This is 1 ticket but has multiple suggestions, so please make sure to say which number you agree/disagree with if you comment!

1 - Extra Diplomatic Point Costs for sieging smaller nations (Both for starting and Joining the siege)
This one is pretty simple, a formula would determine how much extra DP it would cost and it would go based off of total resident count, so a large nation with 100+ residents would have to spend a significant amount of extra Diplomatic Points to siege a small nation with less than 20 residents, and the large nation's allies would also need to spend more DP. The Joining costs increasing is necessary to prevent people making micro-nations with the sole purpose of starting sieges.

2 - Micro-regions
These would be new movecraft and pvp regions that have a player cap of 5-10, and give significantly smaller rewards (like 500 dollars a day and maybe 5 diplomatic points) for holding them. The goal of these would be to give a slightly easier ground for small nations to actually contest and have fun since they obviously can't pull the same numbers as big nations and their alliances. If this is added then there would also need to be a cap amount of micro-regions one nation can hold, to prevent large nations from taking everything over. Suggested locations would be central Atlantic (naval), Caribbean(naval), South America (pvp/tanks), western pacific (planes/naval), Antarctic(pvp), Arctic (pvp/tanks), and there are many more empty spaces of land. These micro regions dont need to be large in size except for the naval ones, so it wouldnt take up too much space.

3 - More punishing occupation
My logic here is that new nations dont exist because old nations aren't dying, and to fix this occupation should SUCK not just be a 2% tax on money that you probably put in your town bank, occupied nations should have increased upkeep, and if a nation is occupied for more than a certain length of time (6 months maybe?) then the occupier should have the option to forcefully disband the occupied nation.