Also the role of the player in EU4 and Victoria seems ambiguous. Perhaps the role could have been fixed as the personna of the head of the executive, and the means and policies available restricted to only those which such an executive personna might have had.
I used to consume a lot of clicker games, but... for those who _haven't_ played them, they're basically management simulators.
I dare say that Factorio is in fact, a clicker game (as it starts off with right-clicking to mine 1 iron ore at a time).
The goal of _ALL_ clicker games is to build enough infrastructure to "stop clicking". The "click" is just the fundamental unit, the introduction to the game. In just 5 to 10 minutes, you'll already move onto automatic miners (Factorio), or Autoclippers (Universal Paperclips), or Heroes (Clicker Heroes), or Cookie Factories (Cookie Clicker), or whatever.
The game then becomes one of resource allocation: you have 1000 iron in Factorio, do you build assembly machines or belts? You have 1000 paperclips in Universal Paperclips, do you get another autoclipper or do you start buying wires?
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In fact, any management game can "turn into' a clicker game rather easily. And I think the "clicker mechanic" (ie: having the lowest-level action equivalent to a click from the user) helps solidify in the Player's mind the "value" of the cookie factory or the Assembly Machine 3 x 4x Speed Modules (or whatever).
But yeah, a well designed clicker game is just a management sim like any other. No one actually plays clicker games by clicking on things.
There’s a term for Paradox’ grand strategy games I like, “data surfing,” that describes what it can be like to mostly passively experience its simulations. Most idlers or clickers progress along straightforward exponential curves, but they could absolutely be designed similarly.
They've really shifted in a more game-y direction over the years. I started with Hearts of Iron 2, where the systems were less abstract and mapped closer to real life. I felt like I was actually running a country and its military. There were more ways to cheese the older games, like the time I played as Guatemala and launched a successful coup to install a Guatemalan puppet government in the USA, but you could avoid those strategies if you wanted a more serious WWII wargame.
Since EU4, or maybe CK2, they've abstracted a lot of the gameplay into those progress bars and point systems, the foremost example being the focus tree in Hearts of Iron 4. I still enjoy most of their newer games, but they constantly remind you that they are games. Gameplay feels less emergent and it feels like I get less agency as a player.
I can only speak for CK since I never played Victoria. However, as something more analogous I have played Offworld Trading Company, having an economic focus, and in-game changes come rather fast there too.
For these Paradox Games ... games... its not about "waiting" for time, but instead about "parallel" decisions. I haven't played Victoria, but it takes 2 years to build a Battleship in Hearts of Iron 3.
You don't just, build one battleship and turn off your brain though. You decide to build a battleship, then move your troops around, or decide to equip artillery to all of your infantry divisions (which will take X months to build and deploy), or ... a myriad of other decisions.
All decisions individually are simple. But these grand strategy games are about keeping "track" of all the individual decisions and building a larger picture from it all.
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I know some people cannot multitask and have no ambitions to learn the skill. But that's what these management simulators are all about (including competitive management simulators like Starcraft or Age of Empires :-p)
Those players then come into multiplayer mode and get wrecked by the multiplayer AI or humans of course. But that doesn't change the fact that I've met these people (ie: my more casual friends who thought they were hot stuff in Starcraft back in the day).
And while controlling a single hero unit might work in the campaign scenarios featuring them (and not even all, good luck dealing with air units even as a hero firebat !),
it's not going to work if you for instance decide to leave to your military buildings and units alone the job of winning the mission while only do resource production !
Do you want the player to be instantly powerful or have to grind laboriously? Do you want them to run from place to place or fast travel? Craft/build instantly or take time?
I think that good games often will give you other things to do while you wait for important things. Some of my favorite games will give you too many things to do so that you must prioritize correctly or you will lose it all.
No more ambiguous than in the more popular Civilization games.
(And Vicky 3 is way above both, but that's normal for a brand new game with tons of advertising and hype...)
Yes, some things you need to wait for - there is always something else you can do in the meantime.
In many ways I love HOI3, for instance, but it's a bit love-hate because about 50% of the time I'm messing with shit I'd rather let an extremely simple "AI" handle. Or just give me some good preset templates (make them "historically inspired", that's cool, or not, either way) for the things that use templates, or, also acceptable, let me save some of mine between games and have them show up when I've researched enough to build them (looking at you, tank and aircraft editors, especially).
As the author points out, Crusader Kings III is more person-oriented, if that's what you want. Personally I like games where it's slightly ambiguous who you are, but things evolve in a "plausible" way if you play for your goals.
The central aspect of the game is making that decision, correct.