Hey all! Ryagi here, this time we're back to our roots with these Mod spotlights, giving a platform for those don't already have one. Today we're covering The Rise and Fall of Empires. A simple but effective mod made by Dante that aims to create a less blobby playstyle, for both players and the AI. I'll let Dante explain what what his mod is all about, enjoy!

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Greetings, Emperors, Consuls, and Caliphs! Im Dante, and today, Im thrilled to introduce you to The Rise and Fall of Empires. This overhaul shifts the focus from mindlessly blobbing to strategic empire management and stabilization. I hope that with this spotlight, I give you an insight into my creative process and a deep dive into the mod's features. The mod includes a revamp of the effects of being over your governing capacity, while actually providing bonuses for remaining under the capacity in the form of administrative buffs, as displayed below.
This was the cornerstone of the mod that I built off for the rest of its development. To contribute to governing capacity challenges, I reduced the capacity that you get from technology and increased the governing capacity for provinces with separatism and unaccepted cultures. I then asked myself, What are some more ways to reduce the player and AIs tendency to become unrealistically large? To start, I thought of separatism and Rebels. In vanilla, Dealing with rebels is essentially a game of whack-a-mole, and once you deal with one stack of rebels, the entire area is essentially pacified. To make this more challenging and involved, I aimed to make rebels more similar to Pretenders. I started by enabling their ability to retreat and reinforce, meaning you need to exert more effort in dealing with them. Then, I enabled the ability for them to recruit new units upon occupying a province and had them give double the separatism.
The problem with this new feature is that you would end up with scenarios like this, where rebels would spiral into enormous hordes of revolting separatists.
A simple fix for this would be to only recruit new rebel units in provinces greater than 12 dev. After tweaking this system, I started tweaking other values, like making civil wars more challenging, or adding buffs and nerfs to various terrain types. One of the most significant edits I made was to defensiveness. I increased the default defensiveness of all coastal provinces by 50% but added a feature where blockading a province would negative this defensiveness increase. The goal is to make it so you need a more active naval presence to take on a fortified coastal fort, such as Venice. Obviously, coastal towns will be more resistant to sieges as they can simply ship in more food and supplies by sea.
In addition to coastal defensiveness tweaks, buffs have been applied to mountain and highland defensiveness, the former of which also has a buff to fort maintenance. This was done to make well-known mountain barriers more important in warfare, such as the Pyrenees, Carpathians, and the Caucasian mountains. In the mod, I also entirely rework the spread of institutions. In addition to adding institution spread debuffs to Mountains, Deserts, and Steppes, I made every institution require the previous one to be embraced, and halved the institution growth from improving development. These are simple changes, but lead to a much more realistic technological situation and higher tech disparity between distinct and isolated geographic areas.
A screenshot from roughly 1625 illustrating the institution disparity Another item changed in Rise and Fall is the effects of development. Regarding development, I made quick changes to the per-development bonuses that you get from each type. Those bonuses are illustrated in the image below:
What this ends up doing is making large centers of development more powerful, and making it so specialization of development is more meaningful. Lastly, I would like to go over one of the newest features of the mod, released in the 1.1 update. This is a disaster called National Decay, which I created to illustrate the collapse of extremely overextended nations. The goal was to create a situation similar to the Ming collapse but amped up the severity. The biggest difficulty was to balance this so it wouldnt happen so often that it would ruin the players game, or happen to every AI, but often enough that it still presents an obstacle to blobbing and sprawl.
I wont bother explaining all of the requirements to fire the disaster in detail, but generally, it happens mid-late game for nations with more than 500 development in unaccepted culture provinces outside the home region, as long as they are not overseas. The full disaster details are visible on the right. The disaster gives a short period for the player to try and avoid it by increasing manpower level or releasing vassals and accepting cultures to avoid the requirements. Otherwise, the disaster is effectively unavoidable, as your civilization has gone past the point of no return. When the disaster fires, it will give the same debuffs as Low Mandate for China, in addition to an insane amount of national unrest. Why is the unrest so high? Mainly to overcompensate for the -100% unrest from recent uprisings, as I had issues where the AI would always be able to kill all of the rebels. An example of a before-after collapse can be seen below, with the Ottomans former extent traced in gold.
This is a collapse spurred on by the AI. The player might be able to avoid this through creative use of accepted cultures, exploit/concentrating development, or culture conversion. This wraps up the overview of my thought process in creating my mod, The Rise and Fall of Empires. If youre intrigued, dont hesitate to check it out on the Steam Workshop. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3279567235 Happy ruling!

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Thank you Dante! This one was relatively Short and Sweet, but the gameplay implications of these anti blobbing mechanics are intriguing, so this mod is definitely something to try out if you not super into the sport of watching nation names get bigger and bigger. As usual, if you have any suggestions for these spotlights, or maybe even want to throw your own hat into the ring we encourage you to reach out to us via Discord or here on the Forums. All are welcome whether you want to show off a classic EU4 mod, or are a tiny mod who hasn't even hit the steam workshop yet. I wish you all a wonderful time creating, browsing and playing your favorite mods. We'll be returning with another spotlight in early August. Till next time!