Pangea, large map. Prince level. (Still getting the hang of History Rewritten 1.24.) No vassal states.
As discussed, with vassal states counting as half, if at this stage I had vassals controlling an additional 26% of population and an additional 36% of land area, I would achieve domination victory. I and vassals would control 63% of population and 70% of land area, a good deal of the way to an elimination victory.
Minimum possible dissent of 322 requires the choice of mostly inferior civics.
In order to survive, most cities need to have only the state religion and a large stack of troops with Authoritarianism.
In addition to all of the above, it is critical to carefully space out any available golden ages.
At this stage, as well as for a considerable period before, dissent becomes by far the single biggest aspect of the game, dominating game play.
I think dissent is a worthwhile addition to the game, but the current manner in which it increases with number of cities is just far too much.
The game already had mechanisms to deal with increasing number of cities, particularly maintenance costs.
P.S. I was trying to play a peaceful game until the Mongols attacked me.
After the Mongols were eliminated, I again tried for a peaceful game.
Then the Japanese attacked me.
When I stopped playing, the Japanese were perhaps 2/3 eliminated and on the ropes.
Dissent is probably my favorite aspects of HR, but I think the balancing is off. In my opinion, I think the civics that reduce dissent reduce it to an extreme degree, and they don't have any costs associated with that lower dissent (I actually thinks some of the best civics also happen to reduce dissent). Here's my take on the imbalances in some of the civics:
Multiculturalism makes dissent nearly a non-issue when taking cities, and it also gives +50% trade route yield as prod. This is way better than industrialism, and I don't really see the tie between multiculturalism and prod anyways. I think it would make more sense if 50% trade route went to food (to represent immigration), and foreign culture influence from trade doubled. I think I would remove foreign culture reducing dissent, I think it breaks the dissent mechanic.
Social Welfare is the strongest labour mechanic in almost every aspect. No unhappiness from corps, and unlimited doctors allow you to work more tiles/specialists than usual. This can make the production gain greater than industrialism, especially when considering that when industrialism becomes available, the factories begin to produce a lot of unhealthiness, making unlimited engineers very hard to utilize. Corporations also begin to take off around this time, making the unhealthiness situation even worse. To make this civic even better, it has low dissent.
Sustainability is also way too powerful; no unhealthiness from pop or corps makes dissent even less relevant, and wind turbines and nature reserves produce commerce. The only way I can see this civic being justified in being this powerful, and low dissent is that free market is much better from a commerce point of view, so the opportunity cost is very high for not choosing it. I think this civic could be more balanced if it had some drawbacks, such as no access to coal.
For all of my playthroughs of HR, I use all of these civics no matter what (I swap sustainability with free market if dissent allows), because I don't think the civics are weak, and they make dissent nearly a non-issue. They are all late game civics though so they can't be really be used for a domination victory, because there would simply not be enough time to get the land and pop if you wait that long. For this reason, I almost exclusively go for science victories in HR. I understand that the dissent scales with the cities because large states become hard to maintain, but I think there needs to be a path for domination victory players to win. I think a good start would be if player could weight espionage points on themselves to reduce overall dissent, and also could use these points on their own cities to reduce dissent. This way, a player going for domination will need to maintain a strong enough economy to fund their espionage if they want to maintain stability.
If the "foreign culture reduces dissent" was taken away from multiculturalism, I don't think scaling dissent with city count could would be needed. In order to maintain the idea that large states and colonies of a state are hard to maintain, it could be added that barbarian culture gain could be tied to distance from capital (this would work if foreign culture produces dissent, which I think is the case, correct me if I'm wrong). The actual civil war from this could get messy though, because I don't think HR is set up to convert barbarian culture to breakaway state's culture.
Edit: just wanted to add that I rarely have more than 8-10 cities in a game (large map) so I don't have much of a grasp with the extent to which the dissent scales
