Certainly an interesting idea, although I would prefer to see it tied to taxation rather than tech level. So while income from the colonies should be essential to have any chance of matching the economies of the other European powers, squeezing it too hard should cause the colonies to seethe with rebellion. Either way though, there should certainly be the element of tradeoff between keeping up with the other powers and maintaining order in the colonies.

I wonder whether it mightn't make sense to scrap the distance to capital penalty altogether, and have unrest be determined entirely by "culture penalty" for large native populations, or the rise of a self-determination movement for large colonist populations (plus obviously taxation for everyone). After all, I don't think Australia, for example, was necessarily more rebellious than Ireland. The reason for distant colonies being hard to control should be just the difficulty of getting an expeditionary force there if anything does go wrong.

Quote Originally Posted by Zaleukos
Still I am hoping for armies that are more "temporally coherent", without silly mixtures of mailed knights and musketeers. Teching up should mean going from low tech 18th c unit to a high tech one, not to tech from the next century.
I don't have a problem with obsolete or outdated units still being around in the late game as such, so long as they acutely feel the cost of using outdated equipment or tactics by being vastly inferior to the more modern units.