Y’all want to talk about educational games I always thought Paradox did a great job, better than MECC. And their specialty was deep history, how the politics>logistics>strategy>tactics>skill chain has things bleed across levels

(If you just want to paint the map with the Third or Second Reich through your superior understanding of logistics there have been better alternatives for 60 years)

With their little “+30 power in domestic affairs for gratuitously insulting your neighbors”; “taking up the cause of this religious minority means you can later push a war over this border land and it’ll be understood within acceptable bounds in your society”

The CKII expansion that allowed you to invite/expel Jews especially gave a felt sense why feudal leaders would do both (access to continental networks of knowledge and finance/an abundance of skilled professionals without local allegiances or the chance of usurping you//growing resentment from burghers, clergy, and landholders whose prerogatives they step on/chance to skip out on your debts)

One of their innovations I’m most fond of is the Hearts of Iron tension meter, where global events push “tension” higher or lower and different regimes have different potential abilities in each range

I think that really gets to something, and though HoI is a very state regime-based game the thing might most be the power of non-state actors – the thing is a lot of their grandiose plans never pan out but what they can do is take steps to ratchet up tension, and they unlock these steps at a far lower level than regimes, and can and do achieve their goals thereby

Like, at the turn of the 20th century anarchists were trying to bring down governments by assassinating individual rulers, which is absurd, like “the King is dead, long live the King!”, the concept had always been that the office transcends the individual, they killed a US President and VP Teddy Roosevelt inherited

And then Gavrilo Princip killed Franz Ferdinand and centuries-old governments — millennium-old meta-government, back to Constantine and Charlemagne — fell and never got up again