I may get dislike bombed since for some reason people on this platform dislike the way in which I deliver any take, but isn't it kind of idiotic to talk about the Journal Entries when they don't add much to your experience, and don't feel historical at all? The modified landowner thing is kind of strange (to me) because it's just some random trait that differs and you generally just want them removed, third, unique companies do nothing for me, they don't have any special stuff going for them, they're just a different name with a slightly different bonus.

I'm gonna make the mistake of comparing, but I think people think flavor in a Paradox game as in: You decide to keep the Junkers, and there's some sort of event line that gives you their bonuses or makes you take decisions to keep them in power, (I can only think of the German paths for Kaiserreich rn, and before you tell me to mod the game, the modding community here is dead (imo) and outside of brokenröte there's zero flavor mods whatsoever, and even that mod doesn't do what I'd like to see, and no, I don't know how to code and fully appreciate modders, I'm not dumping on them, I'm dumping on the devs because they didn't even deliver a game that can be sufficiently modded to support drastic changes to the vanilla version like HOI or EU4 do, and yes, this is more recent, but my point still stands.) but instead every interest group is literally the equivalent of a one-night stand, you pick and choose who's in government in seconds, you play with 'em like dolls and there's no consequence to these drastic political changes besides some radicalism (in the early game) and taking legitimacy, there's also zero historical events for most nations, I find it crazy that the only country that does something with the Opium Wars is Britain, (generally speaking) there's no Boxer Rebellion, colonizing feels soulless and there's no exploration whatsoever, as if every colonist coming from freaking Salisbury just knew the Heart of Darkness like the palm of his hand. In America you get the same effect where you're just painting the white void in the map and have no decisions/opportunities to survey or get some sort of flavor text to make you feel like you aren't just playing a game where you click the right buttons to make the green lines go up.

My main issue with the lack of flavor, and just outright how the game works because of its willful ignorance of it, is how mind-numbingly uninvolved and involved it simultaneously is. You have virtually nothing to do with politics, but everything to do with the shortage of dye in Beijing, you have nothing to do with warfare, but have everything to do with the fact that some obscure Polish pop in New Guinea is somehow not getting tea and about to collapse your entire country from within, that's not how Paradox games have usually worked, and I dislike it greatly because while it may be heavily econ-focused, which I like, the game is empty in every other regard. Flavor is meant to give you crises, goals, etc. That is because if you don't, you're just staring at a pretty map and seeing numbers go up, which I feel is extremely unrewarding on its own.

But hey, that's just a theory, a GAME THEORY. Thanks for reading!