This. Stellaris intimidated me at first because of the sheer, crushing depth I saw on YouTube.

After finally jumping in I found that yes, it’s more complex than other games, but the core systems that actually drive the game forward are fun enough and you can disregard the rest until you’re ready.

Each play-through of Stellaris I’ll say something like, “okay now this time I’ll actually engage with that espionage mechanic that keeps popping up…” etc.

It helps that you start from very little in Stellaris. At start you do minimum of building and just fly around with your science ship discovering stuff, the more complex stuff is more gradual.

In case of game like CK you start with already running empire, which means you need to take care of everything at once.

Usually the suggestion is to start with some tiny country in CK as opposed to, say, the Byzantine empire, to try and get around things like that.

The advice is so taken to heart that the tutorial for CK3 starts in a slightly modified Ireland, which used to be referred to as “tutorial island.”

Starting as a count is also waaay more interesting as you will have some crazy narrative arcs.

Agreed, I also think fans of Paradox games are doing the games a disservice by encouraging people to watch long youtube tutorials before they start instead of just jumping in and experiencing the mechanics. The important ones will become obvious after some time.

You do need to be a little engaged with the community just to learn about all the knobs that at some point you need to twist, which is I think the point of this thread after all.

As an example, a beginner might never realize that they need to redesign the starting division templates in HOI4 unless and until told - and this is a common issue on threads in r/hoi4.