So, in today’s stream Johan revealed that they are changing the way technology progression works, but in reality it didn’t really change. It just put on a mask. Previously, if you say conquered another nation, then your technology progress would shift back. So if you were at 30%, you might move back to 25% depending on how much you took. The way that they “fixed” this is by making the percentage of the tech you are at stay the same, but the costs to get there would increase. These two methods are literally the exact same thing with a different outfit. Whether is shows the percentage changing or not, taking more land still sets back your technological progress even if it hides behind a static percentage. This is NOT a solution, and we can do better than this. With this great new IP, Paradox could finally do away with the terrible model that is oh so prevalent in Stellaris and creeping into EU4 that is “big = bad science”. This is illogical, and it discourages people’s plans and goals in these games.

An Empire expanding does not hinder it’s technological progress in any way. Have you ever heard such a silly thing in reality? There is no reason that Ptolemaic Egypt should have a harder time developing X tech than Cyprus. In reality, Egypt would probably have an easier time since they’d have more population and therefor more brain power, but we are aiming for realistic balance here as that’s the furthest Paradox might accept. The raw number of population and provinces you have should not in itself affect technological progress. A much more realistic and fair system, would be some kind of ratio between the pops of different strata that determines how well your technological progress is. Similar to how in Vicky 2 you would want to have 2-3% clergymen for the most efficient technological gain (or whatever the specific number is, I can’t remember). I don’t have said ratio of course cause it’d require a lot of testing, but just for example, something like 1 pop of the highest strata for 20 of the lowest or something along those lines/that school of thought. Other things such as stability, barbarian risk, or some other aspects could also play a part into it, but the root of it needs to be something independent of size.

I could be totally alone on this, but I feel like this needs to be brought up now, cause otherwise it definitely will not be implemented later. It makes absolutely no sense why a smaller power would have a technological edge of a larger one or vice versa, so we should eliminate size from the playing field. As far as I can tell, being bigger doesn’t directly give you more technological progress like in Stellaris, so there’s no reason to penalize the bigger nations.