Hi, really cool idea for a game. Me and my sister have had a lot of fun playing this. We came up with some suggestions as we played it. We were playing the game competitively as strange as that sounds, so these suggestions might seem skewed by that.
-We thought that expansion of a nation should be based on the size of said nation. So for example if a nation draws an expansion card, it will grow by 2x more if it is size 2000 compared to if it was size 1000.
-We thought there should be a skip button for union cards or new nation cards. maybe you could trade that in for a random expansion card?
-We thought that there should be an option to only use so much expansion. if you draw a large expansion card you could do a small amount of expansions then move onto the next turn.
-we were thinking that a nation should be able at save up its expansion. any expansion not used should go into a bank, maybe you only get to keep 1/2 or 1/3 of the expansion that you don't use? We thought it could represent a nation growing wealthy or powerful in peace and being able to punch above its weight when it comes time to expand or resolve splits in the nation sooner.
-some sort of ledger that you could see all the current nations would be nice, even if its only to see the collection of small nations that are hidden away.
-We thought that nations could be assigned to a player along side giving them a name and colour, and that perhaps there would be a "player" map mode. this could work for single player as well by making it an "alliance" map mode that could let people make power blocks within there world
-we also thought that nations that split should be able to expand into the other half of the nation a bit easier, like it should cost a bit less expansion. maybe that would only last for 10 turns or so representing a civil war/rebellion ending in a more permanent break up of the nation?
-It would also be nice to have an undo button for the turn that was just played (we unionised countries we didn't mean to a few times)
please just ignore all of this if it clashes with your plans for the game. Regardless we are really interested to see where you take this game. Best of luck!