China is the nightmare of balancing in all of Paradox's games. Europa Universalis 4 has taken on the task of trying this once again, with patch 1.33, and China's internal politics.
There is no precise, official “regional focus” for this patch unlike the other free EU4 patches such as 1.29 “Manchuria Update” or 1.27 “Poland Update”. While it means developers haven’t created mission trees for a region, this at least allows them to concentrate on balancing existing content, adding Quality of Life changes, and fine-tuning some other areas of the world.
Focusing on the dev nightmare that is China, with player feedback developers have implemented some changes that make the unification of China a less tedious process for the non-horde Chinese tags. One of them is the addition of the "Chinese Kingdom" government reform for every Confucian Chinese government which gets released by the Celestial Empire.
One huge problem with the released countries in China was that they tend to create the so-called "hugboxes" around them which prevented them from actually unifying China. In order to prevent this, all the Chinese Kingdoms have a -100 Opinion penalty for fellow Confucian countries. At the same time, they also gain access to the Unify China casus belli, which received a substantial buff.
Paradox Interactive
Furthermore, developers are experimenting with giving every Chinese tag cores over the whole region, but this results in really awkward situations where a province had cores of 8 different tags, as these cores were too much of a freebie. By gaining the cores through occupation the process of conquering China feels more natural.
