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>I love the idea of the Paradox grand strategy games, but they seem to me to be almost gratuitously complex. Everything has so. many. parameters. In turn, this seems to make the games (1) require learning a lot of details that are 'coincidental complexity' rather than 'essential complexity' (like a staggering number of unit types and combinations), serving only the purpose of having a (superficially) richer backdrop, and (2) involve a lot of micro-management at the most miniscule levels, again seemingly just to have those things in there, not necessarily because they make a big difference in how the game plays out.

Well, the idea is to simulate running a country, so "a mass of small things that funnel into few things" is kinda the point. The richer backdrop is entire point here, and the bunch of smaller systems have storytelling purpose aside from purely mechanical one. And on occasion some small decision does play role much farther in. Like, hell, I had cases where me getting a cat saved me in the long term coz I got stress reduction from it in a moment where I really needed it.

Factorio would be on the other end of that, there is very little unneeded complexity and very well paced gameplay.

There are games like Distant Worlds that allow for varied level of automation (up to fully AI running empire), which is in itself pretty interesting idea when it comes to teaching players complex games.

>This has kept me from jumping in. From my point of view, I would love it if there would be simple way to dumb down some of the systems, have the game handle some of the micro-management, possibly remove some of the nuance of units, traits, and so on. I know it exists in the games to some extent, but from what I have seen enabling these things in itself required quite a bit of work. Perhaps I just haven't looked hard enough.

CK3 is significantly easier than CK2 to get in. I hit the ground running with CK3, bounced hard off CKII. The builtin mini-tutorials and "tooltips that have tooltips" make discovery of game systems so much easier, and game have a system that will inform you when there is a problem in your empire and what would be the ways to solve it

There are some people that play with a full appreciation of the numbers and want to min-max everything, as you’d expect. But this is absolutely not my experience of Crusader Kings II and especially III. You can approach it almost entirely as a role playing game, or even a story-telling sandbox. You find yourself in situations that aren’t just “how do I beat this neighbouring power with greater attack/defence numbers” but more like “oh no, my oldest children died, I’ve married off my remaining daughter for an alliance and all her heirs are of the wrong house, how can I get her to remarry while forcing the kids to all to become monks or die?” All while writing love poetry to your wife and looking after your favourite horse.

I think Paradox games tend to scare people away by leading them to think that all of the minutiae of their mechanics matter far more than they actually do.

It seems incredibly complicated at a glance, but as you say a lot of the details might as well be inconsequential unless you're somebody obsessed with min-maxing your game experience.

Agreed, I also think fans of Paradox games are doing the games a disservice by encouraging people to watch long youtube tutorials before they start instead of just jumping in and experiencing the mechanics. The important ones will become obvious after some time.

You do need to be a little engaged with the community just to learn about all the knobs that at some point you need to twist, which is I think the point of this thread after all.

As an example, a beginner might never realize that they need to redesign the starting division templates in HOI4 unless and until told - and this is a common issue on threads in r/hoi4.

This. Stellaris intimidated me at first because of the sheer, crushing depth I saw on YouTube.

After finally jumping in I found that yes, it’s more complex than other games, but the core systems that actually drive the game forward are fun enough and you can disregard the rest until you’re ready.

Each play-through of Stellaris I’ll say something like, “okay now this time I’ll actually engage with that espionage mechanic that keeps popping up…” etc.

It helps that you start from very little in Stellaris. At start you do minimum of building and just fly around with your science ship discovering stuff, the more complex stuff is more gradual.

In case of game like CK you start with already running empire, which means you need to take care of everything at once.

Usually the suggestion is to start with some tiny country in CK as opposed to, say, the Byzantine empire, to try and get around things like that.

The advice is so taken to heart that the tutorial for CK3 starts in a slightly modified Ireland, which used to be referred to as “tutorial island.”

Starting as a count is also waaay more interesting as you will have some crazy narrative arcs.

I may be biased since I have literally thousands of hours in pdx games, but honestly the games are only superficially complex, and they could really use additional complex8ty and meaningful mechanics.

It's still fun even if you aren't hyper optimizing and playing perfectly with every mechanic

It gets worse than that. They change mechanics with updates and DLC. So all the work I took to learn EU4 was gone in two DLCs. I don't know what the estates are, and I no longer care, because it would be far too much work to figure out how the game plays now.