How to Reform and Replace Coring in EU V

Coring was part of EU since times immemorable. However, the game outgrew its coring system long ago.

During EU III it was a clever abstraction to represent both rightful claim on a foreign province and at the same time distinguish between provinces that were part of your country since forever from a newly acquired land.

Nowadays we have autonomy together with state/territory mechanic, years of separatism, claims and so on to represent these concepts. Compare to these coring feels ever more arbitrary and pointless.

25 years cores of EU III make more sense from practical point of view compared to click to core of EU IV. When you just conquered a province, people still remember that is was part of a different country and lingering separatist sentiments would continue for some time. It will take a while before locals would finally accept their new country and government. EU III coring represented just that.

Overextension is too arbitrary as well. Why having couple of extra provinces on periphery suddenly affect the entire country go haywire?

It would make sense to remove coring and overextension altogether (or make it represent end of separatist sentiment instead). Instead expand on reducing autonomy and make it a major system of internal management. Possibly rename it into integration as changes are rather extensive.

Reducing autonomy should go in stages, cost admin points to do, take time to do. In general, it should be much more central element of the game. Newly conquered provinces would begin at 100% autonomy (or 0% integration) and contribute nothing to the country. By spending admin points on integrating, it and reducing autonomy you finally get benefits from a province.

There could be a strategic depth and tradeoffs with that as well. If you blob a lot, you need to make choices what provinces you will reduce autonomy as your admin points will not let you do it everywhere so need to choose between say high value trade good and high manpower province based on what you need more at the moment, money or more soldiers for next war.

That would make internal country management more engaging and more important for the overall functioning of your country.

That is more realistic representation of differences in internal administration as some small countries are better managed and can field a better and bigger army. On the other hand, other countries maybe huge but most provinces there do not even know what country they are part of and contribute nothing to it. Thus, with this system better managed countries did better than poorly managed ones, this is a way to represent it.