I'm way, way over the text limit acceptable for general replies so here's a lengthy thread.

Having played a campaign to about 1800 in multiplayer, I've got a fair bit of feedback.

Part of the problem with development isn't so much the number of monarch points available. Nerfing the AI down to rulers that have 6 points addresses part of the problem, but do remember that the AI gets 3 points by default in every category. And, by about the midpoint of the game, basically everyone of any size is rich enough to afford, at minimum, level 2 advisors. So even if you've only got 6 points from a ruler, you're still getting 9 plus whatever you can eke out of your advisors.

Dealing with this problem is a bit more nuanced than that. I'd attack this from two additional angles.

First, the tech groups are just too good. They're basically Western. I'd cut them down to parity with Anatolian. In addition to meaning nations will spend an additional 25% monarch points on tech (which isn't a big deal), it means that countries overseas can't westernize off the states. That's a bigger bonus to Australia and the Pacific states than the "Boreal-American" states, but the reduction in available monarch points will also decrease development expenditures.

Second, add a malus that increases the cost of developing provinces. Since I recently encountered a two province Aragonese Colombia with about 104 development, it's plainly a continent-wide concern. You can use an active modifier that increases development cost by 25-50% if the country's capital is in the New World. Alternatively, if you can figure out how to make it work, you could tie it to government type (since all these new countries have new government types). As yet another alternative, you could have an event fire for each of these countries that gives them an increased development cost until a fixed date of your choice (there are lots of campaign-long modifiers like this in vanilla). That might be the cleanest way to implement the change, provided the events don't all fire on day one and make EU4 implode or something.

Speaking of active modifiers: I like that you added some. I noticed a few that were +0.00 prestige, which was odd (Anime Convention, Big Texas). I don't know if that's a weird display issue (like how the icons for religions tend to be wonky) or what. But I'm a fan of active modifiers in general. They sort of establish campaign goals for me. And, speaking of that, there's the vanilla active modifier that confers a trade bonus if you've got an active trader in India. The countries you've added, since they're technically not Western, aren't eligible for that bonus.

A few other things I've observed and how they might be fixed.

1. Ohio and New Brunswick have *very* similar colors. Perhaps consider giving one a paler shade of red, perhaps more like Aragon's reddish-pink?

2. In my game as Texas, I discovered the Pope and got the event to convert to Catholic. Since I was American Baptist, I decided not to. The event (which has the fire_only_once = yes tag) never fired for anyone else. As a result of this, the rest of America remained Disconnected Catholic until the heat death of the universe. I don't know if the syntax of the event prevents it from ever firing for anyone else (which is possible) or if the event got really weird because the Italian states murdered the Papacy (while Scandinavia remained Catholic), but it's an oddity and probably not working as intended.

If it's not WAI, my suggestion is this: convert the existing event to "yay, +prestige!" for the country that discovered the Pope. Then implement a decision that is revealed once a disconnected catholic ("s_catholic") state discovers the Pope (or when the discovery spreads to them). If you include "ai_will_do { factor = 1 }", the AI will always take the decision. Slap the conversion stuff from the existing event into that decision and voila, problem solved. I would also add a caveat that only countries that explicitly have s_catholic as their state religion can actually see the event; you don't want Utah or Florida deciding that they need to convert immediately and getting saddled with 0% religious unity because all of their land is American Baptist.

3. California doesn't have gold. The guy I've been playing with kept getting salty about this. Please consider adding gold to a province before he reaches critical mass on the saltometer.

4. American Baptist could probably be Protestant. While Baptists constitute an abnormally large Protestant denomination (they're like four times the size of the largest Lutheran denomination), the game as a whole doesn't really differentiate between various shades of Protestantism. Anglicanism gets lumped under the same banner, after all.

5. Alaska, last I saw, was Orthodox. I understand if you were interested in that for historic reasons (or just variety), but Alaska is remarkably Protestant.

Despite the gripes I have (development is extremely frustrating, but I understand you're working to tone that down a bit), I've had a lot of fun with your mod. Cheers.