Yeah, after looking at the dev diaries, I'm inclined to get AHD. The changes to domestic politics and uncivilized countries are really enticing. Kind of ambivalent about the changes to CB. You can manufacture CB's now, kinda presaging the way Intelligence works in HoI3, but the tradeoff is that you can no longer just say damn the Infamy and attack without a CB. Which means WC games are all but impossible.
One change that I'd like to see (and am surprised they didn't do in this one, given the relevance to the American Civil War), would be for very large non-nationalist rebel movements to become civil wars with the chance to spawn new countries. Essentially, the Confederates were a large-scale Reactionary rebel movement that became a seperatist rebellion. I'd like to see that possible with other movements.
Anarcho-Liberals could try to split off a chunk to form their own capitalist utopia.
Jacobins could establish regional republics.
Reactionaries could establish rump kingdoms.
Communists would establish People's Republics.
Obviously there's two main difficulties here:
1. Creating brand new countries without pre-created country files. For the most part, the guts of the mechanic wouldn't be that hard, the main things you're missing are flags, country colors and tags. Political parties would be easy enough, based on the type of rebels. Name would be derived from the territory controlled.
2. Deciding at what threshold a rebellion becomes a full-fledged civil war that would earn the rebels an upgrade to national status.
I got to thinking about this because in my Hindustani game, it's 1878 and I'm facing an impending Jacobin revolt which, according to the tooltips, could field some 750+ brigades. I have little doubt I can put down the upstart swine who fail to appreciate the good graces of His Most Imperious Majesty, Maharajah Saikander III, but it might take a little while. And we're gonna need some replacement workers when it's all said and done. And there's an Anarcho-Liberal rebellion set to fire soon as well, with 325+ brigades ready to go.
The Indian Civil War could easily dwarf all the wars in Europe since the beginning of the game combined.
This seems triggered by my recent campaign against China, wherein I decimated their huge but antique navy, destroyed 150 of their brigades (they had ~600 more), and wound up annexing their remnants of Guangxi and Yunnan, and added Hong Kong, Macao and much of Sichuan to the Empire. The Rajput Legions acquitted themselves in splendid fashion, often taking on forces twice their size, but inflicting 10 losses for every casualty they suffered. The few defeats I suffered came when a single Legion would wind up taking on a combined stack of some 200,000+ men, and I'd have to make a tactical withdrawal.
OOC: Fighting the Chinese in this situation, with their OMGWTF size army, is like the world's most annoying game of Whack-A-Mole. I can easily crush one or even two armies with a single Legion, but I don't have enough armies to keep them from slipping behind me and trying to recapture everything I take. Wasn't until I started focusing on isolating and destroying whole stacks that I began to get any breathing room. But from my naval scouting runs up and down the coast, it looks like they have a stack of 24,000-30,000 men in EVERY province. Probably mostly irregulars, but still.....daaaaaaaaamn. These guys have probably been propping up my Canned Food industry for years.