Suikoden II. Starts off small-scale and manageable, then gradually ramps up in complexity and scope. I'd say the same applies to Shining Force II. You feel like you've taken your tiny team and made a kingdom out of it.
Several of my favorite modern cRPGs — Pillars of Eternity 2, Pathfinder WotR, 40K Rogue Trader — have excellent pacing and amp up from small-scale conflicts to epic dilemmas at a steady pace. Very good sense of progression for the player and the party. All of these have some kind of "kingdom building" alongside the main story path which is truly epic, the sort of stuff that Baldur's Gate II only lightly touched upon with the "stronghold" concept.
Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord has excellent pacing. The game world is a fine-tuned contraption that pushes back and rewards you from the very start but remains challenging even 100 hours into a playthrough. Improving your stats and skills feels so rewarding. The campaign is good, but the sandbox mode is where it's at. Taking any kind of character you can imagine — a slaver, a merchant, a knight, an archer, a thief — and carving out an entire kingdom and building a huge army is an incredibly staffing feeling. Very few action RPGs can match the scale of Mount and Blade.
The Last Spell - this game is hands down the best modern strategy RPG. It packs a city-building Lite formula with RPG character progression and just… clicks. Each run is only 2-3 hours, then you start fresh with a new team and town on the next run. It successfully condenses the full spectrum of first feeling helpless then crawling your way upward until you're game-breaking unstoppable. Every run. I love it. Great music, too.
