10 is very young. I remember trying to play Hearts of Iron 2 in my senior year of high school, at age 17, and found it too complicated for me to stick through with learning to play. When I was in college, I tried Hearts of Iron 3 once again and jumped in as the US and immediately tried to become communist.
At that age, the silly alternate history was a sinker, but it was obviously very clumsy and not all that fun in Hearts of Iron 3. Part of the reason I immediately leapt for whacky alternate history content because I was brand new at the game and the prospect of having to measure my success against the historical WW2 was a bit intimidating. It felt like being able to make an alternate scenario where I didn't feel the pressure to succeed along a historical timeline was welcome.
Alternate history options can be a really good gateway drug to the game in my opinion. When we get more players and more people sticking with the game, many people will learn how to play and then graduate on to wanting to play a more serious and challenging historical game. That's how it went for me, but the improved accessibility played a big part of it. I generally found Paradox games too clumsy and obtuse to stick with playing until Crusader Kings 2, and even that took ten hours just to get a familiarity with the UI. It has to be kept in mind that with your average game, you can just leap in and basically have some level of competency from the start. Experience with one Paradox games tends to carry over in helping you be competent at others, so I think long time veterans can lose sight of the fact that these are indeed difficulty games to get into and learn if you're starting from zero.
I think Kaiserreich is a good place for kids to start. The obsession with memes seemed to draw in a lot of people, and Kaiserreich focuses on smaller regional wars that are rather easy for the player to win. It also features small, easily manageable countries that have enough content to keep new players from getting bored, and is also balanced around an infantry spam since production costs were dramatically increased paired with doubling the equipment requirements of infantry, which again makes it even easier for new players to get involved. The Kaiserreich subreddit seems to be pretty chock full of high school students, and it's not hard to see why. Kaiserreich is extremely accessible and the balance in some ways catered to a lower level of difficulty.
There are a lot of those people who will always suck at the game and never learn to play major countries, and will always prefer the meme stuff. However, there will be some who do get good and move on to other challenges. This is good for us veteran players. More people playing the game is better overall, but obviously a price has been paid. There are a lot of concessions in making small, weak, economically unviable countries competitive with the major countries. This is to bring more players into the game. The development team does seem to be moving more in the direction of trying to strike a balance, so I have no real complains other than I wish they had more more money and manpower to speed up development.
). Paradox games are quite involved but hugely entertaining and will open up a lot of avenues for learning about the various historical periods.
