SW simply has too many factions IMHO. In striving to be as historical as possible, the map is overloaded with factions to the point where provinces are literally choked with agents. This is made worse as many provinces are very small and the castle sizes in MTW are much larger than the old STW ones - meaning that they take up more room in the province.
I agree. I also didn't like the fact that certain provinces were rebel, though without a rebel garrison. Basically up for grabs for the fastest faction to move there. I also used to mod the starting koku amounts drastically down, the AI would have huge armies on my borders and a high degree of infastuctre too quickly for my tastes. Trying to take that river province north of Shimazu was a pain in the tookus! Tech tree was great though. I also liked the ahistorical kensai, I would recruit a merc kensai as soon as I found one. He was honor 9 in no time! Didn't like the producable taisho though, the AI always had 3-4 per army! Polite critisizm though, wasted alot of time on this mod!