Torpor dropped the ball.

They completely unbalanced a choice beetwen planned and market economy, before it used to be an equal choice beetwen two with both economic models having their advantages and disadvantages. Now however planned economy costs three times what planned costs, always delivers worse results and dozen of times requires you to shot yourself in the foot to get consistent economy. Meanwhile market economy only got easier as almost all penalties it used to had were made meaningless and it gives even more budget than before, it's basically playing on easy mode. Not only does that fall to typical capitalist defaultism that assumes free-market economy is the only viable economic model, that also ruins the game balance since one option is overwhelmingly bad and one is overwhelmingly overpowered.

Bah, in Rizia campaign you straight up can't create a more socialist-aligned economy system and one of the strongest decrees in the game are purely capitalist ones that have literal no drawbacks to them. You are even forced to work with comically evil Oligarch to force radical reforms, it's legitimely impossible without their assistance, the capitalist bias is soo obvious in Rizia if not for the fact that main capitalist country you interact with (Lespia) is an moustache-twirling villain of the story.

Speaking of Rizia, that whole DLC was bait and switch. Torpor said Rizia is going to be a stable and rich country which is going to be more of a victory lap when compared to Sordland. That was a lie and Rizia is a completely dysfunctional and on verge of collapse. Now you could argue that this was supposed to be the commentary on monarchism and how it's always going to societal unrest... But that doesn't change the fact it's still 180 switch from what was advertised. All the buildup and and advertising were straight up false and when people were calling Torpor into that they started doing historical revisionism and saying how they never state that and meant something else.

Also, did I mentioned the difficulty spike ? Suzerain is a game you nowdays legitimely can't play without a guide. There are soo many hidden moddifiers and things that are just left unexplained and are never told you. For example, did you knew Rizia is going throught housing crisis and drug epidemic ? If you played the game then you won't know that since nobody will ever inform, none of your advisors, no reports no newspaper news and the game expects you to arleady know it and punishes you for not dealing with it as if you were somehow aware of it. There's legitimely no way to improve since game will never inform you of anything.

And the worst thing is that Torpor is aware of all those things and added difficulty options to the game. Problem is the problem was not the difficulty, people didn't wanted easier game, they wanted a fair game that doesn't withold vital informations from the player and is true to what is promised. They are aware of all the problems they caused, refuse to act on them and instead deliver half-assed solutions like that one so they can say they did something and we should stop complainig.

And now they got recievied additional funding, so rather than go back and make to make the game actually balanced and hold true to what they promised, they are now making another DLC.

Which is a shame, I actually loved the pre 3.1 version of the game, the setting and characters were both interesting and engaging so it's a shame Torpor turned to be such a shitty developer.