I know what you mean, but the problem is that if you establish big powerhouses from the start on, they will make the course of the game more straight, like it was in vanilla.
E.g. France was always destroying everyone, spain was huge, etc..

I increased the Ai aggressiveness to make the AI actually conquer more, but that didnt work that well, though I had some superpowers in my game as germany, but they were only half my strength, and I am no good player...

So what I am trying to do is creating generic conquest missions, making it easier for the AI to conquer, and make it more willing to do it. It will not strengthen the AI compared to the player, but it will hopefully lead to more aggressive nations.

If that doesnt work, I will create some big powerhouses

Sounds like a good idea.

My suggestion dissappeard for some reason. Odd. It doesn't matter, you read it.

I know I'm asking for a lot here, but you should also remove the wastelands when you've got the time. The don't look so good when they're randomly placed in the middle of continents.

removing them isn´t that much work, and I thought about it a little already, just not sure what exactly I will do...I could remove all and repaint the terrain, so there are green plains instead of deserts, or replace some of them with inland seas

So it's not possible to make habitable deserts and mountains? Then just give them low base tax and the "arid" tag.

Well, problem is that habitable deserts dont exist, especially not in those times.
But I can turn deserts into green land.
And if they had basetax above 0, they´d be colonised.

Ill turn the spanish deserts into green land, as I think that might still be plausible.
I might also add new provinces there, problem is that new provinces are savegame compatible, but they then have 0 basetax.

Deserts could in theory be habitable, it would just not be very profitable. They could be 0 basetax, arid provinces. Then they would be hard to colonize, and not profitable.

0 basetax cant be colonised, but can be traversed.
Problem is, they look stupid when everything around isnt colonised. Thats why I removed that huge wasteland above the italian region and made it to these sea provinces.

I am currently working on the spanish desert, almost finished the terrain.
Will then focus on the other large deserts, and then take care of the provinces themselves. Depending on how much time I have for modding, this could take a while

That sounds like a good idea. Take your time.

Would it be possible to add canals? Like one around the prussians? Moving a fleet across the entire world is a pain

I think i can add a canal, but only from the beginning of the game. I have looked into canals once, and I think a lot of the canal stuff is hardcoded.
In this case, it would more likely be a navigable river, or?

You could just add some sea there and put strait crossings.

I know, but a canal would be cooler

A canal will be included in the next update. It must be built, still, but its cheap and quite early.

I have also removed all midland wastelands, though havent changed the terrain. I ran into bugs when I tried, as one of the plugins for gimp isnt working properly. I have just expanded the existing provinces around some wastelands and made other wastelands normal provinces