There were no "direct" civilian casualties in V2. Soldiers are created by promotion/demotion from your other pops, and can promote/demote into them again. so every lost soldier is an actual unit of population that needs to be replaced by another worker, IF they can be enticed to convert, or else your armies remain short-handed. Your mobilized reserves, on the other hand, are pulled directly from your working pops, and any casualties suffered by those reserve units will mean one less worker in that pop when they demobilize.
Starvation was not represented directly, but a province under occupation would see its factories unable to operate effectively, leading to mass unemployment, demotion into lower pops, and emigration to other provinces or countries, particularly if the occupation continued for a prolonged period. There are likely to be occasional revolts as well as war exhaustion sets in, where the rebels take casualties directly from the pops they came from.
A long, bloody war can devastate the civilian population and economy, even without direct civilian casualties. In one Prussia/NGF/Germany game, France repeatedly declared war on me to recover lost territory. In each war, I surrounded and destroyed half a million to a million soldiers, and by the end of the 4th war (in which I took one more region each time), their population was reduced in their remaining continental provinces to the point where they couldn't field another army for the 5th war without bringing in several hundred thousand troops from Africa. It also trashed their economy to the extent that they fell out of Great Power status for several years, largely due to the lack of craftsmen after having several million reservists annihilated.
Embargos are extremely limited in effectiveness in V2.
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