I find the complex absence of any interaction with the map ridiculous, considering the effort they out into making a beautiful looking one, with roads and trains and horse and cart. And unique looking cities and buildings. Yet it is totally bloody pointless. Meaningless.
Zero map interaction was an insane decision.
Your post made me realize that if Vic3 was less Victoria meets Anno and more Victoria meets Railroad Tycoon, I'd tolerate the pervasive bugs, the awkward UI, the huge emphasis on microing everything (I'd want that micro, in fact!). Imagine a game where railway grid, factory placement, transportation costs, etc. mattered. Where fruits from the Northern India are not immediately available in Canada and Alaskan electricity does not power the street lights in Warsaw. Vic3 chose to have a more detailed pop simulation instead of a more detailed map (one cannot have both due to lag ofc). This is exactly as advertised, no problem with that, but did it pay off? I mostly looked on averages and aggregates, almost never felt the need to look into individual pop details. Maybe it's just me, though.
Thrive or perish, depending on market conditions. Your capitalists could become unfathomably rich and build vast industrial empires or they could end up penniless. They could utterly corner the market of a key product, or saturate a declining industry. They could use their wealth to interfere with politics in a way you don't like, or beg you to come save their failing industries.
This. Economic agency is also agency. By allowing the pops have political interests but making them sock puppet kind of obedient in economic sense the game IMO robs them of a huge chunk of agency and reactivity. Imagine Nicholas I starting grain imports from China to sink the grain price and investing huge amounts of money into industry. How soon would he meet the same fate as his father? Yet, I did just that in the game and no one cared enough to slightly irritate let alone stop me.
What to do in the meantime if the economy is somewhat more automated? As for me, I'd love more involved politics (a bit more interactive than sitting on your hands, waiting for the RNG tick up/down to happen), more flavour events/decisions. Again, if the game had logistics and associated costs, international trade could be a much more complex puzzle to spend time solveng.
EDIT: After thinking about alternative pastimes a bit more, I did have some kind of deja vu. Some time ago there was that "we need deeper peacetime mechanics" motiff in the EUIV forum, that tended to spring up with close to 100% probability after the thread was getting long enough. There also was a universal (IMHO kinda rhetorical) answer: "this is a war game, peacetime will never be equally fun". Vic3 does a 180 degree turn and now we have the opposite set of priorities but the dynamics are still the same. And why is that? CK games are all over the place yet they are very playable, popular, and, I daresay, fun. Even moreso given you can switch between dynasty, religion, war, politics, with mods even economy and, despite each part being somewhat simplistic, have tons of fun.
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