nigh impossible

[Eastern Foot-Rocker]

I hope there will be this incredibly difficult starting positions in EB 2, too. I love playing Pontos and Hayasdan because of the difficulty. Especially the first 20-40 turns.

In other mods there is often the problem with large amounts of money allowing you to build every army you want. Especially SS6.4 and RS2, both very good mods, after a time bored me with their loose economy system.

[Grade_A_Beef]

This is a constant problem for many games. As your empire grows your reach that point where you can close a front, or at least shrink it. Then you can work with a large economy while keeping a smaller army. The lower upkeep costs let you invest more in infrastructure, and so on and so on...

Steamrolling is bound to happen eventually. You can find some way to counter that, but it's difficult. Maybe some point of diminishing returns? An increase in corruption may help but will be unrealistic as corruption cannot really be high enough to eat up even half of your province's economy.

An increase in unrest may help, but I don't think players would be fond of increasing their garrison size every time they conquer a province...

civil war's been ruled out...I think.

[Blxz]

Increased choices to roleplay seems to be the best way to do this. This allows someone to play around with the game rather than play to win.

Only other choice I can think of would be a fixed decrease in income multiplied by the number of cities you own; but that feels hamfisted.
Shogun 2 had a good way around this. Pity there is no way to model it in game.