The Japanese Empire roleplay is a world of pain: some problems of vanilla more clearly exposed

So, last time I wrote here I was talking about colonisation. How the current interaction of colonies as Dutch and English East India companies are kind of bad right now. This time I wanted to talk about my Japan runs.

First, it is obviously a hard gameplay as a country rising between empires. If you go for territory first, you lose the trade-off of growing optimally first. Even then, there's actually a reason to rush expansion: when you fight England or France, you can't automatically press conquests against all their subjects in a region of interest. Borneo has 8 little countries, you might never unify the island if you let them get subjected. This is part of the fragmentation problem I talked about last time, where nothing resembling a Berlin Conference or diplomatic scramble exists to sort out who controls what.

Talking about confronting the other empires, it's absurd how much infamy you get for tiny islands in the ocean. One can't roleplay happily. But then it becomes absurdly hard when you need to administer all your subjects' little revolutions (because of course Cambodia, Vietnam, and the little countries of Indochina will have revolutions every two years) while England lets the EIC crumble into 30 microstates and simultaneously picks big chunks of China, most of the time annexing either Tibet or Korea. This ties back to what I said about colonial concentration subjects: the AI has no interest in keeping its companies coherent, so the whole region just falls apart with no one consolidating it.

Talking about India and China warring states if the big country falls, it's the biggest pain you can give the player. They will have revolutions constantly. They don't change laws because you oblige them, even as puppets. And you have no way to incentivize your puppet or protectorate to unify the region, which is also a bigger problem involving unifying places like Romania, Italy, or Ethiopia. Once you bring them in, their objectives revolve around you (self reliance, maintain autonomy, integrate with suzerain) and not the regional objective.

I'm not complaining about it being a sandbox game, but the way colonies and subjects get directionless makes the whole thing really strange. You get to 1890 and you're pausing the game every two seconds. Last time I said colonisation felt like a sketch, playing Japan can make the issues compound: no tools to consolidate regions, no subject AI that pursues unification, no colonial mechanics that matters besides coloring empty land.

Things that could help with the problems above:

Army models (why we don't have them yet?) and regions where they should be built

Automatic rebel-fighting: you flag a navy and an army to fight rebels. But one can go further. I would spend money in-game to repress the amount of rebels I was getting. this could be done with troops on their HQ or something like that.

Release puppet as subject: I actually use a mod for this, but it could be better balanced in vanilla.

More direction to puppets: why I have to ask Dai Nam to enact frontier colonization 5 times before they actually accept it? They are puppets. They should get puppeteered. And follow the general master's strategy for the region, be law-wise or warfare-wise. England shouldn't have to annex Burma itself with English troops, EIC should do it because of pressures from England.

And from my last post: a rework of migration attraction so it doesn't do two contradictory jobs for pops of low and high local acceptance, mechanics for colonial competition, and subject AIs that want to consolidate its region. I've made a mod that transfers pops to unincorporated states every month, more like a proof of concept of what we could have regarding primary culture colonization.