calmon:
France and England get 'lucky' tag which is totally unnecessary. That would be like giving hidden Luck+3 scale to MA Pythium in Dominions.
In eastern tech group cavalry is worse than western. So they have everything worse. You can find tables with unit stats somewhere on EU3 forum.
Research groups - some countries are in bad groups, for example Poland was always latin culture with later parts conquered of eastern culture.
Research speed - in some cases it is of course true. But there were also different factors. I can understand that in EU2 with historical accuracy, but not in EU3. I will use example of Poland again. The thing that slowed down it's progress was acquiring a lot of land on east, really huge amounts. And that mechanism is present in EU already. And then they get additional punishement for different culture. Also China in old times was much more advanced than Europe. Not even mentioning huge superiority of Middle East during Dark Ages.
Manpower - I think someone picked it randomly
Russia got really nice manpower boost, but countries around didn't.