Still, thank you for your advice. I was planning to play the six short scenarios before essaying a campaign, but I'm now leaning toward sticking with HOI2.
Note that a couple of those short scenarios are only slightly less of an abomination than the tutorials. You might do better to just jump into a full campaign.
A lot of players dive head-first into playing Germany, because it includes several "newbie friendly" decisions and tips (I don't know if the "hover" tooltips work on a Mac), and isn't all that difficult for the first few years, but anything you do wrong is likely to bite you later during Barbarossa. Others prefer to try out an "economic" game first, playing a neutral minor such as Sweden, Brazil, etc. Italy makes a decent primer as well, with a small, safe war in Ethiopia (which teaches the critical lesson that in areas of poor infrastructure or extended supply lines, sometimes "less is more").
You might want to browse a few of the threads from the past several months or year, just to pick up some of the advice and info passed on to other players with questions. Really, the game is incredibly deep, but it takes a while to figure out most of the tools at your disposal, and some of the "quirks" that can occur (the game does have its share of bugs, but you can generally avoid most of them if you're aware in advance). The real value of the game is its replay ability, where you can run a completely different style of campaign with the same country, or play virtually any country in the world and generally get a very different experience.
