What is it that makes people want to play them when you get screens that end up looking like an interactive clumped up spreadsheet (like first pic related)?
I tried playing one or two of them before, and I don't get the hype or why people buy into them.
I could play an RTS like Homeworld and get down all the major functions of the game in a single, cohesive tutorial while the deeper elements of the strategy would be gained later as I play and build up my units/fleet, not to mention a great single player campaign.
I could play a 4x game like Master of Magic, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Master of Orion 2, etc. for some fairly good strategy and variety that isn't just like playing another Civilization game.
What makes grand strategy so different? Like with the Hearts of Iron games for example, what would be the worth of playing those games if you couldn't potentially change the results or how World War II turned out by playing? It would seem like an extremely tedious effort to only see slight alterations for how some things in the war turned out with mostly the same end results, with things going so damn slow with all the micromanagement required for even small functions. At least in something like that board game Axis & Allies things would actually get finished at some point without a sure predetermined winner, despite not being as deep of a game as a number of computer games out there.
Oh, and the tutorials for these Paradox games aren't that good at all, to help me out with some I needed to look at some let's players playing it to figure out the game's functions better. For games that are supposed to be quite deep, their learning curve doesn't have a tutorial that'll give you enough know how so you can learn the rest by playing. Not to mention the tutorials are a complete bore, your tutorials better be good if you want me to play your shit over the competing 4x fare which isn't so complicated that I can't learn things by simply playing through the game with occasional tooltips if new to that game.