I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Europa Universalis IV, 244 hours. I don't think I understood a single thing of what was happening. And with every free update, some of the rules changed, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
I was told "don't worry, even the big-brains who plan out their entire campaign with spreadsheets don't really understand the mechanics". But that's no consolation, I felt stressed and confused for every single one of those hours.
May I just say that it's so nice and refreshing to see lots of people mention these supposedly amazing 10/10 games in this thread and hate them, I largely feel the same about all those titles. I used to think my taste was just broken.
I have an order of magnitude more playtime than you (though most of it modded to be fair), and I still play it regularly. It is absolutely not true that people good at it don’t understand the mechanics.
What is true though is that it’s an objectively bad game. Or at the very least is supremely frustrating. It’s “unplayable” in single player because the AI is braindead and that plus the actual mechanics will just hinder your fun, and it’s unplayable in multiplayer because it’s slow as fuck (plus you need like, friends or something). Plus past the early game the game becomes a huge slog, with infinitely wide countries spread across multiple continents with effectively infinite money just hiring all mercs.
The only way to win wars is often total or near total occupation of the enemy. I could go on for a long time explaining all the ways in which it’s a bad game. I guess I play it mostly because of familiarity than fun.
For a second I wanted to defend myself by saying "that's just what I was told", but I think that's not even necessary, it seems it really is objectively a very odd game then, even for people who know the rules.
I can understand getting fun out of a bad game, I had fun in Two Worlds and other janky titles. And I see some "famous" streamers like Sseth just enjoy completely breaking all the systems in a bad game. My trouble is that I can't recognize those systems in enough depth to start abusing them, that's probably one reason EU4 didn't click for me. I tried to just play it straight, and then you run into all those problems you mentioned. From what I casually observed in EU4 forums and the like, people really tear apart the systems to find anything that can be abused to their advantage.
I did have fun with it (for 262 hours) by setting very limited goals (i.e. forming The Netherlands as a trading empire). It helped to focus on only a few mechanics at a time and doing the same run a few times over.
I'm meaning to try out EU5 to do the same, but I haven't had a lot of time for gaming recently, and I want to wait for the first few expansion packs first.
Same with ck3. over 300 hours and i still feel like i dont know what i'm doing.....
I dont hate it though