He's not altogether wrong though. IMO, the Paradox paradigm does tend to lose the wood for the trees. There's really a lot more complexity built into these games than there needs to be, which just makes for a lot of unnecessary tedium.
Quite frankly for example, I've never liked the continuous time mechanic, I mean, is it really necessary to simulate every single day of history for 350 years? In a way, it seems like lazy programming to me - it makes their job easier, but it doesn't make actually playing the game more fun.
I mean, if we must have a continuous time mode, why couldn't it be on a weekly instead of daily basis? For a game with this sort of timespan, it would surely make a lot more sense. I mean, here is a game with a timespan of 350 years which has the same unit of time as HOI2 which has a timespan of about 10.
At the moment I'm playing as the Creek, and after one has spent the first couple of years conquering one's neighbours, there is virtually nothing to do for decade after decade but wait for some money to accumulate so you can buy the next colonist. And on my PC, each decade takes about 25 minutes. Currently I'm in about 1490 or so and the next significant thing I'm looking forward to is government tech 1 which will give me a national idea slot. That's three decades, or 75 minutes away. Is this fun? No it isn't. It's just plain boring.
Couldn't Paradox have at least given us the option of playing at a faster clip during the dull periods? But of course, that would have meant some extra work tweaking up their standard game engine to simulate, say, weekly instead of daily events. Much easier to just leave the engine as it is, after all, hasn't the customer base already shown itself prepared to tolerate such shortcomings?
