I'm going to honest with you. I've been playing Civ-style strategy games since I got my first Windows PC (Windows 95) back in the late '90's, and Civ2 was the very first game I bought for it. And I don't play them to slavishly re-tread the tracks of history in a binding, chained way. Having civ-specific benefits, flavour, and abilities is one thing, but artificially limiting their POSSIBLE growth ability just because in history they had been small is not something I can get on board with. If I want to, say, carve out a large, globe-spanning empire with Serbian Tsar Stefan Dusan, and my playing skill and strategy is up to snuff, why should I have some artificial limit in the mechanics of the game stopping me from being such a successful, large-scale conqueror because people say, "Serbia was small in history, it has to be capped to be small in-game?"