Europa Universalis V simulates a lot of things at a rather small scale. There are 28,570 locations, and in each location there are several population groups, and several buildings in which they work. If you were playing a country with 10 to 20 locations, you could already be rather busy to optimize the production of various raw materials, their further refinement in buildings, and their trade. But even Portugal, which I played in my last run, already starts with 67 locations. Hungary has 189 locations, and the Great Yuan in China have 1,855 locations.

Nations with over 100 locations have a lot more of historical content than small nations. EU5 offers a lot to you if you want to play let's say either England or France and experience the Hundred Years' War. But if you do that, you can't really occupy yourself with managing all your locations and economy at small scale. There is an additional problem with the time scale, for example if you wanted to trade manually, you'd have to adjust your trades every month; in a game that spans 5 centuries, that is 6,000 months of manual adjustment. In my Portugal game, where my number of locations grew due to colonization, I ended up using mostly the mass build button. That probably didn't give the best results, but my economy felt too big for individual fine tuning.

I would like to play something smaller, but version 1.0.10 of the game is getting into my way. Since release there has been a battle ongoing between people who thought that the AI was playing countries too passively and those who thought that the AI was too aggressive. Right now, the AI is very much on the aggressive setting. In some cases, safeguards have been installed in particular to make some countries playable: While in my Portugal game I used console commands to save me from being immediately conquered by Castile, that specific protection of Portugal has now been added by the last version of the 1.0.10 patch. But right now no such protection exists for small HRE states, and several people have shown time lapse videos in which the HRE patchwork practically disappears in the first century of the game. I'm just happy I played Holland and Mecklenburg in earlier patch versions, because right now these countries don't seem very viable anymore. Holland was always threatened by France, but now it is rather often also being invaded by England.

Players who like to play large countries appreciate if AI-controlled large countries are aggressive and pose an actual threat instead of being pushovers. But for players who want to play a small country, sitting between several large neighbors that frequently attack you feels pretty bad, as you can't really defend yourself against them. I felt as if Portugal was already more than big enough for me, and as I like the economic gameplay more than I like the military gameplay of EU5, I don't really want to play one of the big countries that then more or less automate their economy.