So like the tittle says I think there's some things that can enter into the speedrun category and maybe increase the activity of the community or encourage people to find new mechanics/strategies that this game gives us even to this day.

I give some Ideas that I think would be both fun to play & see:

Categories:

1. United Baltic Duchies: Obviusly you can't release it directly and you're forced to form it as Estonia & Latvia. I mean find the fasest way to defeat Russia as 100k nation can result in wacky way.

2. Czechoslovakia: Same rules as the United Baltic Duchies forcing you to be either Bohemia-Moravia or Slovakia, I know that unlike the Baltics can be very short (screw you Prussia) but I mean the Arabia any% exist so I think Its worth having Czechoslovakia too.

Subcategories:

1. Make an "all cores" categories for Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland-Lithuania, India, Gran Colombia. Having the restrisction of No R+P or not (can be sub-sub category too) All of these nations need to defeat strong GPs to get all cores, so I think it would be a good challange.

2. "Alternative nations": What I meant with these is that we can make a subcategory that forces you to play as a specific nation, like force you to form Germany as Austria, Poland-Lithuania as Lithuania, Yugoslavia as Croatia and so on. Not all nations deserve a spotlike but I think that making at least 1 alternative strating nation to form "x" country could be a game changing.

We all discover new things about this game and this speedrun leaderboard was an important piece for that.

Adding categories for the remaining formable nations makes sense, even if they all require playing as releasable nations exclusively. Mandating a release+play on day 1 could still make it work. I've been hesitant to add more categories precisely because of the relatively low activity, but I wouldn't be opposed to adding United Baltic Duchies and Czechoslovakia if there's interest for them, since that's still in line with the theme of formable nations as categories.

Similarly, further subcategories such as All Cores for categories that don't already have them could also work. Some categories likely wouldn't be very different in their All Cores vs Any% varieties though, so maybe we could focus on the ones that would be the most different to begin with. The bigger issue with adding more subcatgories in my opinion though, is that becomes increasingly difficult to organize the leaderboard in a relatively clean and intuitive way. It's already pretty clunky as it is to navigate between the different combinations of subcategories that exist on some of the categories right now, so adding even more combinations could get increasingly messy: If we have a category with subcategories for RTA/IGT, No R+P/R+P allowed, and Any%/All Cores, that's 8 different combinations within a single category. That's not to say it would be impossible to implement, but we might have to rethink how things are organized in that case. I'm not sure what possibilities there are with the current tools on Speedrun.com tbh.

I understand the mess of implementing these, but even if the community is not very active, its not "dead" to say at least. I personally disagree with the All cores runs being not that different than the Any% ones, because with the exception of India, all the other formables need to defeat strong nations that can even ruin a regular run. I know its hard cuz you're holding the Vic2 speedrun community (and we all thank you for that) but at least I think that Romania & Yugoslavia needs and "all cores category" Romania needs to defeat Russia, Austria & the Ottomans, so It's not like you can rely on one of your neighbours cuz you need to defeat them. Yugoslavia on the other hand I think we can make a category of "greater Yugoslavia" being Yugoslavia + accepting Albanians, Bulgarians & Slovenes (Aka take the Generic GP decision instead of the special one), owning every possible Yugoslavia core including the West Macedonia. As for how we can know if there's interest on implementing these... Well I guess a post on the Vic2 reddit or a kind of poll here. There's no speedrun submision every day here, so I think we can make changes here patiently.

I suppose it's hard to say just how different strategies will be for an "All Cores" variant until we actually have runs being made, so there's no harm in trying it out I suppose. There is also precedent for something like "greater Yugoslavia" since we already have "greater Germany" as a category, so that's an option too. The Germany variety is defined as requiring you to hold every core province of every country that is part of the Germanic culture group, so we could always define the Yugoslavia category the same way but for that culture group.

For gauging interest I'd probably first and foremost bring it up on the discord, since that's where most discussion and activity regarding the leaderboard tends to be (I'd probably recommend you bring up suggestions like this there rather than in this forum, because as you can tell it might take a while before I or others even see that you've posted here). Either way, it's always good to give the opportunity for community input before making major changes to the leaderboard I think.