What’s your take on the Armed forces

Only useful for pushing for a professional military to undercut the landed gentry’s power. If you’re doing a colonialism they’re also useful for pushing that.

I understand the building up of productive forces but I’m at the stage where I need to build up the military to ward of the baying American hounds as I also look to crush them in the future.

Playing Mexico I bet. At minimum you need enough armament buildings and battalions to keep your soldiers and conscripts equipped well enough to fight off major powers to a white peace. After that it’s all about building productive forces.

And at the moment, because of this my government is comprised of right wing igs.

That’s fairly standard for most of a run in a non-industrialized power. Now that I think of it it also helps increasing your peoples literacy rates. There’s like a decree that let’s you do that. So if you aren’t in need of money or are trying to boost infrastructure building/quell turmoil At the moment most of the time you want your most populated or industrialized provides to be under that literacy decree while working on getting some kind of education system going.

But I don’t want the war pigs to have too much power to stage coups and not sure if they’re at odds with the industrialists and capitalists

Purely depends on who the leader is, whats their ideology, whether or not you’re stepping on their toes too much with whatever reform you’re pushing, etc. Like if you got a royalist leader of the Army, its obvious they’re going to get super pissed off if you try and institute a republican system or enfranchise more voters but a moderate or whatever other kind of leader won’t really give a shut. Try paying attention to the dynamics of power and interests between the factions and when they do or don’t coincide in movements.

But which ones, all the igs seem reactionary

Pick and chose your battles over the decades. Undercut the theocrats when the gentry don’t really give a shit about religious rights, undercut the gentry when the theocrats are more worried about religious rights over secular rights. Utilize the divided interests of the petty bourgeois and the bourgeois that run contrary to the gentry and church to push for more modernization but be wary of when all four interests coincide. So on and so forth.

You’re most likely playing a economically-sociologicslly backwards nation that’s transitioning from feudal relations to capitalist to socialist. You have to work progressive measures in one step at a time with the understanding that up until a certain point of development, capitalism is a progressive force in relation to the transformation of the ownership of the means of production and control over the State.

I mean maybe once in a blue moon you could get lucky with the dicerolls and get like an anarchist peasant leader with the homesteading law in place making what’d commonly among the largest factions suddenly be radicalized over night while being in a military alliance with a major power letting you just ratfuck your way to communism while letting the imperialists fight in your own civil war against the reactionaries then spend the rest of the game shooting your GDP to the moon and roflstomping all of the world powers in wars of containment boy that China run was wiiiild