Christmas & Cocos islands are included (and are made HUGE) in Victoria for whatever reason. There's no explanation for not being able to include actual countries.
Want me to do my rant again about how it shouldn't be province-based anyway? Paradox games should have the map handled with VECTORS. It's really simple. Just have all the data blobs overlaid on those maps and the rest of the views derived from that data. In EU, for example, there would be only 4 primary data points, and the rest of the possible map views would be formed from them.
Terrain: showing what underlying points are and are not passable (mountains, which are snap points), delineating snap points for rivers, and setting up baselines for latitude and longitude.
Political: showing international and internal country divisions.
Religion: showing blobs of religion.
Culture: showing blobs of culture.
The terrain map is the base map. Beyond the coastline rules, there would be the "impassable mountain range" rule internally, points set up across the map for rivers, and the x/y coords for latitude and longitude. The lines drawn by the mountain ranges, rivers, and lat/long would be auto-snappable in the political map. This would allow the user to CREATE AND DEFINE HIS OWN REGIONS BY HAND, managing them like the real leaders of these countries did.
How does it make any sense that an alt-country has to rely on OTL modern day borders to colonize something when they made it there first TTL? In colonizing, I should be able to draw a line (a vector line, on the map) beyond my existing borders, call that my claim, and hope (spur on) my population takes root there before my competing nations do. If they don't, they don't, and I'm called to the diplomatic table with the other nation to come to an agreement on a solid border. I get to draw my new border (based on the population/religious/culture/resource data at the present time), and they get to accept or reject it. Then they get to do the same thing.
Oh, and determining said borders internally? Well, you'd want to look to the religion, culture, and resource blobs for that! Those blobs, overlaid, would determine the unity and financial sustainability of a region.
Let's say an area of your country wants to go from colony to full state. If you make it too large, it would be run inefficiently, since being too far from the capital would create negative sentiment and lax law enforcement. If you make it too small, other parts of your country would feel misrepresented. If you don't give it enough resources (enough underlying, overlapping blobs), it would become a financial drain on your country and wouldn't grow in population. Et cetera.
A big point of this is allowing multiple resources in the same place. You should be able to get grain/wheat/corn/meat from the same place you can get oil, gold, or diamonds, after all. It's not like we have giant fields of solid diamond sitting around. Same with religion.
It's just calculus to work out the size (and therefore value) of the overlapping areas of the map, based upon the top level administrative divisions that you created or were already in existence at the start of the scenario. It's painful and involved calculus, yes, but you're not the one working it out; your computer is. We certainly have computers powerful enough to handle these calculations. So why aren't these games the absolute best they can be?
Oh, and freaking 64-bit. Beyond support for more than 4 gigs of RAM, I'm sick of playing Victoria, having a ton of province… whatever they are. Actions. The things that are defined by your primary culture which make absolutely no sense to be defined by your primary culture. Using most of them, and then suddenly it swings around to 1/1 and prevents me from using any more than that ever because my population ticked over the 32-bit ceiling. Same with money.
