How Do You Want IE End Game To Look?

Needless to say, I think we all can agree that difficulty options are superior to any one choice, so I’m just interested to see that if you could only have one of these options for the foreseeable future, how would you like CA to balance AI/player faction power in IE’s late game?

Having AI factions be able to conquer large amounts of territory is nice thematically/difficulty wise as it gives opponents of near equal strength in the late game for you to fight. However it comes at the downside that the variety of factions diminishes greatly and can make the end game more repetitive. Likewise, having more surviving factions increases late game variety, but reduces the difficulty as now you’re the only one with a massive empire.

So my third alternative option would be to take some ideas from Crusader Kings also limit the player’s ability to hold that much territory without the use of vassals. This would require a big rework to vassals, including the need to be able to form you own vassal factions, but I think it’s the best middle ground between the two ideas as it aims to retain both lategame difficulty and variety.