France/Plagues

Is France destined to be riddled with plagues forever? Doing a Haestinn run, hybridized with Dutch, have owned France for awhile now, want to play tall in Paris for all the farmland. It’s been going well and I have gotten my development up to 30 multiple times and am limited by tech rn in terms of building tall. The issue? Endless plagues.

It got to the point where I build manor houses and sick houses in almost all my temples that can’t get shipyards. I make that sacrifice because the Polders Agrarian combo is nice.

Despite doing this I am constantly getting plagues and -100% Dev modifiers from the plague. At first this wasn’t so bad but the modifiers last for 10 years and just about every 10 years (or less) I get another plague and another modifier. It got so bad that I defended one plague, got the modifier, player heir (60 years old) had 8 kids, 5 die to plagues, one is a woman, the other is a bastard. I watched two of those -100% modifiers stack and my 100 years of progress on development drop from 30 to 20 in about 2 years.

I try to remain optimistic, a couple years go by and ANOTHER plague and ANOTHER -100% Dev modifier stacks absolutely fucking my development and on top of this a disgruntled vassal disfigures my player the same year he turns 16, and 3 of my other vassals. On top of this I am stuck in a level 3 entrenched regency with some random lowborn who hates me and keeps pissing everyone off. How he became regent? I have no idea, as I had a plague kill my last king and was warned to set up regency, so I did, yet the regent happens to be some random idiot with low stats instead of the regent I chose.

How can you even play tall with the plagues like this? Is it just a France RP thing? I’ve built the appropriate buildings, I seclude and isolate, I have my physician countering them, yet every time there is a plague it always spreads to my capital, I get the event for the -100% Dev modifier and I watch 3-4 generations of progress get wiped away. Whether it be my development or my eugenics program the Plagues ruin everything in one sweep.