The amount of time and attention I have had for an economic grand strategy sim is exactly 0 hours. And that's been over nearly a past year.

Maybe I'm really just not the sort of gamer who can handle these kinds of things.

In any event, I'll stop fooling and take the "in progress" tag off this game.

I was off work today so I decided to try to make Sweden the furniture-making capital of the world.

But I never really got there.

Instead, I ended up in an iron-deficiency doom loop where iron was increasingly expensive so all I could do was build and upgrade iron mine after iron mine.

Eventually, I unlocked a new mining technology to make them more efficient; but then the mines stopped because they ran out of coal.

So I was stuck building coal mine after iron mine after coal mine after iron mine.

Eventually, the entire economy (and the entire royal treasury) was spent trying to dig iron out of the earth.

It's a hell of a generative-story, but I'm not sure it was necessarily fun in the classical sense.

(Looking back now, I'm not even sure where the iron was going or the best way to find out. I have a lot to learn about running a country.

I am not good at strategy games. I would like to be. I very much want to be someone who plays and understands strategy games. I love the big, beautiful, expansive maps and all of the numbers and tables and graphs telling you what's going on. I am just not good at using them effectively.

But, still. I want to play them. So I'll let Victoria 3 defeat me over and over again for a few weeks before I finally sigh and give up. Who knows? Maybe something will click this time.

So far, it hasn't.

I was playing the tutorial mission (as the recommended Belgium). Things were running smoothly: I was creating and upgrading buildings like it asked. Then suddenly it told me to dramatically increase my GDP and the only help available was "there are lots of ways to do this!".

But even then, I was managing. Slowly and steadily, I was increasing my GDP.

Then, a couple of my country's interest groups asked me to enact universal suffrrage. And I like universal suffrage. The only people against it were the wealthy landowners and there aren't that many of them, I thought.

Very quickly, I learned that the peasants and subsistence famers in Belgium are very opposed to the right to vote. Revolution festered causing productivity and standard of living to plummet. I attempted to subsidize some key industries and open up some new trade routes, but my coffers were running light.

Things eventually escalated to civil war (and no, I have absolutely no idea how to do the military in this game) and the country started to burn as wealthiest among us convinced the poorest to destroy everything they have for the sake of the 1%.

I somehow invented the modern US Republican party.

And then my computer crashed, sparing me from the agony of watching everything crumble.

I will probably not open that save file back up. There's no good there for me.

Still: what a game.