in my experience the marathans never made it further then 2 provinces. i have 3 playthrougs now and in 2 of them the marathan conf was done and vanished at around turn 50 and the third has the marathans with 2 provinces at turn 70
i belive that adding france AND britain to the theater would balance stuff even more. i mean im playing france right now and just took orissa by force (after offering the mughals 120k and they denied lol) but the marathans are dead and its hard to get them back. when i came to india with france, all i saw was a huge green landmass (mughals) with the 4 little other kingdoms and they all where allied to each other so the whole continent got stuck and stagnated. that would not hav ehappened with 2 nations there, that never get along. they would fight each other and split indian kingdoms by that.
darthmod had it exactly that way. orissa for france and bengal for GB form the start on..it made india a hell of a fun place. i think maybe lordsith should just ad it as a optional startpos so we can find out how it works with all the other imperial destroyer factors. at the end noone can be certain without trying it out. in darthmod atleast it worked. only reference i can give. yet.
its complicated to manage it all manually. what i did with france until now was (in order)
declared war on the mughals
every other indian kingdome declared war on me
conquer orissa
conquered hyderbad and abandoned it just to get the rebells their own kingdome
hyderbad became a independet kingdome and allied with me
i paid mysore to get peace with them and worked hard on good relations
tried a million times to revive the marathans but it didnt work yet
my end goal is going to be:
getting the marathans back
conquering bengal just to gift it to britain
help the marathans to become strong
and finnaly a mysore/mughal/hyderbad/french alliance fighting the marathan/britain -and what ever else indian faction decides to allie with them- alliance