I don't play EU4 much since CK3 came out, but on the Yellow River flood question: AFAIK the lower Rhine (Netherlands) is the only other place in the early modern world where a river was both so prone to flooding if man-made defences were neglected and so devastating if it did flood. And a lot of the Dutch problems were due to the sea, not really the Rhine. So the Yellow River floods should be catastrophic and really hurt the player.
And if your dev is below 15 your flood defences probably aren't in a great shape because the local authorities lack the people and money to maintain them.
I agree that the flood event should really hurt the player. But, the problem was that the earliest version hurt too much, and the flood wasn't really manageable. One can argue about the seriousness of the flood events and whether they should be nerfed. But, I believe the devs have made changes based on their judgement of the issue, and based on the overall comment of the community.
Therefore, they nerfed them a bit, which are like -10 mandate instead of -20 and -2 stability instead of 3? The devastation and development hit remain the same. So, I think your arguement based on Dutch river isn't really valid. Because the economic hit wasn't nerfed, they nerfted only stability and mandate, which are more related to broad mechanism and playthrough experience and AI ability to handle EoC and etc.
Regardless, the plan of the devs was that player/AI can use a mission called "Tame China's Sorrow" to tarckle the problem. However, they forgot to cover yangtze river flood in that event. Thus, people complained and devs made a change.
Moreover, the purpose of 1.35.3 is just, fix a bug.
The code for the floods was meant to be something like:
every_owned_province = {
limit = {
"provinces near yangtze river, which are getting flooded"
}
"reduce some development for all those qualified provinces"
}
But, they wrote:
limit = {
"every province you owned right now"
}
So, if you play Ming and conquer like Inida or Mongol in 1.35.2, India and Mongol will get flooded, which is surely a bug and would really impact on Ming and surrounding playthroughs. For example, if you play manchu and japan, you will still be stunded by this event and even if you don't take mandate you will still get every province you took from Ming devastated. So, it is serious and need fixing. Thus, we have 1.35.3.
So, in my opinion, flood related content in 1.35.2 and .3 aren't about flood not being punishing enough. It's just normal twicks that happen after every DLC releases.
