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Expanding into Asia is ridiculously cheap due to the half-price overseas discount. Taking an admin idea first is always a bit of a gamble, it can be hard to manage both rapid expansion which you'll want to do in the early game to survive, filling out your ideas and also keeping your stability in the green (especially if you're a monarchy/tribe which are by far the worst governments*). This is only increased when you have you reform your government/westernise due to the huge stab hits and MP sinks.
Personally I might have considered aristocratic as a first/second idea if I had a string of good mil leaders or some decent dip tech like influence as my first idea (especially good since you'll won't be needing much dip tech as a landlocked nation and you'll want to be abusing vassals throughout all of the game). I'm a huge fan of religious rather than humanism since it tends to have much better policies, gives you the massive holy war casus belli and it tends to synergies with unique national ideas a lot better.
*If I have to rank governments it would probably be Republics >> Theocracies > Monarchies >> Tribes. Theocracies used to be top tier but Paradox decided to nearly completely castrate them by no longer allowing their rulers to become generals. While having two free generals was incredibly strong the smart thing would have to limited theocracies to only a single free general. Paradox is not smart (or competent) which is perfectly proven by the fact that the god awful regency mechanics are still in the game unchanged.
Technology part I just don't get - why does old technology increase corruption? In general, corruption should be something that increases constantly and you need to combat actively to keep down, usually costing stability.
Because Paradox has no idea how to balance EU4 without becoming more reliant on
mana monarch points. I also doubt anyone on the dev team has played outside of Europe as evidenced by the stupid nerfs to the New World nations that make them near literally unplayable. EU4 has no direction at all and just flounders around at either "babby's first grand strategy" or "our multiplayer is completely fine and not completely broken at all" multiplayer focus. All they have to do is release some decent expansions that deepen the depth of the game while moving away from MP as much as possible outside of things that would be incredibly hard to simulate in the era like technology.
EU4's motto at this point might as well be "there is always Stellaris". Which honestly has me worried about Stellaris.