox part has been all but removed as updates come.

I remember when I first played this mod in the early days, it was great. You could literally play any nation and put up a good fight, even now, but the problem is fundamental across all nations.

Provinces and states simply do not make any money. At all. In fact in my Windhelm gameplay, I could no longer maintain my SAME army size from the beginning even though I have 10 times more development. How is this? State maintenance. Laughably, my own capital state had more maintenance costs than what was coming in! Disasters and bankruptcy were common and inevitable. Too much DLC crap has found its way to this mod which only becomes more tedious and annoying compared to the younger days of this mod. The "governing capacity" is some weird dlc that ruined empire building and added another tedious aspect to this mod making it less sandbox like.

Now I guess you could say I'm some weak casual gamer that likes to steamroll the map with ease, but that should at least be an option, since I'm 10 plus hours into a gameplay and the map is virtually the same. Not to mention all these uncolonized provinces make the map look terrible and you have to wait 200 years in game to start colonizing, which will take another 100 years to colonize just one state. But once AI colonize all over the place it makes it even uglier. I never have enough monarch points for tech or ideas, yet the AI always does.

One AI had 16k troops, matching my 15k troop size. He has one, 3 dev province with a castle. I have 300 development overall.

Also the terrain for battles is ridiculous. I mean it's in the base game, but if you have to attack any hill or mountain, you will lose even if you outgun them by 3 times.

I just want to say Aetherum, that I loved this mod. It has got me through tough times and has passed the hours. But the current version is, for lack of better expression, extremely frustrating and disappointing.

If it's one thing that I want you to do, it would be to upload the first few versions of this mod. I don't know if it is possible, but to be honest those were the only good versions.