Unrealistic points in country modelling

[Zanotirn]

At the moment without a faction intervention a nation with certain stats with develop in almost completely predictable way, barring that at high unrest a revolution may occur at different times. (Also the default stats pretty much doom less developed nations to a violence spiral). Plus different uncontrolled countries will have similar predictable spending distribution. It seems that while the current system is mostly ok for predicting average situation, there should be outliers. E.g. when nations change governments (anocracies and democracies every few years, auth/totalitarian much more rarely, but also check after every revolution) there should be a chance for the situation to worsen or improve. E.g. a particularly good roll may see a country's cohesion target increase, shift spending towards development and give a temporary bonus to development spending. A bad roll may decrease cohesion target, increase spoils spending and temporarily make spoils more damaging. Meaning occasionally mid-tier stable nations might see the situation worsen and go into unrest spiral and every once in a while a nation may get out of it on its own. This might also happen to countries controlled by factions but more rarely, as special events - even if the faction controls a country, there can always be a popular movement or group appearing.

Another point is that in reality if you don't consider countries with large percentage of income coming from windfall sources, like natural resources, no country ever has successfully implemented a decent welfare at low economic development (and not through lack of trying). In practice countries get developed first before successfully implementing welfare. Usually subsequently they see a certain decrease in economic growth - if you look at lists of countries/periods with highest economic growth, high-welfare countries will never feature there. I think a more realistic adjustment will be to have lower inequality provide a certain reduction to economy priority (but past a certain point extremely high inequality would not provide any benefit), meaning that if you can handle unrest, it's better to develop first and increase welfare later. Also potentially very low economy can cause a soft cap on inequality, meaning that effect of welfare priority on inequality will drop below certain inequality levels depending on per capita GDP (for lower per capita GDP this effect will manifest at higher inequality levels). Though that soft cap might be too complicated to implement in a way that's visible and clear to the player.

[Maty83]

The one exception to your second paragraph should be noted: Norway. Norway was quite poor for an European nation before their discovery of oil and thanks to nationalizing their reserves they ended up with their oil fund. It is an outlier, but should not be ignored.

To that point, one more unrealistic point should be added: Having a bigger country should not mean the Economy priority is improved-Rather, it should stay constant. This point means any superstates you create, especially PAC/ROC-integrated PAC tend to MASSIVELY outscale nations with lower populations to the realm of obscurity, then turning this extreme GDP into knowledge and miltech spending so large it may as well replace the Mercury campuses entirely (Seriously, I was making 10k research very expensively from Mercury and its research institutes while 3.42 Mega-India ended up making 35k research a month by 2038-Even fully ceded ROC ended up with 5.4k by 2031).

With those two fixed, the last full point should be that countries should get a leg-up to 50% global GDP per capita somewhat to represent technological transfer from the richer nations, scaling with knowledge scores. (See-Asian Tigers)

[Zanotirn]

Regarding Norway, that's why I clarified that I don't count nations with a high degree of windfall revenue. E.g. Saudi Arabia and Gulf states also implemented good welfare, but that's easy with oil revenue, and Norway gets 60% of its money from oil and gas exports.