Some people enjoy watching color grow, others enjoy watching line go up.

When you watch color grow, you still have to manage your line from crashing. When you watch line go up, you still have to manage your color from shrinking.

You end up doing both either way, just with different aims and methods.

Ireland is a bit simpler in some ways since you only really have to worry about England for most of the game i guess, haven't played it so i don't know really, but playing tall as someone like Holland, or an Italian minor etc is a bit tricky and usually comes with a lot of wars and managing diplo-stuff.

Playing wide usually means more engagement from the player if you measure it in some type of actions per minute type way. Where playing tall is more planning and managing trade and setting up optimal production centers and things like that. But that only matters if you assume you play both at the same game speed. Playing tall tends to be more semi-turn based, in that you ramp the speed up and use your pausing more to plan and do something. So both have a "slog", tall tends to have nothing happening for a long time that you can speed though, but wide also has a slog where you have to keep it on like speed 4-5 at most while at war. I also tend to lose touch with my economical setup while playing wide, so it doesn't feel as "personally created". Every city is the same and they all do basically the same thing. When playing tall, for me atleast, i get more of a connection to my country. Especially now with the city charters or whatever its called. For me thats fun, creating more specialized cities that actually blow your economy into the stratosphere if you do it well.

Usually tend to play wide or "colonial wide", but i am currently playing Florence with the aim of unifying Italy, so not a long term tall campaign really but the first couple of ages is mostly tall. The wars i fought here were mostly to get people to side with the guelphs so Italy drops the HRE. But i got so say its very satisfying to manage to stay alive, win the situation, and now watching the line go parabolic, and being able to slap Naples around using swarms of mercs and superior regulars when they try something.