So I gave Victoria 3 another chance after a year of patches, and expansions. Originally, I trashed it because it was an absolute shit show on release.
Taking Sweden again, and after watching many you tube video tutorials, I was ready. You really have to scour the internet to figure out how everything works in this game. Vicky 3 is by far the most complex title Paradox has put out.
One of the biggest challenges is just keeping radicals in your country to a minimum, and preventing revolutions. This is done making by political decisions, and raising your standard of living. Yet events, and political agitators pop up that make keeping the peace in your country a real challenge
The military system is much improved from on release but still lags behind EU IV and others as far as complexity, and decisions. This actually might benefit the AI, as armies fight on entire fronts, not at specific provinces. But even just having individual armies and fleets is an upgrade from the release version.
Anyways, after building up my industrial base over a period of 30 years, I wound up attacking and taking over Norway. This was very easy militarily, but you wind up annexing a population who is not too happy about being taken over. I'm still trying to figure out what is the best way to make the Norweigan Pops happy.
After another 20 years of building up the economy, I decided to go after Denmark. This is where things got weird. Apparently Denmark was a puppet of China (Quing Dynasty), so China threw their full support behind Denmark. I'm thinking, how much support can China possibly give them from across the world? Well apparently a lot. As I attacked, China sent a fleet of over a 100 Chinese ships to take on my 40 ship navy, as well as an army of over 140 brigades, against my 50. Soon as I saw that, I stopped attacking Denmark and just defended. The Chinese suffered severe defeats attacking me, and finally packed up everything and left, leaving me with an easy battle to take over the Jutland peninsula, and Copenhagen against the small Danish army. So obviously National interest AI need to still be modified, and military projection as well. China also really needs to be nerfed.
It is 1903 at this point and I am really just trying to increase my standard of living for my population.
So I had a much better experience this time around. The game still needs many improvements, but at least is a coherent game/sim at this point. Should be interesting to see what Paradox does going forward to keep improving the game.