Can you make an anti-imperial empire game?

The game looks cute, although a bit barebones. I hope someday we get bigger Grand Strategy games that build on this to go against all those ahistorical and empire-focused conventions of 4X games, because that's my most consistent complaint I tend to have, and I otherwise love the genre.

Really sucks for me that you can't negotiate trade routes, form voluntary duchy unions or actually form proper factions with overarching ideology in Crusader Kings for instance. What they said about making it a non-zero sum strategy and allowing for proper cooperation seems right up my alley.

Hope they don't get sued by Take-Two.

When I was playing Victoria 3, I was playing the Philippines, obviously, and all I cared about was how the Philippines looked. It's a puppet state of Spain and like, I couldn't give two shits if there was a civil war in the US. What I cared about was, how do we free ourselves from the Spanish yoke?

Mood.