Total War - Recommendations?

[veti]

If I remember right it was basically to cut down on the busywork bloat that tends to pile up on the campaign map as your empire gets bigger. That's also why they began bunching cities up into provincial groups in Rome 2 to make it quicker to cycle through all of your cities on each turn.

I find it very hard to believe that there's anything about the later games that's designed to reduce micromanagement. Especially by simply removing an option that was there in earlier games.

I suspect the reason is more historical: post-medieval period, with an increasingly centralised modern bureaucracy, and increasingly connected population and economy, that sort of local variation in tax rates just isn't viable any more.