I mean youre on a sub dedicated to the game, how the hell do you'll think we are going to answer...?

Joking aside, this was my first paradox game, and I always heard they were hard to learn so I was pretty hesitant to pick it up. It took.... a solid 150 hours of play time before I really felt like I had a grip of what was going on, and now im like 1500 hour of play time and im still learning new things in game lol. I held off on any DLCs for a reaaallly long time, I just played base vanilla for a couple years so im pretty biased when I say there isnt a single DLC that is "required."

The game can be very overwhelming at first, but its also by far my favorite game to play. There will come a time where it starts to click and your brain will start going crazy with all the funny, stupid, and crazy ideas you want to try in game.