You know I had that fuzziness in RTW but now it is gone. So it seems we are exactly opposite there.

Just for info, the WRE starts out with 1000 denarii and an empire in the red. No surprise they haven't got any armies to speak of you go about capturing their provinces.
In my ERE campaign they took a nice long time before they began to compete with me to the advanced spot, so time will help their economy it seems.