It's all context dependent on what the core gameplay focus is, because the core gameplay naturally should require the most detail and player attention, and if other more minor aspects of the gameplay start intruding on the player's attention and taking player attention and time away from the gameplay focus, then it becomes tedious micro. So managing factories is not tedious micro in the Victoria series because the economic management is the core gameplay focus of the game so you expect to have most of your attention and focus on the economic aspect of the game. However, combat and unit management are not a core focus of the game because the Victoria series is not a wargame, so if your attention is constantly and necessarily drawn to unit management instead of factory management whenever a war starts up, which by necessity it is with previous warfare mechanics, then it becomes tedious and detracting from the gameplay.
Meanwhile, combat and unit management would not be tedious micro in, say, Hearts of Iron because it is specifically a wargame where that is the main gameplay focus and so you expect the most detail and player attention to be directed there. In that case, factory management on the level of Victoria being absolutely necessary in order to keep your economy going in Hearts of Iron would be tedious micromanagement, because the economy is not the focus of Hearts of Iron series so the player would not expect and does not want to have to direct that much of their attention to that part of the game. That's why factories and economic management in Hearts of Iron is abstracted to just two broad categories of civilian and military factories in order to not bog the player down with micromanagement in the economic aspect of the game.
With Victoria 3, Paradox is just finally taking that proper mindset of conservation of gameplay detail to make a game where warfare and unit management in an economy game requires as much attention as economy and consumer goods production management does in a wargame, and finally approaching it from the correct perspective that more detail on each in each game would just end up being tedious micromanagement distracting the player from the real meat of the intended gameplay.
Don't get me wrong here, since I appreciate the thought you put into your post, but I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. So first off, the joke was that the thing people were complaining about in this thread (unit micro) is actually not as micro-intensive as the economy can be/often is (depending on how much you want to optimize). The thing is, both the economy and military in Vic2 has a LOT of shortcuts that people often either don't bring up or seldom use (either because they don't know they exist or simply don't want to). For instance, Shift+Click upgrades all factories on the list near employment capacity, provided you have enough money. If you go further, you can even filter specific resource inputs/outputs in your nation and say, remove subsidies from all factories that use coal. Similar thing with the military. There's rally points, hotkeys, and even features like split half and balance armies (which, while not perfect, tends to allocate troop types pretty evenly which is basically what you want). And then on top of that, if you're
really trying to play the game optimally you'll switch to LF in the late game, which means pretty much every aspect of the game aside from diplomacy and military will run itself, though you can still somewhat influence things in the budget screen.
And this leads me to my second point, which is your comment on Victoria as a "wargame." I think in regards to this you have the wrong impression on what that word implies. Basically, a wargame is something in which the
goal and
primary focus is on simulating warfare. Victoria has never claimed to do that, and having an in-depth war system doesn't make it a wargame either. In Hearts of Iron, all the mechanics revolve around warfare. Politics is only fleshed out so much as it sets the stage for WW2, the economy only exists to simulate the production of war materiel, and "population" only exists to determine how many troops one can draw from a given region. In Victoria, it's the opposite: the warfare system exists to show the impact it has on your people and economy. A deep warfare system with sophisticated logistics, equipment management, and combat serves to
improve the economy side of Victoria: from supply shortages, starvation, equipment production (and the effects of switching from civilian to military has), all the way down to the effects occupation and bombing might have on the local populace and industry. In that sense, while warfare might not be a
primary focus, it will always be a core component of the series.
And that's the thing: those of us who are arguing against the dev's warfare proposal in its current form don't
want a wargame. What we want is an economy game/sim with some better level of detail and control in how we wage wars. Because (and I'll refer back to one of my earlier posts), increasing how much the player controls increases the amount of strategic planning and decisionmaking the player has. There's a notable difference in how one feels between "I started a war, lost a diceroll, and now my economy is in ruins" and "I started a war, made a tactical/strategic mistake, and now my economy is is ruins," and I think a lot of people would genuinely prefer the latter while the currently proposed system tends to favor the former, at least when it comes to evenly-matched conflicts.