This is genuinely the most incredibly complex grand strategy game I have ever played. I really enjoyed collecting achievements in EU4, Stelaris and HOI4, but this is on a different level. Most ironman EU4 playthroughs would be about 40hrs for me, it took 200+ hours in on my first run as Venice... and I'm not even to the 1800's yet. The start was a rough learning curve, I thought the 2k+ hours of EU4 would've prepared me but I went bankrupt... twice... in the first century as a trading nation (thankfully never while at war lol). The game made me learn how the system worked. Despite so many setbacks, multiple civil wars, transition to de facto dictatorship, overly ambitious conquests of the entire Indian subcontinent, my first Venice playthrough went on to be the top nation taking over all of Europe, North/South America and India (would not recommend) so it's not like you can't get back up after setbacks -- to a certain degree at least. In fact, later on the game spirals out of control upwards in that you eventually get so overpowered (even as smaller nations) there's no real threat to you. Eventually the whole world coalitions you due to the Hegemony mechanic, but it becomes more of an inconvenience than anything else.
The population and economy simulation is really impressive. Supply and demand curves exist, you can't just build guns and cannons wherever you want, you have to make sure the local market actually has a stock of cannons and firearms. If you plan on going into an extended war with neighbors, you need to make sure you have a means to import or develop a domestic production line. It's not without flaws, especially for nations lacking certain raw materials it can get old micromanaging supply deficits (e.g. tin for native American nations or lumber in Saudi Arabia), but they've also improved the interface so manual trades aren't so bad. They list the top 5 supply deficits in a market now so you can one-click fix it, but I think they still have room to improve the system. You have to plan for food supplies for armies, consider disease risk as well which can dynamically change, and disease resistance can change depending on the geographic origin of the army/population itself.
The control system is well-done, you can't just call a distant spot of land 1000mi from your capital a state and expect to get meaningful income from it. You have to accept that distant provinces will need local infrastructure to govern (through unique buildings), build roads, ports, etc to ensure meaningful communication with the capital (or nearest governing building).
Some aspects are still broken, but to be fair it's an ambitious game where they keep adding new content, so not too surprising. Particularly, the end-game is rough around the edges to say the least (at least for now). Colonial nations get stuck in a continuous feedback loop of declaring war on their overloads (even though they are "loyal"), but then peace out immediately thus remaining a colony. Gets annoying to click through when you have like 30 colonies. Late game turns into a flipbook, with frame rates dropping to 20's on high-end PCs due to very sub-optimal CPU usage. Bank loan interest also only goes down (with advances/research) over time, rather than dynamically based on domestic and global economy, and eventually loans go from 10% APR all the way down to 1% if you play your cards right and there is never an incentive to pay them off at that point (since reinvesting the money in buildings/resources is always higher ROI). I guess that's kind of what modern nations do with sovereign debt, but not because the APR is locked at an absurd, fixed 1%. The game's loyalty system for vassals/subjects also makes no sense. You can be the unstoppable superpower of the world, with more army than every other nation in the world combined, and yet your vassals become disloyal due to opaque mechanics, thus locking you in a permanent spiral of disloyal subjects since you cannot declare war on them. Seem stupid and like a lack of play-testing beyond year 1700. That being said, despite what the comments suggest paradox is taking feedback from the community and has made multiple quality of life changes that helped the game. I'm excited to see how this game improves over the years.
Many people get upset about the Paradox DLC scheme, but until another developer comes along and provides such an expansive level of content for a lower price I don't expect that to change.
I mean, look at how bad the Civilization series spiraled, it's now an oversimplified checker's game meant to extract money by making players pay for each nation a la carte. The amount of free content paradox releases easily is worth multiple DLCs from other developers. Not that this should be the norm, but for things to change there needs to be competition from other developers and demand for these types of games.
Update Version: Public 1.2.5
Overall, would highly recommend [i]only[/i] if you really enjoy Paradox strategy games. It's not like you need an economics or engineering degree to figure it out, but it's definitely not the simplest or most time-efficient game by a long-shot.
